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By Root 124 0

he lay on the dissection table, his body resembled a map of the London Underground due to the number of scars he displayed, a testament to the wonderful care that the NHS can give us all. Both of his legs were wrapped in thick bandages that I knew Ed would want me to unravel; when I did so, I nearly gagged into my mask because the feet were horrible. They were swollen and looked like they’d originally belonged to an elephant, only it was a sick elephant, one with a dreadful skin disease, so that they were covered in disgusting brown polyps and there were ulcers on the tips of his toes. They stank, too, which made my stomach contents even jumpier. He was short and looked just plain ill. Each of his ears carried a hearing aid, too.

All of this was interesting, but even I could see the thing that might have offed him; on his right forearm was a deep cut. This had been partly sewn closed but a goodly proportion of it was gaping open. I took a peek; it seemed to go down to the bone.

When I did his evisceration, there was even more evidence of how much poor Mr Best had required the services of the medical profession throughout his life. He had had heart surgery: veins had been stripped from his leg and sewn around his heart to replace the native arteries (a Coronary Artery Bypass Graft, known in the trade as a ‘cabbage’) – an operation that I knew was a major piece of surgery. Not only that, I also found that he had three kidneys; two were in the usual place (looking to me a bit sick), but there was another tucked nicely into the left side of the pelvis. I knew from what I had learnt from Clive that this was a transplanted kidney, and it had been doing all the work since it had been put in.

I hadn’t seen the paperwork and didn’t know the circumstances of Mr Best’s death so, apart from the cut on his arm, I had no clues. Ed said nothing while he performed the post-mortem so it was only when we were sitting in the office downing some coffee that I learned the truth. Clive asked, ‘What was the cause of death, then?’

‘As expected, he haemorrhaged to death.’ He bit into a chocolate digestive. ‘Hardly surprising since he was found sitting in his wheelchair surrounded by a huge pool of blood.’

Full of curiosity, I asked, ‘So how did he get that cut on his arm?’

‘Apparently,’ he explained, his face completely serious, ‘Mr Best was not a man to be discouraged by the blows that life had dealt him. He might have been suffering from serious heart disease, had a renal transplant, be completely deaf and so blind that he could only make out vague shapes, and he might have been confined to a wheelchair, but that didn’t stop him continuing to do what he’d always done in his spare time. He was a keen woodworker.’

I thought for a moment that I must have misheard. ‘Woodworker?’

Ed nodded solemnly, while Clive chortled to himself and shook his head slowly. ‘He was really serious about it, too.’ The chocolate biscuit disappeared and there was a pause while he trawled in the tin for another one. ‘He had his own circular saw . . .’ he said, his head still down.

‘My God,’ I burst out. ‘He couldn’t have done.’

‘Oh, yes, he could, Michelle. Quite adept at using it, too. Unfortunately one of his friends came to call while he was using it and surprised him. That was how he got the cut. His friend took him to Casualty where it was sutured closed and he was kept in for a day or two. He returned home, refused all social services, and was intent on carrying on as he had always done.’

‘So what happened?’

‘The police reckon that he was reaching up into the fridge to get some milk for tea. The act must have stretched the stitches too much and opened the wound up. The saw had cut through the radial artery so once it was open again, he would have bled to death pretty rapidly with no one to help him.’

I winced.

‘Everyone has to have a hobby,’ observed Ed, shaking his head, ‘but even so . . .’

THIRTY-FIVE

There was only one occasion on which everyone in the Department of Cellular Pathology – the histology staff, the cytology staff and the mortuary