‘It was bound to happen eventually.’ Archie looked unconcerned as he raised a spoon loaded with noodles and fragrant broth from his bowl of pho. They’d met for lunch in a little cafe off the beaten track, having left the mortuary five minutes apart. ‘I mean there’s no rule against it, is there.’
‘I know. It’s just . . . embarrassing. He already hates having a twenty-six-year-old female as a boss and now he’s going to be giving me his “sex face” all the time . . .’ She mimicked a speculative leer.
‘Well played today.’ He beamed at her. ‘If I’d gone ahead and dissected the heart as normal the air would simply have dissipated and we’d have no evidence of the embolism. Shame we didn’t film it.’
‘What, to put on TikTok?’
‘On what?’ Archie looked genuinely puzzled. ‘I mean I could’ve used it when I get onto the lecture circuit.’ Since he was only a couple of years out of med school this was clearly a decade or more in the future but he looked so artlessly pleased with himself it was impossible to dislike him. Where did the posh get their confidence? Cassie wondered. Was it dished out at Harrow along with the breakfast porridge? It certainly hadn’t been on the menu at her school – or she might have ended up studying harder, might even have tried for med school herself.
‘Thank Christ it wasn’t Curzon doing the list today,’ said Cassie. ‘He’d have slapped me down, or complained to Doug about the uppity minion at it again.’ It wasn’t long since Cassie had narrowly escaped a disciplinary for daring to go looking for a deep vein thrombosis in a body without Dr Curzon’s express permission.
An alert sounded on Archie’s phone and he frowned down at the screen. ‘Aha! The radiographer got back to me, and he confirms that Becka Bennett sat up suddenly, feeling sick, just as the doctor was putting in the line.’ He dispatched another mouthful of broth. ‘If the patient is sitting up, it lowers their venous pressure, which is why we’re taught to have them supine during insertion.’
‘So if the pressure in the vein is lower than the outside pressure, it sucks air in around the needle?’
He nodded.
Cassie pushed her bowl away. Becka might have gone on to live another forty or fifty years, but the laws of physics had sealed her fate in less than a second. Lately, she’d started to wonder what the point of life was when it could end so randomly.
‘Are you OK?’ Archie asked, his eyes clouded.
‘I’m fine.’ She faked a smile. ‘Will the doctor get into trouble?’
‘I doubt it,’ he said. ‘It was a busy night and apparently he was an A & E newbie. The coroner will probably call it a tragic accident, nobody to blame.’
Becka’s cause of death would go down as air embolism, but as for what had caused the symptoms that had brought her into hospital – the severe headache and muscular weakness – that was likely to remain a mystery. Archie hadn’t found any signs of stroke in her brain and the rest of her organs appeared healthy too. Cassie imagined what it would be like for Becka’s husband to discover that his wife’s death had stemmed from a misdiagnosis followed by a terrible accident.
Iatrogenic death. Iatro- from the Ancient Greek for ‘doctor’. Death caused by medical treatment.
Maybe it would have been better to leave Becka’s family in ignorance of what had killed her.
‘What made you think of air embolism anyway?’ Archie sent her a cheeky look. ‘Should I mention your sixth sense in my report?’
‘I just saw some froth in a severed vein,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘No psychic powers involved.’ The spurt of satisfaction she’d got from her hunch being proved right had been short-lived. The frothy blood she’d glimpsed while Jason was eviscerating Becka was just further proof that her occasional insights were down not to some ‘special bond’ with the dead but the result of straightforward observation.
Watching him scarf down the last of his noodles before lifting the bowl to drain the last of the soup, Cassie felt a wave of affection. Archie was one of the good guys, he was uncomplicated, amusing company – and the sex worked. So why couldn’t she see them getting to the next stage, i.e. living together? On the other hand, why did that have to be the inevitable next step? The only person she’d ever lived with was Rachel, a trainee psychotherapist who had packed her bags and her umbrella palm into an Uber after five months, blaming the break-up on Cassie’s inability to ‘express herself emotionally’. . . At least she never got any of that sort of chat with Archie.
Uncomplicated. What could possibly be wrong with that?