Stay of Execution

33

Sarah could have done the autopsy at Roodlands, the local hospital at Haddington, as the police had asked, but she preferred to use the new facilities at Little France, and so she asked for the body to be transferred there from the local undertaker’s premises to which it had been taken.

As she drove there she was thankful that Mawhinney had declined Bob’s invitation back to their house for a nightcap. Even on routine assignments she liked to work with a totally clear head.

The late Belgian, whose name had been Bartholemy Lebeau, was waiting for her on the table when she arrived. Joseph, the technician who would assist her, had him ready for examination, his head propped at an angle on a wedge.

She gave the cadaver a cursory examination, as she picked up the notes of the GP who had certified the death, and those of the police officers who had been called to the scene as a matter of routine. Like many victims of sudden death, he looked serene, as if he had simply gone to sleep. The lips were blue, but there were no other outward signs of distress. Clearly, Monsieur Lebeau had been overcome very quickly.

She glanced through the notes. The deceased was male, aged sixty-two; he was not grossly obese. In fact he had been weighed on his delivery to the mortuary and had been found to be around the average weight for a man of his height and age.

He, Colonel Malou and other members of the party had been billeted at the home of a British Legion member, a farmer with a large house near a hamlet called Bolton. They had been preparing to dine with their host and hostess, and Lebeau had decided that he would freshen up first. He had gone into the guest bathroom; when he had failed to emerge after fifteen minutes, the colonel had knocked on the door, to give him, he thought, the ‘hurry up’ sign. There had been no reply; when Malou had opened the door, he had found his friend lifeless on the floor.

Dr Lezinski, the emergency-service doctor who had responded to the call, had examined the body. Naturally she had looked for various options. She had eliminated cerebral haemorrhage as a likely cause, and had come to the conclusion that in view of the man’s age, the drinking habits described by his companion, and the fact that he was a lifelong smoker, death had been due, subject to confirmation by post-mortem examination, to myocardial infarction.

‘And you’re almost certainly right,’ Sarah murmured. She knew Jean Lezinski to be an experienced and very capable GP.

She put a tape into the recorder as usual, but before switching it on, she gave the body a quick external examination. There were no marks, no bruising from a fall that might have contributed to his death, nothing out of the ordinary, apart from an old scar on his upper right leg and another on his lower abdomen, almost certainly the result of an appendectomy. She pulled back his eyelids. The eyeballs were milky, and heavily bloodshot. She turned back his top lip. The remaining teeth, about half of the set God gave him, she estimated, were discoloured with age, coffee and tobacco, but they had been well looked after. On impulse she pulled the lip further back, and frowned. The gums showed signs of a furious irritation, a vivid rash. ‘What the hell is this?’ she murmured.

‘Joseph,’ she called out, ‘would you pass me a torch, please, then hold the lips back for me.’ The technician handed her a penlight and then did as she had instructed. She shone the light into the dead man’s mouth. The rash was widespread.

‘What do you see, Doctor?’ the young man asked.

‘I don’t know,’ she replied. She picked up Dr Lezinski’s report and read through it again. ‘I’ve got to speak to her,’ she said aloud. She knew the medical emergency service number off by heart; she went over to the wall phone, found an outside line and dialled it. ‘This is Dr Sarah Grace,’ she told the operator. ‘I’m in the mortuary at Little France, and I need to speak to Jean Lezinski, urgently. You’ve got her ex-directory there, I know. Either give it to me, or get hold of her and have her call me here at once. I’m on. .’ She looked for the extension number on the phone and read it out. ‘Do it now, okay.’

She hung up and waited. ‘What are you thinking?’ Joseph asked.

‘That rash on the gums, it’s so bad that he must have been taking some medication for it. I have to cover the possibility that there might have been a rare and fatal reaction with something he ingested that day. I’d rather talk to the certifying doctor before I look inside him, in case there’s something she forgot to include in the report. It looks like an open and shut coronary case, and Jean would have had no reason to look in the man’s mouth.’

She waited by the phone; after a couple of minutes, it rang.

‘Jean,’ Sarah began, ‘thanks for calling. I’m looking at your Belgian. He exhibits what seems to have been a pretty severe mouth infection. Did you notice any medication lying around when you examined him?’

‘No,’ the GP replied. ‘Nothing at all. As a matter of fact, when he had his fatal collapse, he was cleaning his teeth. I asked his friend if he was on any drug treatment. The poor chap was very upset, but he was coherent enough to tell me that he hadn’t been. Why are you asking, Sarah?’

‘I don’t know for sure. It’s just that this rash is very severe. In fact if he was brushing his teeth and he strayed on to his gums it might have been damn painful.’

‘Not so painful as to shock him into a cardiac arrest, though.’

‘Hardly. Jean, thanks. I won’t keep you any longer.’

She hung up, frowning. ‘Dr Lezinski says he was cleaning his teeth when he died,’ she told the technician. ‘There’s no sign of any residual paste in the mouth.’

‘The body’s been prepared by the undertaker.’

‘That was kind of him, he should know better than to do anything to an autopsy subject. Let’s get on with it, Joseph. Take a couple of photographs as he is, then I’ll go straight into the heart.’ She picked up her scalpel, as her assistant reached for his camera.