Returning to the autopsy suite, Cassie found Archie stood at the dissection bench snapping on his nitrile gloves. It was a good sign that the sight of his broad back and rugby player’s shoulders still gave her a buzz. His gingery hair was curling over the neck of his scrubs she noticed; time for a bit of gentle nagging. He took stuff like that with good humour.
Jason was back at his station and had just fired up the electric bone saw in readiness to take off Becka Bennett’s calvarium – the top of the skull.
‘Morning, Cassie,’ said Archie, with a casual glance over his shoulder.
She was about to retrieve the next guest out of the body store but instead something made her go over to his bench where he was just severing the respiratory block from the trachea in order to dissect Becka’s heart and lungs.
‘Stop,’ she said, but Archie didn’t hear her over the insolent whine of Jason’s bone saw.
‘Stop!’
Archie paused, his scalpel poised in mid-air.
‘Look,’ she said, speaking more quietly now that Jason had stilled the saw, and fully aware he might be earwigging. ‘It’s probably nothing but maybe you should consider an air embolism?’
He raised a questioning eyebrow.
‘I’m serious.’ She showed him Becka’s notes. ‘Look, she had a central line inserted to inject contrast medium ahead of an MRI scan. If something went wrong when they were inserting it, can’t that cause air to get into the vein?’ She recalled hearing about such a case a few years back.
Archie read over her shoulder, frowning. ‘The scan didn’t happen.’
Cassie pointed out the times recorded by the medical team. ‘Because she went into cardiac arrest right after the line was inserted.’
‘A fatal air embo is pretty rare,’ Archie mused. ‘But her heart rhythm did look normal up till then.’
They both knew that if a large enough bolus of air had entered Becka’s vein it would have reached the right ventricle in half a second. The heart muscles would be unable to pump the resulting froth of blood and air, resulting in cardiac arrest.
‘Ideally, I’d request a scan of the heart,’ said Archie, frowning.
‘Good luck with getting the coroner to stump up for that,’ said Cassie. If it had been Professor Arculus demanding a non-standard procedure then maybe, but Archie was still a new boy.
‘True,’ he said. ‘Right then. I guess we’ll have to go old-school.’ He rubbed his hands in anticipation. ‘Get me your biggest bowl would you?’
Archie used the flexible hose at his bench to half fill the bowl with water. He fully submerged the still-intact heart and lungs and then, taking a pair of scissors, carefully opened the thin white pericardial sac to expose the smooth red curve of the heart. Cassie was gripped: she’d read about this in autopsy handbooks but never seen it in real life.
Archie picked up a scalpel with a magician’s flourish. ‘Here goes!’
Holding the submerged heart in his left hand he used his right to make a cut in the tissue above the right ventricle. A string of silvery air bubbles rose to the surface. Air that shouldn’t be inside the heart.
‘Geronimo!’ he cried, planting a swift kiss on Cassie’s forehead.
Jason had just brought the brain over in a plastic bowl and dumped it on Archie’s dissection bench. His gaze flitted between the two of them. Then his eyes met Cassie’s and his raised eyebrow and smirk told her that he knew that she and Archie were more than work colleagues.
Bollocks.