Stone Cold by Andrew Lane Page B

Sherlock was fascinated. This man was, in his own quiet way, a
genius! His job – in fact, as it turned out, his passion – was taking the evidence that was set out on the metal tables in his laboratory – the bodies of people who had died
unusually or suspiciously – and painstakingly searching inside them for evidence as to how and why they had died. It was very much what Sherlock had started thinking that he might do with his
own life, with the exception that it was confined to a laboratory rather than taking place out in the real world. In a strange way it was the kind of thing that Mycroft might have ended up doing,
if he could have conducted autopsies from the comfort of an armchair.
    Sherlock was particularly interested in how Lukather could tell the difference between an accidental death and a murder. Flattered by the attention, Lukather was very informative on the
subject.
    ‘Let us assume,’ he said, taking a sip of his tea, ‘that you are called in to a place where a man’s body has been discovered. Let us say that it is his bedroom. He is
lying beside his bed, face down. There are no obvious marks of violence – no blows to the face, no blood, no stab wounds or suchlike. The body is just lying peacefully on the floor. Now, the
average constable might think the man died from a heart attack or a stroke, and perhaps ask the man’s family whether he has been feeling out of sorts recently, but you as a medical man are
not so easily convinced. Rather than making a decision and then seeking evidence to back it up, you look for the evidence first and then see where it leads you. So, you have the body brought back
to the mortuary here, and you examine it from head to foot. Perhaps you notice that the corpse’s face is unnaturally pink, which may indicate that he has suffocated after breathing in a
poisonous gas such as carbon monoxide. Now, having found that, you ask the constable to investigate the man’s bedroom carefully. Is there a stove there that might have produced carbon
monoxide that filled the room so that he breathed it in? Are the windows closed, despite the fact that it is summer, meaning that perhaps someone deliberately closed them so that the carbon
monoxide has no way to escape? Maybe there is no stove, but is there perhaps evidence that a pipe has been introduced into the room through a wall or the floor through which carbon monoxide might
have been pumped from a stove outside? You see the kinds of questions you might start to ask, just based on the fact that the corpse has an unnaturally pink face?’
    ‘I see,’ Sherlock replied, fascinated.
    ‘Alternatively, the corpse might
not
have a pink face, but you might notice a small pinprick wound on a shoulder or on the neck. Perhaps the man was accidentally stung by a wasp and
died of a severe reaction, but if so you might expect to find some swelling around the wound. Or if there is no swelling, then perhaps the man was injected deliberately with some poisonous
substance from a hypodermic syringe while he was asleep, in which case you are back to deliberate action again.’
    Sherlock nodded.
    ‘Or you might not find any pinprick wounds, but inside the man’s mouth there is evidence of blistering, suggesting that he drank or ate something toxic. You ask the constable again
to look in the man’s bedroom for evidence of food or drink, and if it is found then you test it on a rat, perhaps. If there is nothing there, or if the things that are there are innocuous
when fed to a rat, then you might suspect that the man was given something poisonous, which killed him, but then the evidence was removed by his killer. Do you see?’
    ‘Absolutely.’
    ‘But let us say that there is no blistering inside the mouth either. You then have to investigate
inside
the body, by cutting it open. You may find a blood clot inside the heart, in
which case you might report a heart attack as the cause of death. You might find that the liver is