TWENTY-ONE

Pathologists and general practitioners don’t get to meet very much, except if they’re married to one another, and not many are. Actually, pathologists and any normal kinds of doctors don’t get to meet much either, which partly explains why most doctors think pathologists are odd; the other reason why your average doctor thinks they’re odd is because they’re pathologists, and they do what they do, which is exactly what any normal person would not want to do. Simple, really.

Mark had been one of my closest friends at medical school and had originally shown no signs that he was anything other than a normal medical student; he worked extremely hard (albeit for three weeks every year just before the exams), drank extremely hard and didn’t give a proverbial. (I know that this is a stereotypical image of medical students, but it’s stereotypical for a very good reason.) We were wild but, I hope, good-hearted and harmless. We feared no one, except possibly dental students (the dental students scared us, because they did what medical students do, only did it with even more depravity), and we felt good about ourselves because we were learning how to treat diseases and save lives, and all that sort of tommyrot which these days is widespread.

Anyway at the time, as far as the rest of us knew, Mark was going to turn into a proper doctor; instead he became the curious hybrid that is the pathologist – interacting not with patients but with body fluids or corpses, in fact usually so disordered of personality that they do not want to meet living patients. They spend their lives sequestered in laboratories, seeing the grist of the medical mill only when it is too late to be of immediate practical benefit to anyone.

I apologize. I rant. It comes of a bad experience as a fourth-year medical student when the professor of histopathology made me slice a fixed brain as if I was preparing cuts of steak, and then humiliated me in front of my peers because it looked, as he so cruelly said, as if it had been done by ‘a luetic gorilla with the shaking palsy’.

Mark had, however, seemed to remain a surprisingly decent chap, although the only contact I had had with him was at the medical school reunions where he had behaved perfectly normally; certainly he had drunk prodigiously so, to all intents and purposes, he had appeared not at all brain-damaged. Until I had met him over the rather badly used body of Marlene Jeffries, I had assumed that he was still in Sheffield, investigating cases in which death was due to poisoned Bakewell tart or suffocation by Eccles cake. I was delighted that he was now in my vicinity, even more pleased when I bumped into him again in the car park of Mayday Hospital, which is the local Croydon infirmary, and not nearly as bad as people insisted. I had just been paying a courtesy call on Sylvie, one of my oldest patients, who was unfortunately celebrating her one hundred and second birthday (statistically, she had just reached the age at which she was more likely to wake up dead than alive) in the hospital because she had overdone the Tio Pepe and fallen over, thereby breaking her humerus).

‘Hello, Lance,’ he called across to me.

He was a tall man, surprisingly self-confident for a pathologist, with pale eyes and ash-blond hair. We approached each other just as a number 109 bus rumbled past on its way to Croydon, each of us pleased. He said, ‘Sorry we haven’t had a chance to catch up, Lance,’ he said as we vigorously shook hands. ‘A murder scene isn’t exactly the ideal place for backslapping reunions.’

‘How are you?’ I asked.

‘Well, thank you. And you?’

I assured him I was. ‘Is this where you’re based now? I thought you were in Yorkshire.’

He winked, then rubbed the first two fingers and thumb of his right hand together. ‘More spondulicks in the metropolis, Lance. A lot of coroner’s work.’ Which summed up pathologists as far as I was concerned; not interested in anything except corpses and cash. He continued, ‘But I’m not based here.’

Now, I have a lot of time for Mark, but that last comment rather wounded me. He made it dismissively, and did so whilst looking back at the fine part-Victorian, part-ramshackle conglomeration that was Croydon’s finest (albeit only) acute hospital. Before I could defend the reputation of this wonderful, not to say unique, sanatorium, he added, ‘I have NHS sessions at King’s.’

‘Nice,’ I remarked.

‘The folk of South Yorkshire are fine people, but you can only take so much coal-miner’s lung.’ He spoke in a jovial manner.

‘So what do people die of around here?’

He grinned. ‘Murder, apparently.’

Once again, I felt the reputation of my homeland had been impugned. ‘It’s not always like that.’

‘No? Inspector Masson told me that this place was some sort of murder magnet, and you were the centre of it. He was of the opinion that people coming into contact with you were more likely to die than to get better.’

I suspected that this was technically slander, but made a rapid once-and-for-all decision not to pursue Masson through every court in the land about it. Changing the subject I enquired, ‘I do hope Yvette Mangon was dead when the drawing compass went in her eye.’

A normal human being would have winced at this, but Mark did autopsies for a living. ‘I think so. She had seventy-seven incisions, all told, and some of them were very deep. The photographs showed a huge amount of blood at the scene – as you’ll be aware – and several of the neck wounds severed major blood vessels.’

There was a certain degree of cheeriness about his demeanour that mere words cannot render. The more blood the better seemed to be the Bentham family motto. ‘Yes, I remember,’ I said weakly.

‘Quite frenzied,’ he said with relish.

‘Quite.’

‘I think I’m going to enjoy working around here.’

It did appear at that moment that a man whose spiritual home was an abattoir might well see Thornton Heath as a desirable place to pursue his career choice. We parted, he presumably to his blood-spattered dungeon, me to my brightly lit, clean surgery and I own to being in a thoughtful mood as I did so. That the two murders were linked seemed impossible to deny, the nature of that connection was obscure to me, hidden as it was amidst a bewildering number of possibilities. Was this the work of someone who hated teachers, as the facts that Marlene Jeffries had been killed with the tools of her profession and Yvette Mangon had been stabbed in the eye with a compass suggested? Was it perhaps connected with that most peculiar of front bedrooms? Perhaps it was someone who, like Max, was convinced that all female PE teachers were (how can I put this tactfully?) of a different persuasion, and didn’t like it?

There were deep, muddy, but fatally swirling waters here.