Bernard Knight - Where Death Delights

‘It’s called progress, Jimmy,’ he sighed. ‘And we may be seeing quite a bit more of Swansea and district before long.’

At a loose end, now that her current batch of analyses was finished, Sian wandered over to Angela’s bench and stood watching what the biologist was doing.

‘That’s this diatom test, is it?’ she asked, always eager to learn something new.

‘Pull up a stool,’ invited Angela. ‘You’d better learn how to do this, in case I’m away when Richard needs one urgently.’

The technician watched as the older woman took a conical-bottomed test tube from a rack, containing a clear yellow liquid with a button of brown deposit in the tip. She sucked off most of the upper fluid with a teat-ended pipette, discarded it and then tapped the tube with a fingernail to mix the deposit into what was left.

‘I don’t really understand the principles of this test,’ confessed Sian. ‘How can it help diagnose drowning?’

Angela carefully sucked up a single drop of the fluid with another pipette and placed it in the centre of a glass microscope slide, covering it with a wafer-thin glass cover-slip.

‘It’s still not accepted by everyone, but I think it’s reliable if done carefully,’ she said. ‘When someone drowns in water containing these microscopic algae called diatoms, it goes down their windpipe and into the lungs, taking the diatoms with it.’

‘So if they’re dead, there’s no breathing, so the diatoms can’t be found in the lungs!’

Angela laughed. ‘I wish it was that easy! No, even if you throw a corpse into the river, the water still percolates down into the lungs. So finding diatoms in lungs doesn’t mean anything.’

‘So what’s the point of looking?’ demanded Sian, pointing to the tube, which had a label saying ‘Lung’.

‘To check that the water actually contains diatoms, though we always look at a water sample as well. If it doesn’t, there’s no point in looking further. Some waters don’t, though even tap water often contains a few, especially if the pipe hasn’t been used for a time.’

She pointed at the test-tube rack, where there were three other tubes. Sian looked at them and read the names written in grease-pencil… marrow, liver, kidney.

‘Are these what you’ve been boiling up in the fume cupboard?’ she asked.

‘Yes, you have to dissolve little samples of internal organs taken at the post-mortem in nitric acid, which gets rid of all the organic material and leaves the diatoms.’

‘Why don’t they vanish as well, then?’ demanded the knowledge-hungry technician.

‘Because they’ve got a shell of silica, which resists the acid. Now, if the victim drowns, then these tiny things get into the lungs and some penetrate the lining, they’re so small. The heart is still beating, so they get carried off in the blood stream and get filtered out in the bone marrow, liver, spleen, and kidneys.’

Light dawned in Sian’s mind. ‘Ah, I see! So you can tell if it was a live body or a dead body that went into the water. That’s really clever!’

Angela smiled at her enthusiasm. ‘Hang on a minute! It’s not all that simple. You have to find a good number of diatoms in the target organs, not just the odd one or two, because we’ve all got some knocking around inside us. They are wafting around in the air, dust from all sorts of places. Filter material, toothpaste, chicken farm litter – it’s everywhere.’

‘You mean I’m breathing the damned things in even now?’ demanded Sian.

‘Probably… a researcher in a London hospital examined the air-conditioning filters on the roof and found plenty of diatoms in them. And because the sea is full of them as well, a chap from Norway found that eating shellfish produced plenty in the organs, as they can penetrate the wall of the gut!’

Sian looked dubiously at the slides that Angela was preparing from the other tubes.

‘So is it worth doing?’ she asked.

‘Sure, if you can find a heavy penetration, especially in the bone marrow – and they match up with what’s in the water – then it’s good evidence of live entry.’

‘What d’you mean, “match up”?’

‘There are thousands of different types of diatom, which vary from place to place. If those in the organs have a similar mix to those in the lungs or the water sample, then it adds to the probability that they weren’t just strays, especially if there are a lot of them.’

She began looking down the eyepieces of the microscope at the slide from the lungs. ‘There we are! Plenty in the River Wye, have a look at those.’

She leaned aside to allow Sian to look and as she twiddled the fine focus knobs, the technician gave an exclamation.

‘They’re so pretty! Like little bananas or boats or pillboxes, with lace patterns on them.’

‘Now have a look at the kidney extract, see if there are any there. It might take some time.’

Sian used the stage controls to move the slide around and eventually gave a cry of triumph. ‘Got ’em! Once you get your eye in, it’s easy.’

Angela took her place and soon agreed that all the samples had diatoms which were a similar mix to that in the lung. ‘So we can tell Richard that this chap undoubtedly drowned, though he probably knows that already. Still, it’s nice to have a belt-and-braces confirmation.’

Sian went back to her own bench, happy that she had acquired a bit more forensic mystique.

That afternoon, Trevor Mitchell had again gone to see Molly Barnes in Ledbury. She was not pleased to see him and she later told her sister Emily, who lived further up the street, that if she had known who it was, she wouldn’t have opened the door to him.

‘Bloody cheek of the man – and that lawyer fellow who wrote to me!’ she protested.

‘What did he want this time?’ asked Emily, who had a soft spot for her brother-in-law Albert. She privately wondered if he had just done a runner to get away from her difficult sister. He had once admitted to her that he had a lady friend in Hereford.

‘Want? Only Albert’s medical records,’ said Molly, indignantly. ‘At first I told him to get lost, but he said the coroner was in agreement and that because it had been an open verdict at the inquest, he could reopen it if he wasn’t satisfied.’

Emily nodded sagely. ‘You can’t beat the system, Molly. It would look bad if you refused. They’d think you had something to hide.’

Emily was inclined to think that her sister did have something to hide, but she didn’t know what. Since Albert had vanished, Molly had ‘taken up’ with a fellow from the other side of town and she wanted to get married, as soon as she could. The coroner had given her a paper to take to the Registrar for a death certificate, but now it looked as if someone had thrown a spanner in the works.

‘So what did you do?’ she persisted.

‘I didn’t have much choice, did I?’ snapped her sister. ‘I can’t see what medical records from years ago have got to do with this. It was only a little accident at work.’

‘Only a little accident?’ squeaked Emily. ‘He was knocked out and spent a night in the County Hospital.’

‘I still don’t see what they want them for,’ she said sullenly. ‘That private snooper said I should have told the inquest that he had been in hospital once.’

The private snooper in question drove away with a sheet of paper in his pocket, signed by Mrs Barnes, giving consent to an inspection of her late husband’s medical notes. Trevor Mitchell had been told by John Christie that if it came to the crunch, the coroner could demand that the hospital produce the records, but it would be easier if the widow agreed.

As he had to pass through Hereford on his way home, he thought he might as well call into the County on the way. It was on the eastern side of the historic city and he parked and made his way to the Records Department, tucked away at the back.