Trauma (18 page)

Sarah undid the large metal clasp on the door and jumped back as the refrigeration plant sprang into life at the same moment. She chided herself again for being so edgy and bent down to examine the label on the big toe of the corpse on the middle tray. It confirmed that the sheet-wrapped body was that of John McKirrop. Sarah dragged the transporter trolley over and adjusted it to the required height by winding the handle at the side. When it was in position and the brake applied firmly she slid out the tray with John McKirrop's body on it and locked it on to the transporter with the metal pin that hung down on a chain. She moved it back a few feet and shut the vault door. It closed with a clunk that seemed to echo throughout the whole suite.

Sarah wheeled McKirrop's body through to the post mortem room and turned on the lights. The light switch also turned on a series of extractor fans which whirred into life. Sarah reckoned that she would not need to get the cadaver on to a table; she could carry out the examination with it lying on the transporter. She doubted whether she could have manhandled McKirrop's body on to a table on her own anyway. She did however, wheel the transporter parallel to one of the three PM tables so that she had access to water and electric power if required. She turned on the big flat lamp above the table and angled it so that McKirrop was bathed in white, shadowless light. Next, she collected a series of instruments together on a metal tray and laid it on the table beside her. She undid the sheet wrapping McKirrop's head, grimacing a little at the cold clammy feel of it.

McKirrop's face had taken on the parchment pallor of death and the wound in the centre of his head was so dark that it looked like a black hole. Sarah adjusted the lamp slightly so that the wound was illuminated perfectly. She picked up a metal probe from the tray beside her and investigated the depth. Her heart sank almost immediately. It was perfectly clear that the skull bone had indeed caused massive damage to the front of McKirrop's brain.

'But how?' Sarah murmured. 'Why had the X-ray of McKirrop's skull suggested that his frontal lobe had been protected? Why had it not shown actual penetration of the brain by the bone? After all it had penetrated to a depth of . . . Sarah measured the extent of invasion . . . one and a half centimetres. 'Crazy,' she said, shaking her head. She ran the metal probe gently up and down the anterior surface of the bone and was suddenly struck by something odd. 'This wasn't the angle!' she murmured. She checked again and was now convinced that the angle of McKirrop's skull bone was different from the angle that had appeared on the X-ray.

Sarah's pulse rate, which had calmed down over the last ten minutes, started sprinting again. There was only one logical explanation. McKirrop's skull had been pushed back into his brain after the X-ray had been taken! Sarah dropped the probe she’d been holding and it bounced off the hard tiled floor. For a few moments she stood absolutely still then she started to consider priorities.

She needed proof! She needed solid evidence! The post mortem carried out on this body would simply report that the patient had died from massive brain damage caused by his skull being broken and forced back into his brain by a large blunt object, the base of a wine bottle. Exactly what everyone had suggested. She searched through the pathology cupboards until she found what she was looking for, a polaroid camera. Another brief search and she came up with film for it. She angled herself behind the trolley to photograph the wound but stopped after taking two photographs. What was this going to show? A photograph of a gaping wound wasn't going to prove anything at all.

Sarah thought for a moment then came up with an idea. She ran through to the small office next door to the PM room and rummaged through the desk drawer until she found a clear plastic protractor. She hurried back with it and positioned it to one side of the wound. She then inserted a metal probe so that it lay along the angle of the bone. She brought up the protractor close behind it so that it showed the angle of the bone relative to the horizontal. She took four photographs. These photographs when compared to the X-ray of McKirrop's skull should demonstrate a big alteration in the angle of the bone.

Sarah started tidying up in the PM suite. She cleaned the wound site on McKirrop's head with a swab soaked in surgical spirit and did her best to obscure any signs of interference, not that there was much. The degree of invasion she had used was minimal and there was no reason for the pathologist to be on the lookout for anything out of the ordinary. She cleaned and returned the instruments to their rightful place and disposed of the used swabs and their wrappings in the discard bin for subsequent incineration. Finally, she wound the sheet back round the corpse's head and wheeled it back to the body vault.

Sarah found to her frustration that she could not remove the locking pin from the transporter in order to release the body tray. She tried again but it was stuck fast; she broke out into a cold sweat. This was ridiculous: she couldn’t get the body back into the vault! Her heart was thumping with the effort that she was expending but still without success. She cried out in pain as her fingers slipped off the metal and broke two of her fingernails. Her fingers flew to her mouth, only half stifling the curse that sprang to her lips. Tools! She needed tools!

She hurried back to the PM suite and returned with a chisel and mallet for use on human bone: two blows with the mallet and the pin eased off. A third and it sprang out to dangle down on its chain in a mocking dance. The tray slid smoothly back on to its shelf.

With McKirrop's body safely back inside, Sarah checked twice that she had left nothing lying around before switching out the lights and listening at the door. She heard nothing so she inched it open and took a quick look out in both directions before sidling out into the corridor. Locking the door behind her, she ran quickly along to the stairs leading up to the ground floor.

She paused at the head of the stairs, taking a moment to compose herself. It was over; she’d done it; she had found out exactly what she wanted to know. She started out along the main corridor in confident gait. No one was going to take much notice of her if she seemed purposeful.

Sarah reached the door leading to the outside and paused to consider for a moment. She’d been being doing everything in reverse, almost without thinking, but now she fingered the mortuary key in her pocket and looked out through the glass doors into the darkness. Everything had gone well but did she have enough nervous energy left to complete the exercise? Could she go through the business of returning the key? No, she decided after a few moments thought. She had run out of adrenaline: it would be silly to push her luck any further. She simply couldn't face the stress of returning the key to the porters' shed. It was about to go missing. No big deal. They could have another one made up. She turned away from the door and continued along the corridor. As she crossed the courtyard to the residency she dropped the key down a grating. The little splash it made marked the end of the operation.

Sarah closed the door of her room and felt weak at the knees. She sank down on to the bed and saw that her hands were shaking. Her mouth was dry and she felt that she might be sick in the not too distant future. Thinking about what she had discovered made matters worse now that she had time to think about it. Fear was taking over from nervous exhaustion. In answering one question she had opened up a Pandora's Box of others. McKirrop had been murdered; he had been murdered by someone on the staff. It must have been someone on the staff, she reasoned. HTU patients were not allowed unaccompanied visitors, not that anyone had wanted to see McKirrop anyway.

But who on the staff would want to kill a down-at-heel alcoholic and why? What threat could he possibly have presented to anyone? Sarah could think of no good reason but she did come up with a bad one. It said that Derek Logan had killed John McKirrop because the results of her tests on the patient were embarrassing and were about to make him look foolish. McKirrop's death had stopped that happening and had turned the tables on her. Her findings had been discredited and her professional competence brought into question. But surely not even Logan could do something so awful?

Sarah found that she could not dismiss the idea altogether. She remembered Logan's distaste for McKirrop. He had regarded him as being a worthless object who was merely taking up space in HTU, his only value being as a potential organ donor. But had McKirrop mattered so very little that his life had been expendable? A pawn to be used in a career game move? Logan was a thoroughly unpleasant individual but was he a murderer? Sarah baulked at believing it but she was left with a list of questions seeking answers.

Could McKirrop's death have been some sort of bizarre accident? Perhaps the nursing staff had made McKirrop's wound worse while they were changing the dressings? Sarah shook her head and admitted that this was a ridiculous idea. Its only merit was that it distracted her momentarily from thinking that someone on the staff of HTU, had deliberately placed a blunt object into John McKirrop's head wound and pushed his skull back into his brain.

After a restless night filled with bad dreams, Sarah was back on duty in HTU shortly after breakfast. Her first thought was to get her hands on the X-ray that showed the original injury to McKirrop's skull. This would be vital in proving her case. She went immediately to the X-ray viewing room and flipped through the large manila envelopes in the rack below the wall-mounted light boxes. McKirrop's films weren't there! Sarah looked again but there was no mistake. The McKirrop file had gone. Frustration mingled with a hollow feeling in her stomach. After one more search of the entire room she turned on her heel and went straight to the duty room to find Sister Roche.

'Sister, Mr McKirrop's X-rays are not in the rack.’

Roche turned in her swivel chair and looked over her glasses. 'Mr McKirrop is dead. His X-rays have been returned to Medical Records along with his case notes. That's usual procedure.'

Sarah felt her cheeks colour. 'Of course,' she said. 'How stupid of me.'

'Was there something you particularly wanted to see?' asked Roche.

'Not really,' smiled Sarah, attempting to cover her embarrassment. 'A detail. I'll just nip along just now and see to it while I remember.' She turned away with another attempt at a smile and left the room feeling as if her shoes were full of tin tacks.

'McKirrop, John McKirrop,' Sarah repeated for the benefit of a clerk who seemed hard of hearing. 'He died yesterday morning.'

The clerk turned away from the reception desk and put on spectacles that hung from a gold chain round her neck. She started to run her fingers along rows of cardboard folders, angling her head to see through the bottom portion of her bifocal lenses. 'And you say he was from?'

'HTU,' repeated Sarah.

'We have a John McCluskey ... and a John McIntyre.'

'McKirrop,' said Sarah through teeth that were beginning to clench.

'Ah yes, here we are. Couldn't see it for looking at it.' The woman chuckled as she pulled the file and handed it to Sarah who opened the X-ray envelope. She pulled the films half way out of the envelope. There were only two. 'There were three!' she murmured out loud. She removed the two X-rays that were there and held them up to the light. The one she wanted wasn't there! 'One of this man's X-rays is missing!' she said.

'I'm sorry. What's missing?'

Sarah looked at her blankly. 'An X-ray,' she said but her voice was distant. This was no accident.

'Typical,' said the woman. 'People are so careless these days. It'll be lying around somewhere in the ward.'

Sarah handed back the case file and left the Medical Records office. She felt dazed. Her proof that John McKirrop had been murdered had evaporated. Without that X-ray she had nothing. If she made an accusation now she would be thought mentally deranged. The whole notion would be deemed ridiculous. A tramp murdered by a member of staff? Absolutely ludicrous.

Sarah had an anxious hunt around HTU for the missing film, just in case it really had been left out of the file through error but found nothing. In her heart she had known that that would be the case. She had been out-thought. That in itself was chilling. Someone figured she might go looking for the X-ray.

Derek Logan came into the doctors' room while Sarah was still searching. 'Lost something?' he asked curtly.

Sarah felt gooseflesh break out her neck, 'An X-ray,' she replied.

'You've lost an X-ray?' said Logan sarcastically. It put Sarah's back up. 'Not me exactly,' she said. 'It appears to have gone missing somewhere between here and the Medical Records Office. I'm just trying to locate it.'

'What X-ray are we talking about?' asked Logan.

Sarah looked him straight in the eye and said, 'One of John McKirrop's head X-rays.'

Logan held Sarah's gaze for what seemed to her like an eternity before saying, 'What do you want that for?'

'I just wanted to see it again,' replied Sarah, watching him for any reaction she could construe as guilt.

'McKirrop is dead,' said Logan brusquely. 'Do you think we could concentrate on our living patients before any of them decide to join him?'