The Murder of Norman Ware by Rosamund Kendal

Author:Rosamund Kendal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jacana Media
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

DR DANIE VAN DEVENTER was a good forensic pathologist. If he made mistakes, missed something small here or there, it was because he was unreasonably overworked and not because he was incompetent or poorly trained. There might have been an element of frustration in his attitude, and he might have lost his temper a little too quickly when his assistants made elementary mistakes, and possibly he drank too much of the single malt whisky that he so enjoyed after leaving the mortuary on a Friday night, but all of that was to be expected, given the circumstances under which he was expected to work. His was not a job conducive to good mental health.

Advocate Norman Ware’s body arrived at the Gale Street mortuary in the back of the unwashed white Forensic Pathology Services van in the early afternoon of Thursday the third of November. Before Dr Van Deventer could do the autopsy on Advocate Norman Ware, he had to complete post-mortems on two other murder victims who had come in earlier in the day (one stabbing and one gunshot); a suicide victim (hanging); and a victim of an accident between a taxi and a bus. The day was proving to be particularly busy.

Because of the plethora of popular television series based on crime-scene investigations and forensic pathologists, the general public has a warped and far more romantic idea of mortuaries, especially South African mortuaries, than is actually the case. Real mortuaries are not populated by inordinately large numbers of beautiful people. There are not highly sophisticated laboratory facilities on site that can deduce within a couple of hours all sorts of miraculous things, such as the make of the nail polish with which the victim painted her toenails three months prior to her murder, or the country of origin of the strand of cotton caught in her stab wound. And the bodies are never as clean and plasticine-like as they appear on television. The stiff that Dr Van Deventer was working on when the delivery van dropped off Advocate Norman Ware’s corpse, for example, had been lying in a muddy cane field for approximately four days before it was found. It had started putrefying and had become bloated and distended with gas. The skin covering the abdominal wall was tainted with a greenish tinge and maggots had taken up residence in the body cavities. Maggots were not the only creatures that had made a meal of the body; some of the victim’s extremities had been gnawed off by cane rats. Naturally, if the producers of television programmes re-created reality down to such detail, they would lose viewers. Thus most of the general public continues to walk around with a perception of death that is far less disgusting than it actually is.

One other problem particular to the Gale Street mortuary in which Dr Van Deventer worked was that it was unable to cope both with the high volume of corpses that passed through it and with the large number of unclaimed bodies.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.