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Graham sighed. ‘Bugger that.’

Peter Gillard, who was on for PMs that day, came in. When he was told what had happened to Dr Beaumont, he looked rather worried, but all he said was, ‘Oh dear,’ which is a typical Peter Gillard thing to say. Clive asked, his voice completely genuine, ‘Think you’ll find a cause of death, doc?’ And Peter smiled shyly.

After the post-mortem – cause of death, ‘neck trauma’ – the four of us sat in the office over coffee and Peter Gillard talked to us about suicides. I’d always thought it a very selfish thing to do and said so, but Peter was more easy-going. ‘A lot of them just aren’t thinking normally.’

Graham said simply, ‘Not right in the head.’

To which Clive added, ‘Reckon you’ve got to be if you’re going to stick your head on a railway line and wait for the train to come. Remember him, Graham?’

‘Oh, aye.’ He shook his head. ‘Cleanest dismemberment I’ve ever seen. Been trying to do it for years, poor bloke, but people kept rescuing him. Very unlucky he’d been, up until the seven-thirty to London came along.’

Peter said, ‘Usually, though, if you really want to do it, there’s not a lot that can be done to stop you. They’re always succeeding in prison.’

‘And in the local loony bin down the road,’ added Clive. ‘We must get two or three a year from there. They take away all the sharp objects and their belts and shoelaces, but they still manage it.’

I asked, ‘How?’

‘One bloke used three pocket handkerchiefs tied together, then hooked them around the door knob.’

‘Surely that wouldn’t be high enough?’

Peter shook his head. ‘A surprisingly high percentage of people dying by hanging are in contact with the floor when found.’

I was really surprised by this. ‘How?’

‘Death in hanging is almost always due to excitation of the nerves in the neck that slow the heart and may even stop it. Add to that some constriction of blood supply to the brain and it’s usually enough to cause unconsciousness and death within a few seconds. Once you black out, of course, it doesn’t matter how low down you are.’

‘Really? That quick?’

‘Less than ten seconds, sometimes.’

‘Never!’

He nodded. ‘Most people don’t appreciate that. It’s likely a lot of hangings are just cries for help but they die a lot more quickly than they thought they would. And that makes it difficult for the Coroner.’

‘Why?’

‘The Coroner won’t confirm a death as suicide unless he is absolutely certain that that’s what they intended to do. All we do down here is find out what caused them to die, but it’s the Coroner who decides how that came about. If there’s a chance that it was a cry for help and they thought that someone would find them before it was too late, he won’t call it “suicide”; similarly, if there’s a remote possibility that when they fell off the bridge, they tripped because they were drunk, he won’t call that “suicide” either.’

‘What does he call them?’ I asked.

‘He calls those “accidental”.’

Graham said, ‘I don’t see that it matters what you call it, bloody stupid if you ask me.’

‘It does to the relatives,’ pointed out Peter.

It was Clive who brought us back to Dr Beaumont. ‘Well, I should think that the Coroner’s going to have a problem calling his death “accidental”,’ he said grimly. ‘I wonder what type of Land Rover it was.’

Early afternoon and, with PMs over and the dissection room cleaned down, we thought we could relax for a few moments – but, as is often the way in the mortuary, this was not to be. Three firms of undertakers arrived at once, all collecting patients, two of them collecting two each. One of the undertakers was Vince, a large man with a cheery smile who always stays for a cup of tea and a chat. Quite often, he brings in pieces of steak for us which, the first time it happened, gave me the creeps as thoughts of the League of Gentlemen and ‘special meat’ came to mind. It turned out, though, that Vince’s family also owned a butcher’s shop.

Anyway, for twenty minutes, it was absolute chaos, with Graham and me running around while