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‘It’s a fatty liver.’

Ed came in at that moment and said at once, ‘Pâté de fois gras! My favourite.’

I continued to eviscerate the body. The smell of alcohol was still strong; it is almost a rotten fruity smell, like rotten apples. I handed the organs over to Ed. The liver weighed nearly two and half kilos, twice as much as normal. ‘Why has his liver gone like that, Ed?’ I asked.

‘It’s a sign that the liver isn’t working normally. Alcohol can do it, but so can diabetes; and obese people may have similar changes.’

‘Is it related to cirrhosis?’

‘Not always, Michelle,’ he said, shaking his head. He looked across at Maddie. ‘You could do with listening to this as well, Maddie.’ She moved in closer. Ed and Clive had been talking about the fact that we needed more anatomy training now we had mastered the day-to-day events in the mortuary and this, I felt, was the beginning. I think Maddie, though, thought it was a dig about our boozy weekends every now and again.

‘The amount he apparently drank, I’m surprised it isn’t cirrhotic,’ Maddie said.

Ed shrugged. ‘Livers vary. Some can take a hell of a lot of punishment, others can’t.’

‘So what did he die of?’ Maddie and I sounded like a Dolby stereo as we spoke at the same time.

He shrugged again. ‘I don’t know yet.’

For the next thirty minutes he dissected out the organs as Maddie and I peered over his shoulder and Clive whistled in the background, and then, when I had weighed them, Ed looked at them in more detail. He told us what he found as he went along. ‘Sooty lungs with some emphysema – there are bad nicotine stains on his fingers, so I think we can exclude a life spent down the mines, it was more the fact he smoked like a trooper . . . the heart’s not big and there is only a moderate amount of furring up of the arteries due to atheroma – alcohol sometimes seems to wash it away, curiously enough . . . Now, that’s interesting . . .’ Something took his eye.

‘What is?’ I asked.

He pointed at the pancreas. ‘See those dots? Petechial haemorrhages. He’s got them on the pericardium.’ This, I knew, was the sac that the heart sat in, like a protective pouch. Clive had taught me that almost from day one. ‘Also, look at his stomach. See those red areas?’ I nodded. ‘Wischnewski spots, they are.’

I admitted, ‘I never heard of those, Ed.’

‘What was the temperature last night?’ Ed asked, turning to Clive

Clive, who always knew things like that, said at once, ‘Went down to minus five at my place.’ We all knew it would be a couple of degrees warmer than that in the city, as Clive lived out in the sticks.

‘Thought so. I’d say that this poor sod went to sleep – probably the worse for wear – and woke up dead from hypothermia. We’ll do full tox, but I can’t find anything else that might explain it at the moment.’

And so he moved on to Mrs Bartram. She was a large lady, although not as obese as many we get through the double red doors. Her clothes, as Maddie had removed them, looked expensive and there was a hint of lavender about them, and her cashmere blanket was still with her. Maddie’s evisceration had revealed a liver that was similar to Fred Norris’s – big and pale – with no sign of cirrhosis. Once again, Ed’s dissection of the organs revealed no convincing reason why she might have died; he could see no significant heart disease, nothing in the lungs, and the brain was fine. There was no evidence of trauma and none of the signs that he had seen in Fred Norris of hypothermia.

‘Full tox, please,’ he asked Maddie when he had finished.

‘Already got it, Dr Burberry,’ she replied. She then asked, ‘So why do you think she died?’

He replied straightforwardly, ‘Well, at the moment, all I can say with a fair degree of certainty is what she didn’t die of. I don’t think she died of heart disease or lung disease or kidney disease, or of anything wrong with her brain, although I’ll have to check all that by taking samples for microscopy. I can’t see that it was hypothermia – she was found at home, and the house was probably well heated. There’s no sign