Third Degree

by Claire Rayner

  When she checked the lungs and trachea she decided that this woman had definitely been dead before the fire. Had she made any attempt to breathe once the fabric of her bedroom had flared, there would have been carbon particles in the nose and larynx, trachea and bronchii, but there weren’t. George would have to check blood – if she could get any – for carboxy-haemoglobin, which would indicate the woman had inhaled carbon monoxide before death, a gas that was produced by fires, but she had a strong conviction she would find none.

  She stopped to think at that point. What was it her professorial lecturer had said? ‘Never assume that the absence of soot and monoxide means that the victim must have been dead before the fire started. In flash fires due to substances such as petrol very little of either is produced.’

  But there had been lots of soot around at that fire, she reminded herself, conjuring up a memory of the charred wood of the floor. No, she was sure. The absence of soot in the breathing tubes had to mean that this woman had died before the fire started. Or so soon after that the fire could not have been the cause of death, however much damage it had done afterwards. And she dictated as much for her notes.

  For the rest, the woman was, she estimated, in her middle thirties, going by her bone age, but there was no way she could identify her racial origin, for although she was dark-skinned, she was well within the range of Caucasian colouring. There would have to be other evidence for that aspect of the identification and she was eager to know whether Wheeler had managed to find any.

  When she had finished and showered and changed, scrubbing herself even more thoroughly than usual, she hurried up, to her office. Wheeler was there, sitting at her desk using the phone, and she waved her hands when he attempted to get up, to encourage him to continue. So he listened and nodded, spoke a little and then hung up.

  ‘All that we’ve managed to find out is that the tenant of the flat was seen going in at midnight, which was a bit on the early side for her, apparently. She had a man with her, but the neighbours were used to that. They all knew what she was up to – one or two of the others in the block are on the game too and they’re mostly a tolerant lot. Bohemian, you know?’ He said it like a rude word. ‘No one saw the man go. But it seems likely to have been the woman we found. The name we’ve got they all say – the neighbours – is the only one they know for her. But we’ve checked with banks and GPs and so forth and found out a bit about her. Her full name was Zivkonek, Isabella Zivkonek. She was a British national with a Yugoslav father. Said to be part gypsy, according to her doctor. He’s given us her dentist’s name, so we can get a firm ID from him.’

  ‘Yes, that’ll settle it. And she used this other name –’

  ‘For business. Yes. Not badly off, it turns out. You know what banks are like, not keen on handing over info unless they’ve got a warrant starin’ at ’em, but it seems she was pretty well off. Lived in an expensive block, that’s for sure. But then, these women can earn big money, I’m told.’ He looked down his nose a little and George smiled. She’d heard DC Wheeler was a lay preacher of some small and ardent sect, and could see that he would find the lifestyles of some of the more colourful characters on the Ratcliffe nick patch not entirely to his taste.

  ‘So they say,’ she said demurely. ‘Well, there it is. It’s not a self-immolation of the sort Danny meant. Wrong ethnic group. You’ve got a murder on your hands, haven’t you?’

  ‘We have?’ He looked a little startled.

  ‘Oh, of course, you didn’t hear what I said down there. She died before the fire got to her.’

  ‘I thought you told Dudley the lump on her head was due to – due to …’ He swallowed.

  ‘Post-mortem … um, movement of blood,’ she said diplomatically. ‘Due to the fire. Not due to being walloped on the head to be killed. It was done some other way.’

  ‘Were you able to find out how?’

  She shook her head. ‘Sorry, no. I’ve still got to do the tests for various poisons and so on, and we’ll be checking the blood, but at present I don’t have any cause of death.’

  ‘I’ll tell the Guv,’ Wheeler said, reaching for his coat, which he’d left draped over her desk. ‘He’ll want to get an incident room set up.’

  She lit up. ‘Inspector Hathaway’ll be back to do this one? They’ll let him leave his big case?’

  He looked surprised. ‘Oh, no. Inspector Dudley’ll do this. He’s acting DCI at present, till we get another pair of hands, I suppose, but everyone’s a bit pushed at the Met at the moment, seemingly.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, flattened, and then brightened. ‘Still, I imagine when Gus – Chief Inspector Hathaway hears about this he’ll want to take over? It could be a big one and it’s just the sort of case he likes. I’ll talk to him about it.’

  ‘Well, that’s up to you, of course.’ Wheeler was at the door.

  ‘But Inspector Dudley’s likely to be … Well, it’s up to you.’ And he went.

  Inspector Dudley’s likely to be unhappy about that, she finished inside her own head. Well, up yours, Inspector Dudley. I’m still going to tell Gus. He’s sure to want to take over, and then won’t we have fun! And she pushed aside the guilt that came up at once when she realized she was pleased to have a body for Gus to come back to and wasn’t thinking of the woman whose body it had been.

  She had to go over to A&E almost immediately she had finished dealing with the last details in the post-mortem room, remembering just in time that she’d promised to go to a meeting about the way urgent path. requests would be handled there in the future. The A&E department was to be reorganized and she’d promised Hattie Clements, the sister in charge and one of her best friends, that she’d be there to help her in her ongoing feud with her consultant Margaret Hill-Sykes.

  ‘She’s hell bent,’ Hattie had told her with feeling, ‘on running down the A&E department till it gets itself closed by the Department of Health, I swear it. She’s doing it on purpose for the benefit of David Delaney. He used to be her favourite junior here, but now that he’s been appointed consultant to A&E over at St Chad’s and she’s retiring in a couple of years, she’s more interested in building up St Chad’s for him than protecting Old East’s interests. She always fancied that chap Delaney – half her age, too!’

  ‘I’ll do all I can to help,’ George had promised. ‘They’re trying to do something similar with the Path. Department and I won’t have it either! I’ll be there. Eleven o’clock, you say?’

  Now, at five minutes past eleven, she went rushing through the walkways, across the courtyard, her white coat-tails flying and her head down as she tried to organize her thoughts. What with the post-mortem she’d just done and the ideas that had thrown up and her continuing preoccupation with getting Gus back on the case, it was going to be hard to think of A&E and its problems.

  But it wasn’t as hard as it might have been, because she walked into an atmosphere of bedlam that immediately banished her own concerns. There had been a major row at a pub a little further upriver, she was told breathlessly by one of the A&E clerks as she stood just inside the department, staring hard at the hubbub that greeted her startled eyes, and two men with knife wounds had been brought in.

  ‘The copper what brung them in said it was a row over some sort of racket they was running,’ the clerk said, breathless with excitement. ‘So I thought drugs as usual, but he said not. It’s all over who drinks where and who gangs with who and so forth –’

  A bell pealed suddenly and then continued to ring with an insistent pulse. At once George started forwards. It was a long time since she had been in a cardiac response team, but her reactions were still in place and she headed across the waiting hall behind the other doctors and nurses who appeared from every corner, equally galvanized, as though she were still a junior doctor in her first year in A&E.

  The far treatment room, which was where the call came from, was full of people but somehow George found herself almost at the foot of the couch on which the patient was stretc
hed and she caught her breath at the sight of him.

  He’d been stabbed in the belly and blood was pulsing from it, bright scarlet and almost sparkling in the blaze of overhead lights. As she arrived, Hattie, who was beside the head of the couch, dived for the site of the bleed and pushed down hard with both hands, so that the pulsing was held back. ‘It just blew,’ she shouted as the new arrivals, expecting a cardiac collapse case and finding something very different, hesitated, not sure what to do. ‘There must have been a nick into the aorta. Get a sample and some packed cells fast and then call the vascular team and the theatre. I can hang on here a little longer – George!’

  Her eyes lit up as she caught sight of George, who now moved round closer as the various people who had come into the room with her scattered to do Hattie’s bidding. ‘I think I’ve got this but can you try? Grab some gloves and see if you can take over here. It’s a surgeon this needs …’

  George had already registered what was needed; she had been an A&E registrar herself for a while before moving permanently into pathology and she remembered cases very like this one. She reached for the gown a nurse had pulled out of a sterile pack for her, and then for gloves. There wasn’t time to scrub properly but there was a second to pull on two pairs of gloves to improve the degree of asepsis; she did just that, then came and stood behind Hattie and reached over her shoulder.

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Hold on there, Hatt. I’ll slide my hand down alongside yours … Where is it? Left or right …?’

  Hattie closed her eyes, concentrating on the sensations from her fingers. ‘To the left,’ she said. ‘I can feel the pressure – yes – you’re in the right place. Now hold on hard there … Got it!’

  George had. Her gloved hand was now firmly closed around the area where the blood was pulsing. She could feel the strength of it against her fingers, weak as it was, and now for the first time the man it belonged to turned his head and made a thick sound in his throat. He had a ventilation mask over his mouth and nose and the frightened-looking young doctor who was holding it in place and using his other hand to pump air into the patient with regular clutches of the bag widened his eyes in horror.

  ‘He’s beginning to come round,’ he said. ‘Isn’t he? I didn’t give him more than nitrous oxide. Can he feel what –’

  ‘It’s all right.’ Hattie was round the other side now, drawing up a syringe with the help of one of the other nurses. ‘He’s had a good deal of analgesia already – they did that in the ambulance. I doubt he has awareness. He’ll be lucky if he ever does again. Oh, great, the packed cells at last.’

  The treatment room filled up with people again. Someone shot round to the far side to set a new bag of blood up to drip into the flaccid arm that was stretched there and someone behind George said, ‘I’ll take him now,’ and reached over her shoulder just as she’d reached over Hattie’s.

  ‘Thanks,’ she managed and gratefully let go in reaction to the signal she was given as very expert hands took over from her. She recognized the elegant features of the tall Nigerian who was Old East’s vascular surgeon and smiled at him in deep relief. ‘I’ve never been so glad to see anyone in my whole life.’

  ‘I’ll bet,’ he said. ‘I’ll get a temporary tie into this just so that we can transport him to theatres.’ Several people closed around him busily as George slid away from the side of the couch and made for the door. ‘Thanks, George!’ he called then, just as she was about to close it behind her. ‘I’ll let you know how he gets on.’

  ‘Please do,’ she said and escaped to stand outside and pull off the gloves and gown and stare down at her bloodied white coat. She’d have to borrow one to see her through the rest of the day, dammit, and other people’s were never long enough. She’d look like Little Orphan Annie, and she swore out loud.

  Hattie touched her on the shoulder and gently urged her to one side as the door opened again and the trolley came out, with so many people clustered round it that it looked like a piece of meat surrounded by tadpoles in a feeding frenzy, and went hurtling out to the far corridor on its way to main theatres.

  ‘Ta,’ Hattie said. ‘Ta ever so very ta. Jesus, that was a nasty one!’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ George said. ‘And I thought life in pathology was tough.’

  ‘It isn’t always like this,’ Hattie said. ‘Only enough to make it obvious we have to keep this unit going. If that poor bugger had had to go to St Chad’s he’d never have made it. Another ten minutes, even under blue lights, in the sort of traffic there is between here and there, would have killed him. Even Hill-Sykes’ll have to see that.’ She shook her head and then looked round her department with a practised eye. ‘Well, things seem to have settled. Come and sit in the office. I’ll see if Hill-Sykes is still here – it was amazing how absent she was when that blew, wasn’t it? Some bloody A&E consultant she is!’

  ‘Well, you said she was retiring soon,’ George murmured. She had heard Hattie go on at length in the past about her much hated medical boss and wasn’t in the mood for more. ‘Just hang on in there.’

  ‘Oh, I will,’ Hattie promised grimly. ‘I will! Look, ducks, I’m sorry to have wasted your time. I’d have thought the bloody woman would hang around and wait to do the meeting when the fuss was over, but obviously she hasn’t.’ She glared at her watch. ‘It’s getting on for twelve – maybe she’s gone to lunch. I’ll try to fix the meeting for another time, then? Meanwhile, shall we go and eat lunch ourselves? Things seem to be under control here.’

  And indeed the department had quieted down suddenly in the way that was so often the case in A&E, which could swoop from total peace to bewildering activity and vice versa in a matter of minutes. George grinned at Hattie and nodded.

  ‘Lunch would be nice. So would gossip,’ she said. ‘Lead on.’ And for the next hour she sat head to head with Hattie in the canteen as they talked of the various people in their lives and exchanged the most interesting details of what was happening around Old East. It was a refreshing time for George and she relaxed a little, but not completely. Certainly not completely enough to talk about Gus, and how much she was missing seeing him at present. Somehow she just wasn’t in the mood for that.

  Because somewhere deep inside she was becoming alarmed for Gus. The knifing she had seen in A&E had been so vicious, so deliberately designed to kill that it had been chilling to look at; and hearing a little more about the background to it from Hattie – and she told George that indeed, as the clerk had suggested, the man had been involved in a protection racket – it occurred to her that it was possible that this was one of the cases Gus was investigating. It was a thought that chilled her even more. Could these people attack Gus in the same way? She felt sick as she considered the possibility.

  But then she was annoyed with herself. Gus had been a policeman long enough to know how to take care of himself. He’d dealt with violent criminals before safely. He could again. Couldn’t he?

  By the time she got back to her own department at almost two o’clock, she had convinced herself he could and felt a little better: more than ready to make and carry out a few plans of her own. She’d track Gus down and talk to him and after that, once she’d told him of her new case and the problems it threw up, then the problems would be over. He’d come and take over this case and be safer doing so – a great remedy for both her anxieties. So she promised herself as she walked into her office; and found Sheila there, agog, waiting to deliver a message.

  ‘Dr B, remember that leg you had the other day? Well, there was a call from Sergeant Slavin of the river police. He says he’s got another part of it. He’s on his way – How’s that?’

  ‘Great!’ George picked up Sheila’s excitement. ‘How long will he be?’

  ‘He said ten minutes – and that was about fifteen minutes ago,’ Sheila said, looking at her watch. ‘I’ll go down and check, see if he went straight to the mortuary?’

  ‘No,’ George said. ‘I’m on my way down.’ But she stopped as she got to h
er desk to check for other messages. DC Wheeler had called to make an arrangement for the police dentist to come and take casts and examine the body, and she stood, tapping her finger on the message, thinking, and then picked up her phone.

  ‘Inspector Dudley?’ she said, once she’d managed to get to him past the switchboard, which had a tendency to protect him from outside callers unless they knew exactly who they were. ‘At last. Listen. I think we might have another case for you –’

  ‘Another?’ He sounded bored more than anything else. ‘Is that a fact. What is it this time?’

  ‘The leg, remember? I think we’ve got another piece of that body. Sergeant Slavin’s bringing it in. I’m not sure what it is or where he found it, but it could help us to get an ID and that’ll mean you’ve got –’

  ‘What I had before. A difficult case with an unidentified victim.’

  She felt herself flush at the faint sneer in his voice. ‘My point is that having more of the body could get us an ID – and that means you’ve got two cases on. The Zizi woman and this one. Too much for you on your own, isn’t it?’

  ‘Are you trying to tell me how to do my job, Doctor?’ He was very quiet and she didn’t at first register how angry he was and blundered on.

  ‘Oh, of course not, Roop. I just thought maybe you’ll need Gus to –’

  ‘Dr Barnabas,’ he said and now his voice was almost shaking with rage. ‘I would prefer you to address me by my full name and rank if you please, as I do you. And I will thank you furthermore to do your own job and leave me to mine, all right? I’ll decide, together with my superior officers here, whether or not I need more help on this case and I’ll thank you to mind your own business!’