Free The Silent Sleep of the Dying (Eisenmenger-Flemming Forensic Mysteries) by Keith McCarthy

fancy molecular biology, I'd like to have a chat with Medical Genetics. See what they think, okay?"
    She nodded and went in search of sterile pots to label for the various specimens. She came back with them piled in her arms. They spent the next fifteen minutes taking further samples and then labelling the pots. Having done that, Hartmann began to pile all the organs into a silver bowl.
    "I probably ought to be going now," said Belinda.
    Hartmann had turned his attention to the cyclist. He was feeling and bending each limb in turn. He didn't look up as he said, "Fine."
    She began to strip off her gown, moving towards the body store, while he tried to reassert his self-confidence. He had picked up a clipboard on which were cartoons of a human body, front and back, and was noting down the external injuries. He had just started on the dissection of the organs when Belinda tentatively came back to the viewing balcony to speak to him over the perspex screen.
    "Would it be all right if I were to come and see you when you're going to look at the tissues down the microscope?"
    Hartmann hid his concern that here was another chance to play the jerk. "Of course. It'll be a couple of days. I'll let you know when the stuff's ready."
    Denny and Lenny came in some ten minutes later. They had considerable fun in telling Hartmann exactly what they thought Belinda needed to make her a happier human being.
    *
    Belinda had been entrusted with the samples. She had taken the ones in formalin through to the cut-up room so that the laboratory technicians could put them into cassettes for processing over the weekend; the slides made from these would then be ready by Monday afternoon for Hartmann to examine. She was now taking the fresh samples to the molecular biology lab to put them into the freezer.
    Hartmann had told her not to start the analysis straight away but she suspected he didn't know how long it took. The tissue had to be digested with enzymes, the nucleic acids extracted and stored before any tests could be run, and that would take several days; the analysis itself might take a further week.
    Surely it would be better to start matters at once. She wasn't, she rationalized, disobeying Hartmann, since her action would not technically be starting the analysis, merely preparing the tissue. And it would save valuable time when, as she was sure it would, the analysis became necessary.
    Thus decided, she didn't put the samples directly into the freezer. As per the protocol, she split the tissue pieces into two with a sterile scalpel on sterile petri dishes; half of each sample she froze (this was done to provide spare tissue in case something went wrong), the rest she put into plastic disposable test tubes. Then she poured onto them a solution of protease. The rack of test tubes she then put into a waterbath set to body temperature.
    *
    In truth, Hartmann wasn't particularly interested in non-Hodgkin's lymphomas but at least it was a weekend away, and away, moreover, at the luxurious Pretender Hotel on the southern edge of Loch Lomond, all paid for, bar the drinks. Three days of relative freedom; freedom from responsibility, freedom from Annette, freedom from Jake and Jocasta, freedom from debt. He planned to enjoy himself.
    On the Friday afternoon, he flew up to Glasgow Airport then took a taxi to the hotel. It was every bit as splendid as he had hoped, the hotel a converted castle set in pinewoods that sloped down to the loch's edge. There was a gymnasium, a swimming pool, a sauna and an eighteen-hole golf course. There was also an air of opulence that he found at once relaxing. He decided that perhaps life wasn't too bad.
    He was checked into a room that managed to avoid the sterile conformity of most modern luxury hotels, then showered, changed and wandered down to the reception buffet. The procedure over the next few hours was exactly as it always was on such occasions. When he registered, he picked up the obligatory wallet (filled with a