Tangled Web (8 page)

By nine a.m., Prosser had established that the coffin had already been closed and screwed down when his driver had gone to collect it from the hospital so he had not seen the contents. Next to deny any knowledge of the problem was the mortuary technician at the hospital who told Prosser that he personally had not been on duty the previous day and that the man who had was off today. By nine fifteen Prosser had succeeded in getting through to hospital management and finally had the ear of a man who realised just how serious the complaint was and what the repercussions might be.

‘What exactly did you say was in the coffin?’ asked Ronald Harcourt, hospital manager at Caernarfon General.

‘Bits,’ replied Prosser, acknowledging the inadequacy of his description but failing to come up with an alternative.

‘What d’you mean, bits?’

‘Dismembered remains.’

‘Are you telling me that the child’s body had been dismembered?’ asked Harcourt, his voice rising with incredulity.

‘No, no … there
was
no child’s body,’ spluttered Prosser angrily. ‘Just bits, assorted human bits, lungs, kidneys, a heart maybe and I saw a finger among the mess.’

‘Bloody hell,’ exclaimed Harcourt, suddenly getting the picture. ‘Have you spoken to anyone in Pathology yet?’

‘Just a mortuary technician; he wasn’t on duty yesterday. No one else was in when I called.’

‘I’ll get on to them right away and get back to you. Give me your number.’

Prosser gave him the number and added, ‘The child’s funeral is at eleven. We need the body.’

‘Do the parents know about this?’

‘The father was present when I opened the box.’

‘Oh my God, worse and worse,’ gasped Harcourt. ‘Something tells me we’re in big trouble over this one.’

‘You speak for yourself,’ said Prosser. ‘It’s nothing to do with me. My driver collected the coffin in good faith and remember … the funeral’s at eleven.’

A frantic search of the mortuary fridge failed to come up with the body of Megan Griffiths. Harcourt stood beside consultant pathologist, Peter Sepp, becoming more and more agitated as he watched the proceedings. ‘What the hell am I going to tell the parents?’ he demanded in an angry urgent whisper.

Sepp’s expression was cast in stone. ‘There’s only one explanation,’ he said, as the head technician closed the fridge doors and gave a final shake of the head. ‘The child’s body must have got mixed up with the biological waste bag …’

Harcourt looked at him as if he couldn’t believe his ears. ‘The biological waste bag?’ he repeated slowly.

‘The bits we don’t need when we’re finished with them,’ said Sepp. ‘They go into a biological waste bag for disposal along with clinical refuse from the theatres.’

Harcourt gave himself a few moments to let nightmare images dissipate before asking, ‘Can’t you recover the child from the bag then?’

Sepp shook his head and looked at Harcourt directly. ‘I’m afraid not,’ he said. ‘It gets taken to the incinerator every night.’

Harcourt felt himself go weak at the knees, as the full implication of what he was hearing became apparent. ‘Let me get this straight,’ he said, ‘You’re telling me that pathological … offal was put into Megan Griffiths’ coffin while her body was sent to the hospital incinerator in a biological waste bag?’

‘That’s what it looks like,’ agreed Sepp reluctantly.

‘Jesus Christ! How in God’s name could something like that happen?’ demanded Harcourt in a barely controlled whisper in deference to the fact that several of Sepp’s technical staff were still within earshot.

A shake of the head from Sepp, ‘I really don’t know,’ he said.

‘Christ the lawyers will be gathering like hyenas round a dead mammoth when they hear this,’ said Harcourt. ‘Find out who’s responsible. Blame has to be apportioned and
seen
to be apportioned otherwise we’ll all be tarred with the same brush.’

‘You’ll tell the parents?’ asked Sepp.

‘I can’t imagine a queue forming to compete for the privilege,’ said Harcourt sourly.

Harcourt’s pager went off and he picked up the phone mounted on the tiled mortuary wall. His expression suggested he wasn’t hearing good news. ‘Tell them we’ll issue a statement in due course,’ he snapped before slamming the phone back on its hook. ‘It’s started,’ he complained. ‘The father must have been on to the papers already.
The Bangor Times
wants to know if the rumours are true. Have we really lost a baby’s body? God, it’ll be TV and the nationals by lunchtime and something tells me they’re going to think losing the body would actually have been preferable to the truth when they find out.’

‘They’ll lap it up,’ said Sepp. ‘They’ll see it as a good human-interest story and milk it for all it’s worth. Tears make good television.’

‘We’d better have a meeting and agree on what we’re going to say,’ said Harcourt. ‘Damage limitation is the name of the game.’

‘I’ll call my staff together and see if I can find out what really happened.’

‘We need names,’ insisted Harcourt. ‘We must identify the culprit or culprits and be seen to act firmly and decisively. Those responsible must be sacked without delay.’

‘But it must have been a genuine mistake,’ insisted Sepp. ‘No one would want something like this to happen. The guilty party will be just as devastated as the parents, I’m sure.’

‘Won’t do,’ snapped Harcourt. ‘The press will need a human sacrifice, nothing less will do. They must be sacked.’

‘And their heads mounted on the hospital gates,’ added Sepp sarcastically.

‘And as it’s your department …’ continued Harcourt icily.

Sepp’s expression changed. ‘You think I should offer my resignation?’

‘In the circumstances, I think it might be the honourable thing to do, don’t you?’

‘Honourable?’ mused Sepp. ‘Where’s the honour in feeding a media circus? They wouldn’t know honour, or even common decency come to that, if it kicked them up the arse.’

‘That’s as may be,’ said Harcourt, ‘But we have to play the game over this one, present a solid front. The hospital’s good name is at stake. I want to be able to tell the Hospital Trust exactly what happened and what’s been done about it. That means finding out who’s responsible and getting rid of them whatever the extenuating circumstances.’

‘And me?’

‘Offer your resignation for the benefit of the press and we’ll decline it when the flak dies down.’

Sepp looked at his watch and said, ‘Time’s getting on, you’d better tell the parents there isn’t going to be a funeral.’

‘I’ll phone them from my office,’ said Harcourt, making to leave.

‘Maybe not such a good idea,’ said Sepp thoughtfully.

‘What d’you mean?’

‘If we’re into playing the media game, a phone call might be seen as callous. You wouldn’t want that.’

‘Maybe you’re right,’ agreed Harcourt. ‘I’ll drive over there myself and tell them personally. I’ll get the address from Prosser.’

Pathology Department 1pm

‘So that’s it?’ rasped Harcourt. ‘A monumental fuck-up and no one’s to blame? Just what do I tell the medical superintendent and the hospital Trust and what do I tell the tabloid scavengers baying at the gates? Just one of these things, folks?’

Sepp shrugged his shoulders uncomfortably. ‘I’ve talked to all my staff and none of them can throw any light on this. I’m sorry but that’s the way it is at the moment.’

‘Then somebody’s lying,’ exclaimed Harcourt. ‘What about the mortuary technician who’s off today?’

‘I called him at home; he doesn’t know anything either.’

Harcourt sighed in frustration. ‘Somebody must know something,’ he insisted. ‘Have you gone through everything in chronological order from the time of the post mortem on the missing child?’

‘Of course.’

‘And?’

‘And nothing. No one admits to having put the child’s body – or what he
thought
was the child’s body - in the coffin.’

Harcourt shook his head. ‘Who took the waste over to the incinerator then?’ he asked.

‘No one admits to that either. A thought that B had done it while B thought that A had done it and it turns out that neither of them did.’

‘Jesus! You do realise that the press are going to crucify us over a Pathology department where nobody knows what anyone else is doing. It’s clear that someone on your staff knows more about this than he or she’s letting on.’

Sepp bristled. ‘Or maybe it wasn’t someone on my staff at all,’ he snapped.

‘What d’you mean?’

‘I’m simply pointing out that we don’t know for sure that one of my people was responsible.’

Harcourt looked openly incredulous. ‘You’re surely not suggesting that someone walked in off the street and did it for a laugh, are you?’

Sepp tried manfully to keep his anger in check. He spoke more slowly. ‘The fact of the matter is,’ he asserted, ‘that people are in and out of the Path department all day long. You must know that. I’m simply saying that it is not inconceivable that someone other than a member of my staff caused the mix-up.’

‘You’ve no security?’

‘It’s a mortuary not a bloody bank,’ snapped Sepp, finally losing patience with Harcourt’s aggressiveness.

‘All right, all right,’ said Harcourt, suddenly realising he was pushing Sepp too far and backing off. He made an open-palmed gesture with his hands and said, ‘Let’s not start fighting among ourselves, but if it
was
someone from outside your own staff, that would surely imply malicious intent rather than an innocent mix-up, wouldn’t it?’

‘I suppose it might,’ agreed Sepp.

‘Hard to believe.’

Medical Superintendent’s

Office 2p.m.

‘I suppose the parents took it badly?’ said James Trool, medical superintendent of the hospital as he poured chilled water from a carafe into the crystal glass in front of him on the table. He was an undistinguished looking man, large but with coarse features and a penchant for wearing light coloured suits and brightly coloured ties – a trait that had only surfaced when he’d married his second wife, Sonia, some two years before. It was a marriage that had surprised many because Sonia, an American, was almost twenty years younger than he was; beautiful and very wealthy in her own right. They had met when her daughter was admitted to the hospital after a bad car crash, the same crash that had killed her first husband.

‘You could say,’ replied Harcourt, fiddling with his cuff links and severely editing his answer. ‘The father called me an oily little bastard and assured me we wouldn’t be getting away with it, as he put it. He promised we’d be hearing from his lawyers.’

‘Par for the course,’ said Trool, with a hint of bitterness in his voice. He leaned forward and put his elbows on the table, saying, ‘You know, I can remember a time when people faced up to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune without the need for
counselling
, or whatever they call it, and large injections of
compensation
.’ He endowed the words with extreme distaste.

‘I wouldn’t mention that to the press if I were you,’ said Harcourt.

‘Of course not,’ said Trool. ‘Our deepest sympathy will be extended to the family. Our hearts will go out to them … in an effort to minimise the damage their bloody lawyers are about to do to us.’

‘With respect Dr Trool, I think you’re being a bit harsh. It was a terrible thing to have happen to them.’ The speaker was a slight woman in her late thirties. She was Inga Love, director of nursing services.

‘Indeed it was, Miss Love but it was an
accident
. These things
happen.
No one meant it to happen. To use it as the basis for screwing money out of the hospital is damn nearly criminal in my book.’

‘Something tells me the Griffiths are not going to see it that way,’ said Harcourt.

‘Of course they’re not,’ snapped Trool. ‘
We have been to hell and back
,’ he mimicked. ‘
We don’t want anyone to go through what we have gone through. It’s not the money that’s important, it’s the principle.
Yugh! Makes me want to throw up.’

‘It can’t be easy to have something that awful happen to your child, Dr Trool,’ lectured Inga Love.

Trool grunted.

‘If I can just remind you,’ interrupted Harcourt, ‘I have to brief the press in fifteen minutes. Perhaps we could agree on our approach.’

‘The usual,’ said Trool. ‘Damage limitation. Thoughts with the family at this time, all our sympathy goes out to them. Tragic error, no excuses, a momentary lapse in a busy department, full investigation under way. Steps have been taken to ensure it never happens again, that sort of thing.’

SIX

Any difficulty Gordon and Julie were having in making conversation was resolved on Tuesday morning when they both arrived at the surgery carrying copies of the local morning paper.

‘Have you seen it?’ asked Julie.

‘I could hardly miss it,’ replied Gordon, opening his paper to reveal the headline,
Hospital Loses Baby’s Body! My Agony by Grief-stricken Mother
.

‘It was the cot-death baby in Caernarfon,’ said Julie. ‘What a thing to happen to the parents on top of everything else.’

‘Whose patient?’ asked Gordon.

‘Jenkins,’ replied Julie, giving the name of a Caernarfon GP.

‘I got the impression that they still hadn’t managed to find the baby’s body when this went to press,’ said Gordon.

‘I didn’t pick up on that,’ said Julie, ‘but surely they did, I mean you can’t actually lose a body in a hospital.’

‘You’d think not.’

Julie came through to Gordon’s room after morning surgery was over. He could tell by the expression on her face that something was seriously wrong.

‘You were right about them not having found the baby,’ she said. ‘I’ve just had a phone call from James Trool, the medical superintendent at Caernarfon General. They think the missing baby was sent to the hospital incinerator by mistake: they managed to keep that bit out of the papers.’