Unnatural Causes Read online

  Dr Richard Shepherd

  * * *

  UNNATURAL CAUSES

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  ’Tis not enough, Taste, Judgement, Learning, join;

  In all you speak, let Truth and Candour shine:

  That not alone what to your Sense is due,

  All may allow; but seek your Friendship too.

  Be silent always when you doubt your Sense;

  And speak, tho’ sure, with seeming Diffidence:

  Some positive, persisting Fops we know,

  Who, if once wrong, will needs be always so;

  But you, with Pleasure own your Errors past,

  And make each Day a Critick on the last.

  ’Tis not enough your Counsel still be true;

  Blunt Truths more Mischief than nice Falsehoods do;

  Men must be taught as if you taught them not;

  And Things unknown propos’d as Things forgot.

  Without Good Breeding, Truth is disapprov’d;

  That only makes Superior Sense belov’d.

  Be Niggards of Advice on no Pretence;

  For the worst Avarice is that of Sense:

  With mean Complacence ne’er betray your Trust,

  Nor be so Civil as to prove Unjust.

  Fear not the Anger of the Wise to raise;

  Those best can bear Reproof, who merit Praise.

  Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism

  1

  Clouds ahead. Some were snowy mountains looming over me. Others lay across the sky like long, sleeping giants. I moved the controls so gently that when the plane tilted down and to the left it seemed to respond not to command but by instinct. Then, ahead of me, the horizon straightened. It is a strange friend: always there, glimmering between sky and land, unapproachable, untouchable.

  Beneath were the North Downs, their gentle curves bearing an odd similarity to the rise and fall of the human body. Now they were sliced cleanly through by the motorway. Cars chased each other along its deep cut. They gleamed like tiny fish. Then the M4 was gone and the earth was falling away towards water, a river knitted with a complexity of tributaries.

  And here a town, its centre robust, red-hearted, radiating roads lined by paler, more modern buildings.

  I swallowed.

  The town was disintegrating.

  I blinked.

  An earthquake?

  The town’s colours waved. Its buildings were pebbles on a riverbed, viewed through the distorting lens of flowing water.

  Extraordinary air currents?

  No. Because the town waved in time with something inside me, something like nausea. But more ominous.

  I blinked harder and my hand tightened on the plane’s controls as if I could correct this feeling by correcting altitude or direction. But it came from deep inside me, forcing its way up through my body with a physical power that left me breathless.

  I am a practical, sensible man. I looked for practical, sensible explanations. What had I eaten for breakfast? Toast? Harmless enough and offering no explanation for the sudden intensity of this sickness. And if it wasn’t exactly nausea, then what? Its chief component was an inexplicable sense of unhappiness, and … yes, dread. A sense that something terrible was about to happen. Even … an urge to make it happen.

  A ludicrous, irrational thought crossed my mind. What if I got out of the aeroplane?

  I struggled with myself to remain seated, to keep breathing, to control the plane, to blink. To be normal again.

  And then I glanced at the GPS. And read: Hungerford.

  Red, older houses at the centre. Hungerford. On its peripheries, grey streets and playing fields. Hungerford.

  And then it was gone, replaced by Savernake Forest, a vast green cushion of vegetation. Gradually the great forest brought me relief, as if I were a foot-traveller enjoying its leafy shade. If my heart rate was still raised the cause was retrospective horror. What had happened to me back there?

  I am in my sixties. As a forensic pathologist, I have performed more than 20,000 post-mortems. But this recent experience was the first time in my entire career that I suspected my job, which has introduced me to the human body in death after illness, decomposition, crime, massacre, explosion, burial and pulverizing mass disasters, might have emotional repercussions.

  Let’s not call it a panic attack. But it shocked me into asking myself questions. Should I see a psychologist? Or even a psychiatrist? And, more worryingly, did I want to stop doing this work?

  2

  The Hungerford massacre, as it became known, was my first major case as a forensic pathologist and came absurdly soon after I began my career. I was young and keen and it had taken many years to qualify. Years of highly specialized training, far beyond routine anatomical and pathological study. I must admit that so much time spent staring at minute cellular differences on microscope slides nearly bored me into giving it up. On many occasions I had to reinspire myself by sneaking into the office of my forensic mentor, Dr Rufus Crompton. He let me read through his files and look at the booklets of photographs from his cases and sometimes I’d sit there, engrossed, long into the evening. And by the time I left I could remind myself why I was doing all this.

  At last I qualified. I was rapidly installed at Guy’s Hospital, in the Department of Forensic Medicine, under the wing of the man who was then the UK’s best-known pathologist, Dr Iain West.

  In those days, the late 1980s, pathologists were expected to join senior police officers as hard-drinking, tough-talking, alpha males. Those who carry out necessary work that repulses others often feel entitled to walk with a swagger in their step and Iain had that swagger. He was a charismatic man, an excellent pathologist and a bull in the witness box who was not scared to lock horns with counsel. He knew how to drink, charm women and hold a public bar spellbound with a good story. Although sometimes rather shy, I had almost convinced myself I was socially competent until I found myself playing the gawky younger brother to Iain. His light shone in pubs across London and I stood with an admiring audience in his shadow, seldom daring to risk adding a quip of my own. Or perhaps that was just because I couldn’t think of a good one, anyway not until at least an hour later.

  Iain was head of department and it was quite clear that he was top dog. The Hungerford massacre was a significant national disaster and a personal tragedy for the people of that town, especially those families directly affected. Under normal circumstances, Iain, as boss, would rush to such an event. But it was mid-August and he was on holiday so, when the call came, I took it.

  I was driving home from work when my bleeper went off. It is difficult to imagine now that we lived in a world without mobiles but in 1987 there was nothing more than a single bleep to alert me to the fact that I should make a
phone call as soon as I could. I switched on the radio, just in case the bleep was related to a headline. And found it was.

  A gunman had been on the loose around a town in Berkshire so obscure that I had never visited and barely heard of it. He had been on a killing spree, starting in the Savernake Forest and working his way towards Hungerford town centre, and now he had retreated into a school building and the police had surrounded him. They were trying to persuade him to give himself up. Reporters believed that he may have killed as many as ten people, but since the town was under a sort of curfew there was no way of obtaining an accurate figure.

  I arrived home, which in those days was a nice house in Surrey. A happy marriage, a nanny, two small children playing in the garden: it couldn’t have contrasted more with the houses of murder scenes I visited. On that day, I knew my wife, Jen, probably wouldn’t be there yet because she was busy studying.

  I walked through the front door and straight to the phone, saying goodbye to the nanny as she left. I got the up-to-the-minute information and discussed with the police and coroner’s office whether I needed to go to Hungerford this evening. They were adamant that I must. I promised to leave as soon as my wife returned.

  Switching on the radio news, I listened to Hungerford updates while I made the children tea. Then I bathed them, read a story and tucked them into bed.

  ‘Sleep well,’ I said. I always did.

  I was the caring parent focusing on his children. And simultaneously the forensic expert desperate to get in the car and see what was happening in the biggest case of his professional life so far. When Jen walked in, the forensic expert took over entirely. I kissed her goodbye and sprinted straight out.

  The CID had instructed me to leave the M4 at Junction 14 and wait on the slip road for my police escort. A few moments later a police car slid alongside mine and two grim faces turned to me.

  They offered no greetings.

  ‘Dr Shepherd?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Follow us.’

  Of course, I’d been listening to the radio all the way and I already knew that the massacre had ended with the death of the gunman. He was twenty-seven-year-old Michael Ryan, who, for no reason anyone could discern, had roved Hungerford armed with two semi-automatic rifles and a Beretta pistol. He was dead now, either because he had turned a gun on himself or a marksman had saved him the trouble. Reporters were excluded, the injured had been taken to hospital, residents were indoors and the town had been left to the police and the dead.

  We passed through a roadblock and I followed the police car very slowly along eerily empty streets. The last long rays of the evening’s summer sun were passing across this ghost town, bathing it in a benign, warm light. Anyone alive was inside their home but there was no sense of their presence at the windows. No car moved apart from our own. No dog barked. No cat prowled through flower beds. Birds were silent.

  As we twisted and turned through the town’s small suburbs we passed a red Renault askew at the side of the road. A woman’s body was slumped over the wheel. Further on, as we turned into Southside, were the smouldering remains of Ryan’s house on the left. The road was blocked. A police officer’s body sat motionless in his squad car. The car was riddled with bullet holes. A blue Toyota had collided with it and inside was another dead driver.

  An elderly man lying by his garden gate in a pool of blood. On the road an elderly woman, dead. Face down. I knew from news reports that this must be Ryan’s mother. She lay outside her burning house. Further on, a man on a path, dog lead in hand. The juxtaposition on that almost-dark August evening between the quotidian streets and the extraordinary random acts of killing that had taken place there was, frankly, surreal. Nothing at all like this had happened in the UK before.

  At the police station we halted. My door slammed and then the officer’s door slammed and after that the heavy silence resumed to cover, no, smother, Hungerford. It was a few years before I was to hear another such silence, the silence that follows horror. Usually the scene of a homicide is accompanied by the bustle of the living – uniformed officers, detectives, crime scene investigators, people rustling paperwork, taking pictures, making phone calls, guarding the door. But the enormity of that day’s events seemed to have frozen Hungerford in a state I can only compare to rigor mortis.

  The police station was more of a police house: anyway, it was being refurbished, with lumps of plaster on the ground and wires hanging. I must have been greeted. I must have shaken hands. But it seems to me, looking back, that the formalities were carried out in total silence.

  It was soon completely dark and I was in a police vehicle, heading for the school where Michael Ryan had barricaded and then shot himself.

  We glided very slowly down the still street, the headlights picking up a crashed car, its driver clearly visible, motionless. Once again, I climbed out to look. The light from my torch slid over the feet, the torso, the head. Well, there was no doubt here about the cause of death. A gunshot wound to the face.

  We stopped at the next car and then a couple more. The gunshot wounds were in a different place each time. Some people had been shot once, some had been shot again and again and again.

  Recovery vehicles were waiting unobtrusively to take away the crashed cars when the police had documented them and removed the bodies. I turned to the officer driving me. My voice hit the silence like breaking glass.

  ‘There’s no need for me to see any more of the bodies in situ. There’s no doubt about how they died so I can deal with it all at post-mortem.’

  ‘We need you to take a look at Ryan, though,’ he said.

  I nodded.

  At the John O’Gaunt School there were many more police officers.

  I was briefed downstairs.

  ‘He told us he had a bomb. We haven’t searched him yet because we were worried that it would detonate if we moved him. But we need you to have a look at him now and certify death. Just in case he blows up when we do look. All right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I suggest you don’t move him, sir.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Do you want a flak jacket?’

  I declined. It was designed to stop bullets and so would have been of little use at such close range to a bomb. And, anyway, I had no intention at all of moving Ryan.

  We went upstairs. That rubbery smell of school. And when they opened the classroom door, there were desks. Some of the desks were scattered but most still stood in neat rows. Pinned around the walls were pictures and scientific diagrams. All perfectly normal. Apart from a body, propped up in a sitting position at the front of the class near the blackboard.

  The killer was dressed in a green jacket. He would have looked like a man off hunting for the day if there hadn’t been a gunshot wound to his head. His right hand lay in his lap. It held a Beretta pistol.

  As I set off towards him, I was aware that all the policemen were quietly leaving. I heard the door close behind me. From beyond it there came a radio message: ‘Going in.’

  I was on my own in a classroom with the UK’s biggest mass murderer. And perhaps a bomb. I had been attracted to my profession by the books of that lion of forensic pathology, Professor Keith Simpson. But I couldn’t remember him mentioning this as a possibility in any of them.

  I was acutely aware of everything around me. The quiet sounds beyond the door. The arc lights outside throwing overlapping, dark shadows on the ceiling. The small beam of my own torch. That classroom smell of chalk and sweat, mixed strangely with the smell of blood. I crossed the room, focusing on the body in the corner. On arrival, I knelt down to look at him. The gun, which had already killed so many people that day, was pointing straight at me.

  Michael Ryan had shot himself in the right temple. The bullet had passed through his head and out of the other temple. I saw it later as I left the room, embedded in a noticeboard across the classroom.

  I debriefed the officers. There were no hidden wires. The cause of death was the g
unshot wound to the right side of the head, which was typical of suicide.

  Then, relieved to be leaving that sad grave of a place, I gathered speed on the motorway. But it seemed that Hungerford’s silence had infiltrated the car and was riding alongside me, a massive and unwanted passenger. Suddenly I was overwhelmed by all I had seen that day. The enormity of it. The horror. I pulled over to the hard shoulder and sat in the dark car while the lights of other vehicles swept by, unseeing, unknowing.

  I only became aware of the police car which had pulled up behind me when there was a tap at the window.

  ‘Excuse me, sir. Are you all right?’

  I explained who I was and where I’d been. The officer nodded, scrutinizing me, assessing me, wondering whether to believe me.

  ‘I just need a minute,’ I said, ‘before I continue.’

  Police officers know about transitions between work and home. He nodded again and returned to his own car. No doubt to check my story. A few quiet minutes later and I knew I had left Hungerford behind and home was ahead. I indicated, waved goodbye and rejoined the great river of motorway traffic. The police car pulled out behind me, following me protectively for a short distance before dropping back then turning off. I continued my journey alone.

  At home, the children were in bed and Jen was downstairs, watching TV.

  ‘I know where you’ve been,’ she said. ‘Was it awful?’

  Yes. But I only allowed myself to shrug. I turned my back to her so that she could not see my face. I felt I had to extinguish the television news with its reporters discussing Hungerford excitedly and so urgently. The Hungerford dead had no excitement or urgency any more. Here were men and women simply slaughtered as they went about life’s business, business they thought important and pressing until it was brought to an abrupt halt. There was nothing important for them now. There was nothing pressing.

  Late into the night I was busy making phone calls to sort out how I would conduct multiple post-mortems the next day. I hoped to help the police reconstruct every death and thus, with witness help, all Ryan’s moves. Reconstruction is important. It matters a lot to anyone involved, and it matters to the wider world. As humans, we have a need to know. About specific deaths. About death in general.