The Silent Sleep of the Dying (Eisenmenger-Flemming Forensic Mysteries) (18 page)

Her tone suggested she feared he was going to start questioning her entire practice. Insecurity seemed to be all that kept her functioning, and perhaps it was the only glue that was adhesive enough to hold such disparate parts together. "Nothing. Just a bit of a coincidence — after all, they worked together and then within a few weeks they're both dead of cancer."

"He died of falling off a building."

The wittiness of the reply surprised Eisenmenger. He had assumed that she would be incapable of more than the mundane, prosaic thinking that was ubiquitous in medicine and science. "Of course. I meant … "

"Yes, he did have cancer," she interrupted and he saw for the first time a more typical professorial, condescending style. "In fact I think he had familial polyposis."

She turned and was walking before he could say anything more. As he caught up with her they turned a corner into an identical corridor; the effect was disorientating as if time had flicked back and they had made no progress. A door opened to their right and ahead to allow out a young man and woman in whispered conversation punctured by occasional muffles of laughter. Eisenmenger saw a scowl on Bowman's face as she stared at their backs; perhaps joviality was not a departmental policy. It wasn't until he saw the woman's profile that Eisenmenger realized who she was.

"Belinda!"

She looked up and she might have grinned a large grin had she not then caught sight of Bowman. "Oh, hello." Her companion, clearly regarding valour and discretion as indivisible before God, nodded recognition of his departmental head and hurried off.

"You know each other," surmised Bowman, her tone one of disapproval. When Belinda said nothing, Eisenmenger explained, "We worked together once."

Bowman frowned, then understood. "Of course, St Benjamin's."

To Belinda, Eisenmenger said, "I'll see you later. How about a drink?"

Belinda smiled and nodded. Before she went into the room her eyes smeared off Bowman like they might have done off spittle. That left Eisenmenger with Bowman looking at him as if he had just confessed to membership of a badger-baiting society. "Belinda's an excellent pathologist," he ventured, to which Bowman merely said, "Really?" and carried on towards the mortuary.

They found Hartmann in his office. Bowman hardly knocked and perhaps this was unfortunate because the door opened to find their quarry at his elbows on the desk, his face enveloping his hands. He looked as if he were overcome by something, perhaps grief, perhaps mere exhaustion.

Eisenmenger knew nothing of Hartmann. He had looked him up in the Medical Directory and found nothing that distinguished him from the herd — no honours, no prizes, no research degrees, no prestigious former appointments. It didn't mean that he wasn't a competent, possibly excellent pathologist, but it had made him wonder. When he had phoned colleagues with questions, they had been similarly ignorant of Hartmann and his achievements. No one had anything bad to say, but it was as if Hartmann were transparent, a hole; you knew he was there because he occupied a position, but there was nothing more to be said about him, no further description could be made.

Eisenmenger smiled and held out his hand with a murmured, "Hello," when Bowman introduced him. Hartmann too smiled but it was not a creature of grace; it skitted, like a new-born faun and, in similar fashion, fell down completely before another second had died. His handshake was wet, warm and weak; Eisenmenger felt it would be presumptuous to judge anyone from their handshake, felt too that it would foolish not to. Hartmann dropped his hand and he now stood behind his desk, both arms hanging, looking for all the world as if he were awaiting the noose around his neck.

"I've said that we will give Dr Eisenmenger all the cooperation he requires." Bowman's tone suggested she considered this an act beyond Christian duty. "These things are very tedious, but we have nothing to fear."

Well, maybe she didn't but Hartmann's reaction to the phrase was interesting. He briefly closed his eyes — for a moment it looked as if he was about to faint — then opened them to look out from a face of grey pallor.

"Oh, no," he whispered, but Eisenmenger had the idea that this was not agreement but despair.

*

Helena had booked the day off, for which she was extremely grateful. She didn't feel that she could work, not feeling the way that she did. The problem was that she couldn't decide how she felt. Different, certainly, but the acknowledgement that she had experienced a change did not assist her in defining what that change was. Also, she recognized that this was something
new
; of that she was certain. The third parameter she could assess was that this appeared to be good.

She wrestled with this peculiarity for much of the day while she worked on some papers at her father's old, oak desk in the study. Eventually, though, she sighed and sat back, chin down, a frown on her forehead. She had fought against the inevitable all day, but enough was enough. Helena was too intelligent to refute the undeniable; there was only one conclusion.

She was falling in love.

For years since her parents' murder and the subsequent suicide of her brother she had avoided emotional entanglement, This had not been a deliberate decision, merely a side effect of the trauma she had suffered. For a long time after the terrible days of her bereavement she had been in an unstable equilibrium of mental health, and part of that balancing had involved the severance of all outside contacts that could in any way affect her emotionally. She had withdrawn all her roots that tapped into other's lives, clamping down so that she presented to the world the smallest possible profile, and within that profile she had suppressed everything that was not intellectual. Only in this way had she survived, but there had been a cost.

She knew that some of her colleagues had used less than complimentary epithets about her. "Frigid" and "dyke" were the favourites. It followed a standard course — the attempted seduction, the rebuttal, the hurt pride, then insults, usually behind her back — and it had happened several times. The first time, she had been devastated by the virulence of the reaction, and time and repetition had failed to reduce the shock. She still found herself incredulous that human beings could be so unpleasant, especially so unpleasant in such an underhand way. Why couldn't they see that she was still normal, even if she didn't want to form a "relationship," that she wasn't interested in "relationships?"

So she had lived an abstemious life and been quite happy. Not everyone, she told herself repeatedly, needed sex. The men that she met never quite seemed to fulfil what she needed, and what was wrong with that?

John Eisenmenger had come close, she had to admit. She had felt something with him that she had not experienced before with other men. It had bothered her at first, this attraction, and she had spent many hours trying to analyse it. She had decided that part of it was his diffidence; so few men seemed able to accept that not all women wanted to be taken by full frontal assault, and John had somehow managed to convey interest combined with an acceptance that she might not want to reciprocate. This, combined with his obvious intelligence and an air of frailty and injury, had proved a potent mix.

Unfortunately it had been a potent mix of circumstances that had conspired to disrupt the tentative, fragile bonds that they had formed. The death of Marie before his eyes, especially in such a horrifying way, had induced in John a breakdown that had been complete, sudden and severe. There had also been an inevitable breakdown in their friendship; Helena had tried to keep in contact, to behave effectively as someone loving and loved, but she had known all the time that this was not a role she could make hers, not at such an early stage in their relationship. Eisenmenger's silence following Marie's death had only increased the sense that it was over. In such a cold climate, all tendrils of contact had withered.

She smiled and within her she felt a chill laugh. What a pair of emotional cripples!

And now along had come Alasdair. Ironic, really, given that she and John had only just got back in contact, and that she had felt again the old affection for him.

Alasdair whom she had known for barely three hours and in that brief time had managed something beyond belief. He had made her want him.

Just a small feeling — infinitesimal almost — but she knew it was there, and the knowledge perplexed her. How had this happened?

Certainly he had the same courtesy that in John, at his best, had secretly delighted her and made her willing to consider lowering her shield for a better look. And if Alasdair had taken that and pushed it gently one step further, then it was only a minute increment.

He was handsome, certainly, but not strikingly more so than John.

He was clearly very bright, but she had seen John work his way through a murder, seeing things that other, equally experienced pathologists had missed, and she knew that he, too, was exceptionally clever.

As far as she could tell Alasdair and John were equally respectful of her, equally well read and equally easy-going.

On an objective level, they were almost clones; which left only the subjective.

If Alasdair had an advantage, it was one that sprang purely from the non-intellectual, non-logical part of her mind. It was a part of her that she had hardly used for many years, part that she had considered almost atrophied to uselessness.

She wasn't sure if she liked its re-emergence as a force within her, but it was clear to her that it could no longer be ignored.

*

"What do you think of Hartmann?"

Eisenmenger had taken Belinda to small pub about a quarter of a mile from the hospital. It was her second suggestion after he had vetoed the Medical School bar as too public. Not that he would have chosen this place for either its decor, its landlord or its customers.

Belinda hesitated, which alone was eloquent.

"This won't go any further, Belinda," he reassured her. "Do you know why I'm here?"

She was almost embarrassed. "The juniors haven't been told officially, but the rumour is that there's been a complaint against him."

Which might explain her reluctance to speak. Life as a pathologist, as any kind of medical practitioner, was punctuated by being complained about and having to investigate others who were being complained about. It was such a tight circle

Eisenmenger wondered why there weren't all giddy. "Not quite," he said.

He was drinking a pint of bitter — at least someone had had the honesty not to dub it with the sobriquet of "best" — and she an orange juice. The pub was filling up and with the people came noise and warmth and smoke. "It's a question of a single case. Not a complaint, just a query or two."

She seemed relieved. "Which one?"

"A PM. The Sweet case. I think there was a hospital enquiry."

Immediately her look of anxiety came back. "Oh," was all she said.

"You know about it, of course."

She nodded.

The first thing he had done after his meeting with Hartmann was to ask for the slides and the tissue blocks from the Sweet case. Then he had sat down and checked that each block and slide was correctly numbered with the number of the Sweet autopsy. Only then had he looked at each slide under the microscope.

All were of a tumour that had the morphological characteristics of Burkitt's lymphoma. Unsure of whether he was relieved or even more confused, he had leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. How had Burkitt's come to present like that? So rapidly and with the skin involvement? Skin involvement was unique.

After perhaps fifteen minutes he had returned to the slides. This time he wrote a report on each individual slide, this time he noticed what was wrong. Not the one thing that was wrong but the cumulative burden of small incongruities.

Hartmann had taken samples of skin and had reported on them as being involved by the tumour, but in none of these slides was there evidence of epidermis or dermis, the constituent structures of skin. The same was true of the brain, the lung and the heart; all the slides and blocks labelled as showing these organs contained tumour but they could not definitely be said to be the organs themselves. Of course, he argued because he was a cautious and reasonable man, they could not definitely be said not to be the organs, for mostly these blocks showed nothing but tumour.

And then there was the lack of further investigations, nothing to confirm the conclusion that this was Burkitt's lymphoma.

Caution again guided Eisenmenger. If it had not been an autopsy case, if this had been a biopsy and the patient still alive, the lack of confirmatory tests would have been criminally negligent because the therapy for Burkitt's lymphoma was far stronger and more dangerous than that of other tumour types. But this was not a living patient; not to do more work was poor practice, but not completely inexplicable.

Again he stopped and sighed, again he stared for a long time at the ceiling.

Then he began again to examine the slides.

And this time, for the first time, he noticed that there was something actually and completely
wrong
. The slide labelled "Tung" had a thin band of muscle, degenerate and almost completely obscured by tumour cells, running along one side.

Which meant that it wasn't lung because lung didn't have bands of muscle in it, although small intestine did, which was the classical site for Burkitt's lymphoma.