In the privacy of his office, he put through a call to one of his pet hates, the sarcastic Bertram Sealy. There was no one else he could ask. All the other forensic pathologists he knew had retired or left the district.
“You?” Sealy said when Diamond announced himself. “I didn’t expect to hear from you. I thought you were one of the ghostbusters now. Do you wear a proton pack?”
Diamond was in no mood to trade insults. “Can we have a serious conversation? I need information.”
“Sorry, old boy. I’m a scientist. I know nothing about the dark arts.”
“Okay, you’ve had your fun. You shouldn’t believe everything they print in the papers.”
“It was on Instagram. The word is that you’re trying to arrest a hoodoo. Is that right? It’s not a good way to go. You’re going to meet some very strange people.”
“You’re not amusing me, Sealy.”
“No, but you crease me up. I never know what you’re going to do next, and it’s always hilarious. What do you want from me — the address of a good shrink?”
He controlled his anger. Graver issues were at stake than his self-respect. “I want some professional advice about death from alcoholism — and before you go off on another tangent, it’s nothing to do with me personally. Laugh if you want and get it out of your system. This is a case I’m investigating. You must have carried out scores of autopsies on drunks.”
“Hundreds. I had one this week. Liquor is present in a high percentage of unnatural deaths, forty per cent at a guess. I know straight away by the smell.” The man was becoming interested, as Diamond knew he would.
“As obvious as that?”
“It is to an old-stager like me. Some of the younger ones smear wintergreen oil or some such inside their masks to eliminate the odours of the dissecting room. They don’t know what they’re missing.”
“Are you saying the smell tells you exactly what they drank? Beer, say, or wine?”
“I didn’t say that at all. All alcohol is ethanol by the time I get to sniff it, with a distinctly sweet smell. Death is the great leveller. Whatever they imbibed, be it homemade hooch or the finest champagne, it ends up in the bloodstream as ethanol, also known as ethyl alcohol.”
“You can’t tell if it was vodka or gin?”
“Are you listening, or do I have to repeat everything? Like anything else we consume, the drink metabolises. The enzyme systems reduce it to its basic form. The liver deals with ninety-five per cent of it, reducing it to water and carbon dioxide. What’s left, the remaining five per cent, is excreted through the kidneys and lungs. If the drinker is still alive and tested with a breathalyser, the level of intoxication can be measured that way. If he ends up on my slab, I’ll send a blood sample to the lab, but my nose has already told me what I’m dealing with.”
Diamond had started getting lost when enzymes were mentioned, but he’d got the gist of Sealy’s explanation and now he made an attempt to sound informed. “BAC levels.”
“What do you know about them?” Sealy said.
“I know five hundred is about the maximum. The woman I’m interested in had a reading above four hundred.”
“She wouldn’t have survived.”
“She didn’t.”
“Anything above three hundred is likely to induce a coma. The figure you’re talking about is curtains. Asphyxiation generally.”
“This was cardiac arrest.”
Sealy made a sound like the hinges of a church door being opened. “Sudden cardiac death. Interesting. Strictly speaking, this isn’t a heart attack, but the outcome is the same. Prolonged alcoholism weakens the heart function and the ticker doesn’t get the oxygen it needs when it pumps. It’s more usual in middle-aged men than women. You said this woman was an alcoholic. What age?”
“Late forties.”
“Plausible enough if she’d been poisoning her system for years.”
“Can this kind of sudden death be induced by a massive extra intake of alcohol?”
“Binge-drinking?”
“You could call it that. Someone else wants to finish her off and makes sure she drinks more in a short time than she ever has before.”
“Homicide?” No response came from Sealy for several seconds. “There’s no way I could tell at autopsy. Alcohol in a very high dose could well precipitate a rhythm disorder. On the face of it, a sudden cardiac arrest is possible, but you’d have small chance of proving premeditation.”
“What if her usual drink, which was vodka, was doctored with alcohol in a higher concentration?”
“I object to that term, ‘doctored’ — a slur on my profession.”
“Happier with ‘corrupted’?”
“What are you suggesting the supposed murderer added to the drink — pure ethanol?”
“It’s available online for the price of a coffee and biscuits,” Diamond said.
“If it’s that cheap, it wouldn’t be pure.”
“More than ninety-five per cent alcohol as compared with vodka at about forty.”
“You are taking this seriously,” Sealy said. “My only observation is that I’ve never come across such a method of despatching a victim. Theoretically, it could be done. Excessive intake such as this would quickly overrun the body’s coping mechanism. I could tell from the state of the organs that the deceased was an alcoholic and the blood test would tell me she’d consumed a lethal amount.”
“What would be the result of drinking so much at once?”
“Take your pick of coma and asphyxiation or sudden cardiac arrest.”
“And the pathologist can’t tell if it was murder?”
“Of course not. That’s your job — and the best of British luck.”
Diamond put down the phone and returned to the incident room. John Leaman was using a marker on the whiteboard on the wall inside the door. To the left was a long list of more than fifty names.
“What are these — our suspects?” Diamond asked him. “You’re depressing me, John.”
“They’re the cast and crew from the two episodes being shot when Tudor and Nicol went missing,” Leaman said. “Quite a lot will be deleted for various reasons and we’ll get down to a hard core of people who could have been involved in both disappearances.”
“This is if we have one perpetrator?”
“Isn’t that what we’re working on?”
“It’s my assumption.” He exhaled audibly through soft vibrating lips. “I didn’t expect quite so many. You took them from the lists I collected from the production office?”
Leaman nodded.
“We can scrub some straight away. Daisy Summerfield is dead and Dan Burbage had the climbing accident.”
“I didn’t like to remove any of them without your permission, guv.”
Diamond looked for the names that interested him most. Greg Deans was there. Sabine, of course, and her stunt double, Ann Bugg. Candida, near the top of the list. Fergus Webster, the key grip. He borrowed the marker and drew a thick line linking Candida to Fergus. “These two are an item, I found out today.”
Leaman winced visibly as his pristine list was defaced.
“Unfortunately there are names to add,” Diamond told him. “Trixie Playfair, the original choice for the plum part. And Will Legat, the tramp who was stained with Jake Nicol’s blood. Do you want to write them in, or shall I?”
“I’ll do it if you don’t mind.” Leaman’s neat, small lettering was tidier than Diamond’s.