Funeral Note

Dr Sarah Grace

Silly me, thinking for one moment that I could operate as a consultant criminal pathologist in Edinburgh without ever crossing the path of the chief constable, especially when he’s Bob Skinner. I should have known it had to happen, but I hoped it wouldn’t. . or so I told myself.

I knew there would be talk when I made my decision to move back to Scotland from the US. But hell, I should never have gone in the first place. When Bob offloaded me for that fucking witch of a politician, I should have stayed put and fought my corner.

But I didn’t; instead I made nice. When he made his speech about us having fallen out of love, I agreed, and when he said that we should do what was best for our children, well, I could hardly disagree with that one either. Had I known that he was planning to move the witch, Aileen de Marco, into our bed first chance he got, it might have been different.

Okay, our marriage wasn’t perfect; we’d both played away games, but in that respect, the score was Bob three, Sarah two, and maybe he’d been involved in other matches that I still don’t know about, so he wasn’t standing on any high moral ground, not ever.

Looking back, I can see that he sandbagged me when I was at my weakest. I’d lost my parents, and I was still in shock over that, yet he’d left me alone in the USA to take care of the estate and everything, when he could have taken time out at no cost to his precious career. Then someone else died, someone I’d been close with in my younger days and had gotten close with again, someone who’d been filling the void that Bob had left. I might have stayed with him, but it all came to an end.

My husband played Mr Magnanimous then. It was as if my affair had never happened. Sure, he said something about the score between us being even, but the truth was that his great big macho ego made him blank it out. We went back to Scotland, for the new beginning we announced, to establish a stable base for our kids, me full of good intentions, Bob full of. .

Some would call it bullshit, but I’ll be generous and call it the same crusading zeal that had always led him to put his job over me and over our family: apart from Alexis, that is, my former stepdaughter. From the age of around five, he brought her up alone. He had one significant relationship in that time, with another cop, a classy lady called Alison Higgins, but, as he put it when he told me about her, she was as ambitious as him, so it didn’t last. It wasn’t till I came along, after Alex had left home and gone to university, that he had any meaningful time for anyone else.

I have nothing against Alex, far from it; she never did a thing to undermine me, and we get on perfectly well even now, but she and her long-dead mother are the true loves of his life, even if he doesn’t know it. And she is her father’s daughter, in every respect. She’s as precociously outstanding in her profession, the law, as he was in his, and like him she will go to the top, wherever she decides that might be. But like him also, she sets it above everything else in her life, so anyone with whom she becomes involved, and there have been a few already, had better accept that it leaves her incapable of ever focusing fully on a personal relationship. Of all people, Andy Martin should have known that when they got engaged, given that he’s been Bob’s protege from way back, but he didn’t, and that thing crashed and burned. Mind you, from what I hear, he’s come back for seconds.

When I came back myself, from America that first time, weakened, insecure, and diminished, Alex was perfectly nice to me. She loves her young brother, James Andrew, and being his mother always gave me brownie points with her. There being about twenty years between them in age, Jazz may be the closest thing to a kid of her own that she will ever have: sad but true. But when the witch came along, and Bob decided that our marriage had indeed gone stale and the time had come for a nice amicable separation, that was it for Alex and me. No conflict, but no contest either. We never fell out, but I am damn sure that behind the scenes she was part of the team that advised her father on a split deal that worked out very well for him.

It might seem that as the mother of two young children I was in a strong position, but it wasn’t as easy as that. Mark, our other, older, son, was adopted under Scottish law, and that might have been a problem if I had pursued sole custody aggressively. Then there was the property side. Bob’s father’s estate, combined with the insurance that followed his first wife’s early death, left him comfortably off, but my parents left me substantially better fixed than even he was. If that had gone into a common pot, I’d have been a loser. Alex knew that, even if he didn’t, so the deal put on the table was that we each took away what we brought, and that we have joint custody of our three children.

Fair enough, but there was one small, but globally enforceable, clause in the deal, put there by Bob’s lawyer, a partner in his daughter’s firm, that put all the strings in his hands, given the fact that I’d said I was going back to the USA to practise medicine. The children can never be removed permanently from the jurisdiction of the Scottish courts. In theory, I could have gone to the mattresses on that one, but in practice we were negotiating a no-fault divorce. . Hah! Equal fault was the truth of it. . so I had little choice but to sign off on it. What it meant in effect was that I was the one to whom my kids went on their school holidays, while they spent the bulk of their time not just with their father, but, as happened very soon after I left, with the witch, Aileen. Ironic, and then some, that Bob always used to talk about ‘fucking politicians’!

Deal done, marriage ended, I moved back to the land of my birth, to work in New York; I bought a family home outside of the city, and I went back to practising medicine with the living, among disadvantaged people, since I could afford to do that. I settled in. I made the house welcoming for the kids’ first visit, and I arranged my work schedule so that I could spend most of my time with them when they came over. I enjoyed my job too, particularly the novelty of interaction with my patients: by definition, that’s not something that pathologists experience. Eventually I found time to begin a new relationship, with a nice single man, a classy New York Latino, who was even smart enough to bond with James Andrew by taking him to baseball matches. When I mentioned that to Bob in one of our occasional conversations, the sound on the other end of the line was that of a lead balloon going down.

So, there I was, a wealthy, professional, attractive, thirty-something woman with all the flexibility she needed in her life, and a guy to take care of all those things she can’t do for herself, or would rather not. Ideal, yes? On the face of it, absolutely, but there was one problem that I failed to dissolve: the loneliness that had enveloped me, even as a wife and mother.

Looking back, I believe it started that time when Bob was stabbed, and almost died; it was a ridiculous thing, a random street knife crime incident that could have happened to anyone. He hung on the edge for a while, but he pulled through. He has great physical strength, and his body made a complete recovery, but his mind didn’t. It was a different person who emerged from the chemical coma. While the man that I married had been single-minded, the one to whom I found myself married after the stabbing was obsessive, to the exclusion, at times, of everything else.

It was never the same from then on. He shut me out of his life, and for a while I took myself out of his, until I went back, out of stubbornness as much as love. But he never let me close to him again. We had a married life, and we had a second child, but Seonaid’s birth gave pleasure, not joy. We had meetings of the body, but never of the mind. I put a face on it, but inside, I was living in a bubble.

When, finally, I left him for good, I believed that I would be a whole person again, an independent spirit able to interrelate completely with another. But it didn’t work out that way. Oh, it was fine with my New York guy Armando at first, sex and that was all, but as it can be with these things, we started to drift into something else, and that was okay too, up to a point, until he started wanting more and more from me in commitment terms, and then became more and more frustrated when I found that I couldn’t give it, until one night he asked me how it was that he could be in bed with me and still feel alone, and I realised that I felt the same way.

So we split, last January, and that was probably the lowest point of my life, lower even than when the witch stole Bob from me. I’d had suppressed anger to fuel me then and a clear path to a new life that I thought I wanted. But when Armando and I parted, calmly and rationally (that must be the only way I can do it), my tank was drained. All that I had was my isolation. I had a big empty house, I had a job at which I was okay, but at which I knew I did not excel, and I missed my kids so much it hurt. I was back in the bubble, in a country whose passport I carried, but in which I felt alien.

I don’t know what I’d have done if Master Yoda hadn’t made contact, but he did, on the third Friday in February, out of the blue. His email told me that he’d met Andy Martin at a conference and that Andy had let him have my address, and went on to ask me to please call him on the cellphone number he gave me.

I didn’t leap to the phone: Professor Joe Hutchinson was part of the old life I’d left, and even then I’d rarely ever seen him unless we were surrounded by bits and pieces of human beings. I mulled it over for a couple of days, but on the following Sunday I was feeling so low and weepy after a Skype video chat with Mark, Jazz and Seonaid, and more than a little pissed at having seen the witch passing by in the background, that I dialled his number.

‘A long time ago,’ he began, once we’d got past the ‘hello, how are you’ stage, ‘I found that it was much more fun finding out how the dead died than administering mostly palliative care to the mildly unwell, and pandering to malingerers. Maybe I’m being cynical,’ You could say that, Joe, I thought, ‘but I believe that all doctors should be specialists. You’re not a specialist general practitioner, Sarah, and you never will be, but you are a gifted pathologist. There’s a vacancy here at Edinburgh University, linked with the health authority at consultant level, and I’m sufficiently eminent for recruitment to be entirely in my hands. The person appointed will be my number two, and will succeed me as Professor of Pathology, by the end of next year, no later. I owe my wife some time, before she becomes my widow. I’ve put a lot into this department, and I want to leave it in good hands. That’s why I’m offering the post to you.’

I was silent for so long that he thought I’d hung up on him, and hung up on me. I waited for five minutes before I called him back. When I did there were pieces of metaphor all around me on the floor. That bubble was burst. I had purpose; I had self-belief. I was smiling, no, I was beaming.

‘What would I have to do?’ I asked, as soon as we had reconnected.

‘Practise and teach,’ he replied, ‘as I do. You’ve been in the academic word before; you know how it works.’

‘When do I start?’

‘When can you start?’

‘Give me three months to extract myself; May.’

‘That’s ideal, but don’t you want to know about salary and conditions?’

‘No.’

I resigned my New York job next morning and put my property on the market. The kids were with me for Easter when it sold, but I didn’t say anything to them. The only person I told was Andy Martin, out of courtesy because he’d put Joe in touch with me in the first place, but I didn’t give him any details other than that I was coming back to Scotland in May. Bob and the witch? They would find out in due course.

And they did, when I moved into a rented apartment in the city centre a few days before I took up my unannounced appointment. By that time, Bob had heard from Andy that I was coming, but he had no idea that I was back for good. I called him, at the office, and invited him to lunch with me in a restaurant of his choice. He wasn’t keen on a public meeting; instead he proposed the senior officers’ dining room, a small oasis of privilege in the police headquarters building.

We ate there, and I told him about my career move. He congratulated me, without meaning a word of it, I’m sure, but we chatted politely about it, and about his appointment, although he had been in post for nine months by then. We did our real talking afterwards in his office.

‘What do you want?’ he asked, abruptly, as soon as the door closed on us.

‘What do you mean?’ I played the innocent, badly; it doesn’t come naturally to me.

‘You know bloody well what I mean,’ he snapped; just like towards the end of our old times.

He’d asked for it, so I laid it out. ‘I want what’s best for the children,’ I told him. ‘I’ve bought a house in the Grange, and I’m moving in in a month. During the school term, I’ll have them with me at weekends. Okay?’

‘I don’t know,’ he grunted. ‘I’ll need to think about that; they have their own weekend routines. The Jazzer plays mini-rugby on Saturday mornings.’

‘All year round?’

‘Of course not.’ He frowned. ‘Look, Sarah, you’ve bounced this new situation at me. The first thing I need to do is explain it to the kids. Then Aileen and I need to discuss it.’

I felt a chill, as if an ice cube had fallen into my cleavage. ‘Excuse me.’ I suspect that it came out as a hiss. ‘This has nothing to do with that woman.’

‘Oh, it has,’ he murmured. ‘And you’d better believe it.’

Two minutes alone and we were at loggerheads: I’d expected it to take at least five. I stood to leave. ‘Weekends, Bob,’ I repeated. ‘And holidays. For a while.’

That’s how it’s playing out; even if the witch opposed it, although I’m quite certain she didn’t, she’d have been overruled by a higher authority. That same evening, after a brief call to check that I was free, I had a visit from Alex. She brought a bottle of wine, and we had a girlie chat. It wasn’t until the she was leaving that she murmured, ‘Sarah, please don’t hurt my dad, or embarrass him.’

‘I don’t want to do either,’ I told her truthfully. ‘I never did.’

She gave a small smile, and patted me on the shoulder. ‘I’ll talk to him,’ she said.

The arrangement that Alex had brokered was the one I’d proposed, but outside term time, Bob has them at weekends rather than me. Their carer, Trish, is the glue that holds the routine together; she transports them between homes, and has every weekend off.

I had breakfast with them, and said my farewells, before I left for the morgue, to work on the mystery man from Mortonhall. It was a holiday Friday morning and the boys weren’t due back at school for another month at least, but they would be in Gullane by the time I got home again.

Young Sauce Haddock is a keen one; he was waiting for me when I arrived at the horrible brick and grey concrete mortuary on the corner of Cowgate and Infirmary Street. Its appearance is as depressing as its purpose and I never enter it without my spirits being lowered. How bereaved people must feel if they have to go there is beyond my imagination. If I had the power to raze just one building in Edinburgh to the ground and start over again, I would flatten that one.

As Bob had asked, I’d given the victim a quick, preliminary examination the night before. There had been no extra toes, no tattoos, no bar code on his ass, or anywhere else; in fact he didn’t have a single distinguishing mark anywhere on his body. Dental records weren’t going to be any help either; his teeth were perfect, thirty-two of them, all present and correct. In fact, the only part of him that was missing was his foreskin. But there was saliva foam in his mouth, and that interested me.

‘The chief says he wants you to. .’ Haddock began, but I cut him off.

‘I know what he wants,’ I said. ‘He wants me to make his job, and yours, as easy as possible; but that isn’t up to me, that rests with the guy in the next room.’

‘Sorry, ma’am,’ he murmured.

‘Don’t be. If he wants to spell things out, that’s his privilege. I do what I do, regardless. You ready for this?’ I asked him, as Roshan, my postgrad assistant, and I stood with him outside the examination room.

‘You mean will I faint, Doctor,’ he asked, with a Brad Pitt smile, ‘or chuck my breakfast? We won’t know until we get there, but I hope not. Where do I stand?’

‘There’s a viewing panel, with a loudspeaker so you can hear us.’ I looked at him. ‘Or you can come inside, if you want, as long as you suit up like us, and get the hell out at the first sign of queasiness.’

He grinned again. ‘Might as well get it over with. Got a suit?’

We waited until he was sterile, then walked into the room, where our subject was waiting for us. He’d been X-rayed earlier, section by section, as a matter of routine, and an image of the torso was displayed on a light board. My technician, Roddy Frame, was fingerprinting the body as we entered. ‘All the other exposures are unremarkable, but you might want to take a look at that one, Sarah,’ he called across, his voice muffled by his face mask.

‘Why are we wearing masks?’ Haddock asked. The laugh lines round his eyes were creased. ‘Is it in case he catches something off us?’

‘The other way around. You can get some nasty molecules in the air in this room.’

I stepped up to the light board and peered at the image, and saw at once what Roddy had meant. ‘Indeed,’ I murmured. ‘Look, Roshan.’

‘What?’ the DC asked, behind me.

‘He had broken ribs,’ I told him. I pointed at the X-ray, counting the fractures. ‘One, two, three, four.’

‘That’s from the bruising on his chest?’

‘Yes. It must relate.’

‘Is that what killed him?’

‘No. I’d say it was meant to be the opposite. Injuries such as these are common when CPR is applied, that’s. .’

‘Attempted resuscitation?’

‘Exactly.’

‘So he might have had a heart attack?’

‘It’s possible, but I won’t know until I look inside.’ I looked over my shoulder at Roddy. ‘Are you finished?’

‘Yes, Sarah, he’s all yours.’

As I went to work, with Roshan alongside me and Haddock standing stoically a few feet away, but in my eyeline, so that I could spot any signs of weakness, I had a few possibilities in mind. The first was the one that the young cop had raised, the kind of congenital cardiac condition that can strike down the fittest without any prior warning, but when I opened the chest cavity, all the internal organs were in perfect condition. I made a point of checking the lungs and airways for soil or fabric from the sheet in which he’d been wrapped, but they were clear. Given the circumstances, that was important; it meant that he hadn’t been buried alive.

Possibility number two was the jackpot winner. As soon as I opened the skull, I knew. ‘Massive brain trauma,’ I pronounced.

Haddock knew it also, for the blood that had been released made it obvious. He whistled; he was a cool one. ‘I can see that,’ he exclaimed, drawing a chuckle from Roshan. ‘Does that mean he’s been shot?’

‘I doubt it; I looked for an entry wound, but there was no sign.’

‘A blow to the head, then?’

‘No, the skull’s intact; a blow hard enough to do that would have fractured it and caused obvious external damage. I expect to find that this man, whoever he is, suffered a subarachnoid haemorrhage, that’s bleeding between the outer membranes of the brain.’

‘So he was hit?’

‘I doubt that very much; in fact I’m quite certain that he wasn’t. You know the shit that happens to people?’ I asked.

He frowned. ‘I’ve got first-hand knowledge.’

‘Well, this is an example of it. A person, young and fit like this man, could be walking around with a weakness in the wall of a cerebral artery, usually at the base of the brain, knowing nothing about it until the day it gives out. When it does, there’s a fifty per cent chance that it will be fatal, and a good chance that the sufferer won’t even make it to hospital. It’s subject to completion of my examination, but I’d say right now that there was nothing untoward about the circumstances of this man’s death, and that the way in which his body was disposed of played no part in it.’

‘So like the chief said,’ he ventured ‘this might not have been a crime at all?’

I had to laugh at his incredulity. ‘He has been known to be right, Constable.’ When it comes to his work, I added mentally.

‘I’d better report this, Dr Grace,’ Haddock said, full of eagerness.

‘Don’t you want to wait till I’m finished?’

‘Will you be able to tell me any more than you have already?’

I raised my eyebrows. ‘I can’t tell you how the book will end till I’ve read it all.’

His chuckle was muffled by his mask. ‘In that case I suppose I’d better not miss a chapter. It’ll be colourful, if nothing else.’