Free Good as Dead by Mark Billingham Page A

them outside the doors when they arrived at the hospital wing. Dobson said, ‘Here you go,’ then turned and walked away.
    ‘He’s a charmer,’ Thorne said.
    McCarthy opened the door for Thorne and ushered him through. ‘Bark’s worse than his bite,’ he said. ‘Like a lot of them.’
    Thorne had naively imagined that Barndale’s chief medical officer would be older. That he might possibly be wearing a white coat. As it turned out, the man who showed him into his large, bright office and dropped into a chair behind a cluttered desk was, like the governor, a few years younger than Thorne himself and considerably better dressed. He was stocky with thick, dark hair and a well-trimmed goatee. There was a trace of a northern accent.
    ‘Roger said you’re looking into Amin Akhtar’s suicide.’
    Thorne nodded and held up the stack of files he’d brought with him from Bracewell’s office. ‘Got to work my way through this lot as soon as I can, but I wanted to have a quick look around in here first.’
    ‘That’s fine—’
    ‘Just get my bearings, you know?’
    ‘Not a problem.’
    ‘You found Amin, right?’
    McCarthy stood up, removed his jacket and hung it across the back of his chair before sitting down again. A heavy sigh made it clear that he was going to find talking about Amin Akhtar’s death hard work.
    ‘I’ve not been here that long,’ he said. ‘Only a year or so, and this is like the worst nightmare. There was a kid who cut his wrists in his cell a few months before I got the job, and I know this kind of stuff goes on in prisons, but Amin was here .’ He held out his arms. ‘On my watch, so … ’
    ‘Tell me what happened.’
    ‘I got here about seven-thirty,’ McCarthy said. ‘A bit earlier than usual because the governor had called a senior management meeting for eight o’clock and I needed to get a few things dictated in the office. I decided to do a quick round before the meeting and Amin’s was the first room I checked.’
    ‘Why was that?’
    ‘I always check the private rooms first,’ McCarthy said. ‘And his was the only one that was occupied.’ He looked down and straightened some papers on his desk. ‘Well, you know what I found.’
    Thorne was thinking: clean slate. ‘I haven’t had an opportunity to see the police report yet,’ he said.
    ‘Really?’
    ‘Or the post-mortem. So I’d be grateful if you could tell me.’
    McCarthy cleared his throat. ‘Amin had taken an overdose of Tramadol, which is the same drug he was being treated with. It’s related to morphine … ’
    Thorne nodded.
    ‘He’d been checked twice on the rounds between six-thirty and seven a.m. and although the hospital officer on duty was rightly suspended, I don’t think we can really blame her for not noticing that anything was wrong. I mean, I can’t honestly say I’d have done anything different. He was just lying there in bed, so anyone looking in through the window for a few seconds could easily have thought he was asleep and that everything was OK.’ He held up his hands. ‘She didn’t notice the plastic cup and the few spilled tablets lying on the floor by his bed. Simple as that.’ He shook his head, looked to see if Thorne needed any more detail.
    Thorne waited.
    ‘There was some blood where he’d bitten through his tongue and he’d … soiled himself, though obviously that couldn’t be seen from outside the room.’ He looked at Thorne again. ‘Yes, we might have been able to save him if the officer on duty had been a little more observant, but as it was, Amin was dead by the time I went into his room. He was still … warm, but I checked and there was clearly no hope of resuscitation. So—’
    ‘Still warm? So what time did he take the overdose?’
    ‘Well, I haven’t seen the PM report either, but I spoke to the Home Office pathologist when he arrived and he put the time of death at somewhere between six and seven a.m. The hour after he was given that last dose of