Down Among the Dead Men (24 page)

I left the hospital grounds and ended up walking for ten minutes in the direction away from the hospital; by the time I realized this, I panicked, as it was going to take me ten minutes to walk
back, going over the allocated time for my break. So my head started to run away with itself; Clive would think I was pushing my luck due to my bad news, and I would be letting the team down as
Maddie was probably working her socks off in the PM room. I hurried back and apologized to Clive, who hadn’t even noticed.

‘I think I’d like you to stay clean today, Michelle.’ This was Clive’s subtle way of telling me he thought it inappropriate that I was around the dead today.

FORTY-FOUR

‘In the old days the Coroner’s officers would attend the scene and none of this would have happened.’ Clive was talking sternly and Maddie nodded in solemn
agreement.

I happened to be walking into the body store, just after arriving on the afternoon of the following day, and of course I wondered what was going on. ‘What’s happened?’ I asked.
I had spent the morning with my mother, just chatting and reminiscing about Gramp because she had rung the night before and was clearly down in the dumps.

‘Look at this, Michelle.’ Clive was still talking as though he was seriously peeved, and was gesturing towards the body that lay on the trolley in front of him. He continued,
repeating himself. ‘Because the Coroner’s officers used to attend the scenes, they got their information directly about how people died. Nowadays, all they do is make telephone calls.
Half the time, the information they get is second or third hand and it’s all Chinese whispers.’

Maddie and I nodded and made the right noises, like we dared say anything else.

Clive’s annoyance had come about because of the death of Mr Lionel Helmond who had been found collapsed in his garden. The information from the Coroner’s office had been straight to
the point and authoritative:

No one had thought any different. After all, we have people of seventy-plus coming through the double red doors all the time, and probably half of them have died of heart disease. The exertion
of mowing his lawn had quite likely done for Mr Helmond, so there was nothing to make anyone think anything else. The question might have been resolved a little earlier, though, had the post-mortem
not been performed by Dr Zaitoun.

It was Maddie who was working in the dissection room that morning, as Clive was at a management meeting with Ed and other managers. After Maddie had stripped the body and made out a chart on
which she put all the external abnormalities that she could see, she eviscerated the body. Dr Zaitoun came down about twenty minutes later and did what he always did, which was to dive straight in
and hack things around a bit, then decide that death was due to heart disease. Maddie was busy sewing up the organs in the body when Clive returned. Being Clive, he took an interest in what was
going on.

He asked Dr Zaitoun, ‘COAD, was it?’

To a doctor, COAD means Chronic Obstructive Airways Disease, which is things like chronic bronchitis and emphysema. Dr Zaitoun looked up from writing his notes. ‘No. He died of ischaemic
heart disease.’

Clive shook his head. ‘No, it was definitely COAD.’

Dr Zaitoun frowned and opened his mouth. Before he could argue, Clive said, ‘He certainly Came Over All Dead, didn’t he?’

Maddie laughed into the silence that met this remark; Dr Zaitoun paused, then said again, ‘But it wasn’t COAD.’

Clive shook his head in disgust saying, ‘Forget it,’ under his breath and turned away. He spent the next few moments examining the body; in particular, he became very interested in
the hands which were clenched tight into fists. After a while, he called out to Dr Zaitoun, ‘You sure he died of heart disease, doc?’

Dr Zaitoun said, condescendingly, ‘Quite.’

Clive paused, then asked, ‘This bloke was mowing the lawn, wasn’t he?’

‘I believe so.’

‘What kind of mower was it?’

Dr Zaitoun was becoming increasingly irritated, coming out of the alcove where he had been writing his notes. ‘What does that matter?’

‘Bet it wasn’t a petrol mower.’

Dr Zaitoun thought about this. ‘It was probably a push mower. The exertion might have been the final straw.’

Clive pursed his lips as if he were a car mechanic presented with a particularly tricky and expensive repair job. ‘You sure about that?’

Dr Zaitoun was now rattled. ‘Of course.’

‘You’ve looked at his hands, then?’

Dr Zaitoun said, ‘Yes,’ but he said it after a small pause and he said it uncertainly.

Clive said simply, ‘Good,’ and left the dissection room.

Maddie had followed Clive out. ‘What’s going on?’

He would say only, ‘Wait and see.’

Dr Zaitoun had finished and had, as usual, gone without even saying goodbye. As Maddie sat down with Clive in the office to have coffee, he said, ‘I knew it.’

Maddie asked, ‘What did you know?’

‘That guy is useless, I wouldn’t trust him to PM my hamster.’

Of course, she wanted to know what he meant. He got up and led her into the dissection room where the body of Mr Helmond lay, now reconstructed and washed. He went straight to his left hand that
was still clenched into a fist, and unfurled the fingers. There was a deep linear burn running across the palm and across the fingers. Clive said, ‘Heart attack? My backside it was a heart
attack. I just checked with the Coroner’s office; they had to make a few phone calls and talk with the ambulance crew, but it seems that Mr Helmond was using an electric mower at the time he
died. The poor bloke ran over the cord and got two hundred and forty volts for his trouble.’

‘What are you going to do?’ asked Maddie.

‘Have a word with Ed Burberry. He won’t thank me, but I can’t let this go.’

Ten minutes later, Clive returned with Ed and they went into the dissection room; I could see from Ed’s expression as he emerged that he was not happy. He went out but was soon back again,
this time in the company of Dr Zaitoun; back into the PM room he went while Maddie and Clive stayed in the office and waited. There were raised voices for a few minutes and then they heard the PM
room doors open and Dr Zaitoun hurried out. Ed followed, but came into the office and sank into a chair with loud sigh. ‘Oh dear,’ he groaned.

Maddie made him some coffee. Clive said, ‘This won’t be the last time, Ed. You mark my words. There’s more to come.’

Ed said nothing but apparently the look he gave Clive spoke volumes.

All this, I had walked into after taking the morning off. I could tell Clive was upset that his judgement had been ignored by Dr Zaitoun. Although I did wonder if he really cared what Dr Zaitoun
thought of him, I came to the conclusion that deep, deep down he did, but would never admit to this.

Maddie, on the other hand, looked as though she was ready to throw in the towel and made it clear that it was
her
turn to have a weekend off.

FORTY-FIVE

Over the next few days, all three of us got to see how Dr Zaitoun operated, which was pretty shoddily. Clive was totally pissed off when he took just ten minutes doing a road
traffic victim, not even bothering to chart the external injuries. ‘No respect for the family at all,’ Clive said loudly enough for him to hear. You could always tell when Clive was
angry, because he became tight-lipped and quiet, growling when he spoke; and he would stalk around threatening to kick things like the wall and the door. He mumbled to himself, stuff that was
difficult to hear but you knew it was about Dr Zaitoun’s behaviour. This was Clive all over. He took it personally although, technically speaking, it wasn’t really his problem; Clive,
though, considered it would reflect badly on the mortuary and thus on us if the PMs weren’t done properly.

Things were quiet for a week or so, and then Dr Zaitoun did the autopsy on an old gentleman who had died shortly after having an endoscope put down his throat to investigate swallowing
difficulties. They had seen a tumour at the entrance to the stomach and had biopsied it; then, though, after three hours, he had collapsed, sweating and fevered. He had been rushed to ITU, but had
died before the night was over. Dr Zaitoun – not reading the hospital case notes as usual – decided that it was a spontaneous perforation of the tumour. The distinction is important
because spontaneous perforation would be a natural cause of death, whereas if the act of biopsying it had caused the hole, then it would be an unnatural death, and there would have to be an
inquest. We wouldn’t have known any different, except that the endoscopist rang up the mortuary a couple of days later to find out the results of the post-mortem. He was most surprised when
Clive read out what Dr Zaitoun had written.

‘Really? That’s odd. I could have sworn I’d made the hole.’

Clive put the phone down, shouted a loud swear word, sighed, and said some more things under his breath about Dr Zaitoun.

The final straw came not long after and concerned John Lester, a twenty-year-old heroin addict, found dead in his flat. His father was a rich businessman and had paid a lot of money to have his
son treated at a private clinic; the treatment involved inserting under the skin of the groins tiny slow-release beads of heroin, the theory being that this constant supply of heroin would stop the
patient craving more, and the supply would eventually decline to zero, thereby gradually weaning him off the drug. This was not a big enough hit for John Lester, though, and he decided to top it up
by a heroin injection, which resulted in an overdose costing him his life.

Clive tried to tell Dr Zaitoun that he really ought to read the notes carefully but, as usual, he didn’t listen. He did the post-mortem in his usual ten minutes and wasn’t even going
to take blood and urine for toxicology until Clive reminded him. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘I suppose we’d better.’

‘What about these beads?’ asked Clive. ‘Best we keep a hold of them just in case?’

Dr Zaitoun looked perplexed for a moment, then: ‘I don’t think we need them.’

Clive said with a frown, ‘I’m not sure . . .’

But the good Dr Zaitoun was definite. ‘No, it will be fine; I’ll have no use for them. The guy died of a heroin overdose. All we need is a level from the blood.’

Clive looked really unhappy, but clamped his jaw shut. ‘OK,’ he said tersely, at which Dr Zaitoun smiled and left the dissection room.

What Clive did next flabbergasted me. He took a scalpel and, opening up both groins, he took out the tiny white beads, putting them into a sterile pot. ‘What are you doing?’ I
asked.

‘Doing his job for him, the twat. This won’t finish here, Michelle, you wait and see. This will jump up and bite him on the arse, this case.’

Clive was right of course. Ed came down to the mortuary a few days later looking a worried man. He sat in the chair by Clive’s desk, while I made him an instant coffee, and Maddie (who had
been dealing with undertakers) came and joined us. He asked, ‘So, all in all, what’s the general opinion of Dr Zaitoun?’

I think Ed wasn’t quite sure what hit him as Clive gave him
exactly
what he thought about Dr Zaitoun, and Maddie and I chipped in with some choice observations. Looking slightly
shell-shocked, he sat quietly for a moment, and then groaned. ‘Oh, bugger.’

Clive then made faces at Maddie and me, indicating that we should find other things to do in the mortuary because this was going to be managers’ talk, so we made ourselves scarce.
Afterwards, when Ed had gone, Clive gave us the low-down. ‘It’s not only down here that the twat doesn’t function. Apparently half the hospital’s complaining about
him.’ As we absorbed this, Clive went on, ‘The last nail in the coffin is that heroin death. The Coroner’s received his report and is seriously shouting the odds about
it.’

Trying hard to remember the events of that PM, Maddie and I looked at Clive questioningly, and he explained. ‘His report just goes on about death being due to a heroin overdose and
doesn’t mention the implanted beads.’

Maddie asked, ‘Do they matter?’

Clive made a face. ‘Only a lot. According to Ed, this treatment with the beads isn’t licensed. The General Medical Council was already interested and, now that someone’s died,
they’ve moved into overdrive.’ I didn’t know much about how this all worked, but I knew enough to realize it was serious. Mention the GMC to a doctor and they will usually go
white and start shaking. Clive went on, ‘The Coroner’s not happy that Dr Zaitoun’s report doesn’t go into great detail on the implanted beads and, apparently, he’s had
to tell the Coroner he neglected to keep them as evidence.’

Maddie said, ‘But you kept them, didn’t you?’

Clive looked Maddie in the eye, and then grinned suddenly. ‘I haven’t worked here for years not to see a cock-up before it happens.’

This was the beginning of the end as far as Dr Zaitoun was concerned, although it only came slowly. Clive revealed that he had kept the beads and produced them for toxicological analysis when
asked, and Dr Zaitoun had to rewrite his report and admit that he had ‘forgotten’ to mention the beads when he submitted his first version. The GMC continued to investigate the clinic
and Dr Zaitoun left to go and work somewhere else, much to our relief.

We all thought that we would hear no more of Dr Zaitoun, but we were to be proved wrong. One day Bill Baxford came to call at the mortuary. He looked worried: the inquest into
the death of John Lester had been called and, at the last moment, Dr Zaitoun was unavailable. ‘He’s working in Coventry now,’ he said. ‘He claims that his secretary OKed the
date with us without telling him, and now he’s gone and booked a holiday in France for the same time.’