The body of Zeman was laid out on a table in the morgue of the hospital. He lay soiled and lifeless but commanding even in death. ‘What a bloody waste,’ thought Joe. ‘All his life before him. I liked and admired him. That man could have been my friend.’ Three wide-eyed Afghan officers briefed by Iskander stood solemnly in the background, watchful and suspicious, and Grace began her post-mortem examination.
‘Now you do all understand that I am not a pathologist,’ said Grace, fixing on a pair of spectacles. ‘But I do appreciate that Muslims bury their dead very swiftly and if we are going to get to the bottom of the cause of Zeman’s death, I’ll have to do my best. Sir Bernard Spilsbury would find much to fault in my performance, I’m sure.’
‘Grace,’ said James, ‘he’s in London, you are here. You’re the best doctor in India and more importantly you’re the only civilian doctor for three hundred miles so go ahead. Our own MO here is a jolly fine chap, as you know, you trained him after all – and none better when it comes to treating bullet wounds and sunstroke but he’d be the first to say, “Let Dr Holbrook do it.” ’
Grace stripped away Zeman’s clothing with assistance from Iskander and began to work away patiently with a steady hand, giving a commentary on what she was doing in English and in Pushtu. She took the temperature of the body. She examined eyelids and lower jaw explaining that these areas would give the earliest and the clearest indication of the onset of rigor mortis but following this with the caveat that the relatively low temperature of the stone staircase would have delayed rigor. She asked her audience to mark the beginnings of hypostasis, pointing out the tell-tale pattern of staining which showed the points where his body had been in contact with the hard stone steps. They noted the livid bluish colour which had begun to gather at the waist and in the right buttock and thigh. Proof, as all witnessed, that his body had lain there where found for some hours and had not been moved from some other place and put on the stairs. She examined his limbs and torso finding no wounds, no puncture marks, nothing unusual.
Such an intimate examination of the body of their senior officer must have been unbearably stressful for the Afghans, Joe thought, but so extreme were the circumstances of the man’s death and so acute the need to know the truth, they watched on, silent and wary. And the whole thing was only possible thanks to the impersonal, efficient and thoroughly scientific procedure Grace was demonstrating.
Finally, a gruelling hour later, she was ready to sum up. Pointing to a white china dish which held a sample of the vomit taken from the mouth and throat she said, ‘Well, there you have it. The matter expelled consists, as you might expect, of semi-digested particles of the food Zeman ate at the banquet, poultry, rice, fruit and so on. I see no evidence of foreign matter but lacking the facilities of a chemistry laboratory that is as much as I am able to say. The state of digestion, as you see from the size of the particles, is not very advanced and this gives us an indication of the time of death. A time which is borne out, I may say, by the temperature of the body and the progress of rigor.’
‘But why Zeman?’ Iskander interrupted. ‘We all ate the food. No one else has been affected!’
James and Grace looked at each other in horror and each said, ‘Oh, my God!’
‘What? What are you saying? Who . . .?’ said Iskander.
‘She’s all right, Grace,’ James burst out, grasping her hand. ‘When I left her this morning she was sleeping like a baby and just as pink. She’s all right!’
‘I think you’d better tell us what happened in the night, Grace,’ said Joe. Turning to Iskander he said, ‘I think you should know. I heard a noise at three o’clock and woke. When I looked into the corridor Grace was going along to attend to Mrs Lindsay.’
‘James fetched me. And yes, it would have been at about three. I – we both – assumed it was a return of the sickness she’s been suffering from lately, aggravated, no doubt, by the unaccustomed rich food. She told me she had a stomach pain, had vomited and she had a high temperature. I gave her some drops of Chlorodyne and she began to feel better. I sat with her for half an hour and she fell comfortably asleep so I went back to my room.’
Echoing everyone’s alarm, James said, ‘Look, I’m going to send a bearer to knock up everyone who was at dinner last evening and check whether they’ve been ill in the night. Who’s left? That’s Fred, Burroughs and Rathmore. Lily, as we saw for ourselves, is unscathed.’
He gave orders to a Scout standing in attendance.