Stay of Execution

57

‘Hey,’ said Skinner, quietly, as he helped Sarah fasten her sterilised blue gown, ‘before we go in, there’s something I want to tell you. I’m sorry I leaned on you to do this; moral blackmail isn’t very nice and I wish I hadn’t said what I did, about you letting me down. It wasn’t right, and it wasn’t even true.’

‘Sure it was true,’ she replied. ‘That was how you saw it at the time, and if you were being honest with yourself rather than simply trying to be nice to me, you’d see that it still is. I’ve got no ethical problem with doing this; my reluctance was personal. So can we please stop saying sorry to each other? It’s all right for us to disagree, Bob, and it doesn’t even matter who’s right and who’s wrong.’ She pulled on her cap. ‘Now let’s do this thing.’

She led the way from the dressing room into the autopsy theatre, where a postgraduate pathology student and a police photographer were waiting, standing over the body of Colin Mawhinney as it lay on the stainless table, naked, washed clean, white, still and cold.

She went straight to work, running through the preliminaries, giving the corpse a thorough external examination, speaking into the microphone above her head as she did so, dictating the notes that she would type up later. ‘I can find no marks on the body,’ she said, ‘no signs of injury, not even any old scars.’ She turned and nodded to the photographer, who snapped off a couple of shots. ‘I’m now going to look inside the mouth,’ she continued, picking up a spatula, and pulling the jaws apart. ‘Inside, I can see traces of weed, and general debris that’s come from immersion. That’s what I would expect. We’ll take samples later. Let’s have a look at the hands now.’

When the first phase was complete, she turned to the student. ‘Mike, I want you to do a couple of strong compressions on the chest wall. Not too strong, though; mustn’t break any ribs.’ As the young man did as she had asked, she turned to her witness husband. ‘Do you know what this is for?’

‘No.’›

‘It’s. . Wait a minute. Yes. Come here.’ Reluctantly, he followed her beckoning finger. ‘Do you see that foam, around the nostrils and mouth?’ He leaned over and saw as she had described, a light froth, white, with a very faint pink tinge. ‘That’s a vital sign,’ she told him. ‘It’s a mix of water, air, mucus and a little blood, whisked up by respiratory efforts. Basically it tells us before we do anything else that he was alive when he went into the water.’

‘We never doubted that,’ said Skinner.

‘Well, you know for sure now. Okay, I’m ready to begin the internal examination. In the circumstances,’ she said to her assistant, ‘I’m going straight for the lungs.’ Skinner backed off, quickly; when she picked up her scalpel, he cheated, as he always had done at that moment in every autopsy he had witnessed, by staring into the lights, blinding himself to what was going on before him. He could not shut out the sounds, though, as she opened the abdominal cavity then spread the ribs.

As she worked, her assistant came to join her on the opposite side of the table, mercifully blocking Skinner’s view. He knew what they were doing, and he tried not to imagine it, but as always he failed. She removed the lungs, and placed them in a wide dry basin, which the assistant hooked on to a scale. ‘Seventeen hundred and ninety grams,’ he announced.

‘That indicates that they’re still full of water,’ said Sarah, as the student laid the organs on a steel bench. Leaving the opened corpse, she walked round the dissection table and began to examine them. ‘They’re voluminous and ballooned,’ she called out, speaking up for the microphone. ‘The pleural surface appears marbled; they feel doughy and are pitting on pressure. I’m going to start to section now.’ The assistant came over to her with several dishes ready to receive tissue samples. ‘But first, I’m going to be a little unconventional and aspirate some of the water content.’ She reached out and selected a syringe with a long needle, inserted it carefully into the lower lobe of the right lung and began to draw off liquid.

‘Bob,’ she called out, when she was finished, ‘I think you should see this.’

Her husband tore his eyes away from the bright, near-blinding light. ‘Must I?’ he replied.

‘Oh yes, you must.’

He blinked hard as he walked round to her, trying to restore some focus to his vision. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘I’m not going to make you look at any squidgy bits, but tell me,’ she held up the syringe, ‘what you make of that.’

He peered at the fluid in the chamber. ‘It’s slightly pink,’ he murmured.

‘Blood traces; to be expected. Anything else?’

‘Nothing I can see.’

‘Exactly. And that’s what’s giving me a problem.’

She laid down the syringe, and turned to him. ‘Go on,’ she said, ‘get your large ass out of here.’

‘Eh?’

‘You heard. I don’t need you here any longer; Mike’s a witness, the photographer’s a witness. This autopsy has just become anything but routine. I am going to have to work super-carefully from here on. I’m going to have to take several sections of the lungs from different lobe locations, central and peripheral. I’m going to have to take samples of the stomach contents, and do a lot of other testing. I do not need the distraction of having you in the room and wondering all the time when you’re going to puke.’

She patted his chest. ‘Thanks, you’ve got me this far, after I was reluctant to do this; now the best way you can support me is by digging out a technician, regardless of the time of day it is, to take water samples from the part of the dock where the body was found. We’ll need to analyse them. After that, you can go home. . but don’t wait up for me: I could be some time.’