Fatal Last Words

Eleven

‘What would you be doing if you weren’t here right now?’ Sammy Pye asked Ray Wilding.

‘That’s a bit personal, is it not?’ the detective sergeant replied. ‘Same as you, maybe.’

‘And then again maybe not. Ruth’s away at her mother’s; she often does that when I’m on this shift. She’ll be back by the time I knock off, though. We’ll probably go out for something to eat later on.’

‘Us too. The sad truth is, if I wasn’t on duty I’d be stuck up a ladder with a roller in my hand. Becky’s in a redecoration frenzy at the moment, and I’m the painter.’

‘Is that right? When she moved up from London, I thought she was talking about getting a place of her own.’

Wilding smiled, sheepishly. ‘She was, but we’re. . we’re getting on fine together, so what’s the point?’

Pye whistled. ‘Is this Ray Wilding I’m hearing? The man with more notches on his headboard than Billy the Kid had on his gun.’

‘I’m afraid it is. And I always swore blind I’d never marry a cop.’

‘Marry? Did you say marry?’

‘Well, in a manner of speaking,’ the sergeant admitted. ‘We’re going to see how it goes.’

‘And DI Stallings isn’t missing the Met? She doesn’t regard this as a backwater?’

‘Hell no. On that last investigation she had the best result of her career. The DCC might have been involved in the arrest, with big Montell and me, but he faded right into the background afterwards, as is his way. Becky’s on the record as the senior investigating officer. She’d never have got near something that size in London.’

‘Excuse me, gentlemen.’ The voice came from the speaker above their heads, breaking into their conversation. ‘You’re supposed to be witnessing this, aren’t you?’

Both detectives looked through the glass screen that separated them from the autopsy room. In truth they had been trying to ignore, as best they could, the little old man in the green gown, while he and his assistant delved into the remains of the late Ainsley Glover as he lay naked on the stainless-steel table. ‘Sorry, Prof,’ said Pye, leaning forward to speak into the microphone that was set into a console beneath the window. ‘I didn’t realise we were getting to the exciting part.’

‘You think you jest, young Detective Inspector,’ said Professor Joe Hutchinson, Scotland’s pre-eminent pathologist. ‘Let me wipe the smile off your face. I have a cause of death for you. Would you like to step into my office?’ He stretched out a hand in a gesture of invitation. ‘It’s OK, we’ve put all the bits away, or back.’

Reluctantly, Pye and Wilding opened a door to the left of the window and stepped into the examination room, just as the old man stripped off his surgical gloves and threw them in the general direction of a bin in the corner. They tried not to look at his assistant, who was busy sewing the subject back together.

‘Heart failure,’ Professor Hutchinson declared, looking up almost belligerently at the officers; he stood no more than five feet four and they towered over him.

‘As the doctor on the scene told us,’ said Wilding.

‘Of course she did. In the end the heart always fails. Young Dr Brookmyre can’t be faulted for that. Also, I gather that she was made aware of the subject’s medical history. Is that correct?’

‘Yes,’ Pye confirmed. ‘I wasn’t there, but my colleague told me that Dr Mosley, the Book Festival director, said that he’d had a recent heart attack.’

‘He had, although the indications are that it was fairly minor, as these things go. Even so, that would have led my young colleague to her diagnosis. If only. .’ The tiny pathologist’s eyes twinkled, he paused, and suddenly the detectives were on edge, knowing that their morning was about to change, and guessing that it would not be for the better. ‘If only that young colleague had taken a closer look, then she might not have induced such complacency in you two flatfeet. Mr Glover died of heart failure,’ he went on, ‘but that always has an underlying cause.’

‘And in this case?’ asked Pye.

‘In this case, if she’d bothered to smell his breath, a fairly routine piece of procedure, I have to say, she might have been less presumptuous.’ He pointed to the body. ‘Even now the scent is there. Go on, gentlemen, have a sniff. Go on, I insist.’

Wilding shrugged his shoulders, stepped up to the table and leaned over the body.

‘What do you detect, detective?’ the professor challenged.

‘It’s sort of sweet, isn’t it?’ the DS offered.

‘Fruity, would be my description, but you get the picture. A classic sign.’›

‘Of what?’ asked Pye.

‘Of hyperglycaemia.’

‘Low blood sugar?’

‘No, my son, the opposite. We’ll need some more detailed lab work than I’ve been able to do here, but it’s already clear to me that the man’s glucose levels were fatally high, absolutely off the bloody clock.’

‘But he was seen going off to inject himself with insulin.’

‘Well, he didn’t. I’ve only been able to find minimal levels in his bloodstream. This poor chap developed ketoacidosis. That means he went into a diabetic coma. . and died. When was he last seen alive?’

‘Around about midnight.’

‘And how was he?’

‘Fine. He was lucid, in good form, although he did tell someone that he felt a bit hyper and needed to inject.’

‘Well, he didn’t. I put the time of death at about one thirty, without much room for error. If he appeared normal at midnight and died that quickly, he didn’t dose himself with his insulin. More like he ate three or four giant-sized bars of chocolate. . only there’s none in his stomach, just some white wine and a melange of partly digested canapés. The only conclusion I can come to is that he died as a result of a catastrophic pharmaceutical error or, to use the vernacular, that he chose to top himself, by injecting himself with a massive dose of glucose. Either way, gentlemen, I wish you an enjoyable Sunday.’