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By Root 174 0

was the lead SOCO, a pretty normal-looking guy about six foot tall, and Clive was firing questions at him left, right and centre about what had happened. It had turned out that the old lady on the middle table waiting to be dissected was a landlady of a quaint Cotswold-stone bed and breakfast in a quiet village favoured by American tourists. A very glamorous lady, as we saw by a photograph that the police had seized from her property. She had been having a relationship, although it was not known what sort of relationship, with a long-term lodger. From what they knew, as they had him in custody, he in turn had been having a rather bad relationship with alcohol, and needed it to function on a daily basis. His landlady had been giving him the cash to fund this need, but had eventually had enough of handing out money, and that morning refused to give him any. With that, he had taken the frying pan and promptly and very firmly whacked it round the back of her head. Clive commented that she definitely wouldn’t be able to give him any more beer tokens now, and Dr Jones had gone through to get changed, so we all moved into position in the PM room for the beginning of what would prove to be a very late evening.

A technician’s job with a forensic post-mortem is very limited for the first few hours. While the forensic pathologist removes the deceased’s clothes and jewellery, handing it all to the police for bagging up and labelling, and SOCOs take photos, and hair and swabs are collected for various technical tests at forensic centres, a technician is not required and does a lot of standing around and watching. You may be needed to turn the deceased over, or stand for a long time holding them on their side while the pathologist checks the posterior of the body for any marks or wounds. This can make your arms and legs ache, but is part of the job. On this particular occasion, I had nothing to do for an hour and a half, but could not leave the room in case I was needed. Dr Jones had left the removal of the brain until the end of his examination. After I had finished my duty of weighing the organs for him, he asked me if I would retract the scalp and look for the wounds on the head. I wanted to run away at that point. This was a possible murder case. This was going to require a precise incision around the back of the scalp, one which didn’t go through any wounds that might be there. And to top it all off, I had an audience. Everyone in the room would be watching me. I would just have to go for it.

I washed down the hair of the dead landlady on the table in front of me and, from the amount of blood that came off it, I thought the task of finding any wounds would be easy. I was to be proved wrong. I found a very small laceration measuring only four centimetres, but it continued to bleed. Luckily it was going to be above the incision line I was about to make, so I would not mess up any evidence. I pointed this out to Dr Jones, and then had to wait another fifteen minutes while he ordered photos to be taken and the wound to be swabbed before staring at the wound under the spotlight. Apparently, flecks of paint or enamel off the offending weapon can sometimes be found in wounds, and if they can match these up at the lab, it can act as strong evidence for the prosecution.

After he had finished, Dr Jones asked me to go ahead with the incision, but not to remove the skull, as he would do that. After the initial cut, the scalp retracted quite easily, and the smooth white bone of the skull was exposed. The thought that came into my head was that of a soft boiled egg, just after you have cracked it with your spoon. Whatever had hit this lady over the head, it had done so with great force, for the skull was cracked in several places. When the scalp was peeled forward, an actual piece of skull fell on to the table, which showed the extent of the injury.

After a lot more photos, as well as some brilliant bone-saw work by Dr Jones (amazingly, with nobody getting hit or injured by loose flying bone chips), the brain was removed, more photos were