By 12.30, as the cadaver steadily ceased to resemble a human being, West became quite certain: ‘The muscle fibres were torn in a desperate attempt to grab something.’ Hiss did not reply. As the legs and each finger were cut open to scour for other secrets, he remained reserved. The embalmer’s formalin, he realized, had destroyed any chance of finding conclusive evidence. ‘It’s well worth doing, isn’t it?’ repeated West as they drank coffee.
‘Yes,’ replied Hiss, still looking for a pattern of injuries and still feeling restrained by a Health Ministry official’s edict that he should be cautious (the edict was possibly a consequence of the friendship between the deceased and the serving minister of health).
The corpse was turned over on to its shredded back. The Spanish stitches were cut by a sharp scalpel. It was just past one o’clock in the morning and the pathologists were about to enter already trodden ground. Swimming in formalin within the distastefully brown chest cavity were the remains of the Spaniards’ handiwork.
Dr Lamela, the senior Spanish pathologist, had carried out his duties in circumstances very different from those enjoyed by the Israelis. Working in a cramped, ill-lit autopsy room, he had lacked important instruments, and had afterwards been denied any laboratory in which to conduct essential scientific tests. Aged thirty-five, he was a reluctant pathologist, obtaining little satisfaction from his task. In his three-and-a-half-hour investigation of the virgin corpse, he had noted that there were no external marks, bruises or perforations of the skin, the obvious signs of murder or violent death. Later tests had confirmed that no poisons were present.
Lamela’s next theory was drowning. But he had noticed no water in the respiratory tracts leading to the lung, which ruled out death by drowning. Nor had he found much water inside the lung tissue. The single, reliable test for judging whether the deceased was alive or dead when he fell into the sea had been frustrated by nature. That proof depended upon traces of the sea’s diatoms (microscopic algae) in the bone marrow. If the person had fallen living into the sea and swallowed water, the diatoms would have entered the bone marrow, providing irrefutable evidence of drowning. Subsequent tests revealed that at the point in the Atlantic where the corpse had been discovered and hoisted into a helicopter, the seawater contained no diatoms. The ‘little’ water in the lungs Lamela ascribed to pulmonary oedema, water which could arise through a heart attack. He therefore relied upon speculation rather than scientific proof when, mistakenly believing that the deceased was a strong swimmer, he excluded drowning and suicide as a cause of death.
Instead, Dr Lamela had concentrated upon the coronary arteries to the enlarged heart. Both were 70 per cent constricted. The evidence of a heart attack seemed strong. The twenty-two-stone man had lived with only one functioning lung and a diseased heart, and the right ventricular muscle of the stricken heart was acutely enlarged. His widow had disclosed a medical report written some years earlier which had noted a lack of oxygen in the blood, a common cause of sudden death. Taking into account the deceased’s complaints to the ship’s crew just before his death about the temperature in his cabin, Lamela concluded that the fatality had been caused by a heart attack. But, by scientific criteria, he was again speculating. He had failed to test whether there was an infarction of the heart muscle (a noticeable scar in the heart tissue), a certain indicator of an attack. Instead he had relied upon the small blemishes which revealed slight attacks in the past. His shortcomings were manifest.
At 1.20 on Sunday morning in Tel Aviv, eight men and one woman peered into the evidential debris bequeathed by Lamela, the stench from the formalin irritating their eyes and noses. As an assistant ladled the liquid out of the cadaver, Hiss complained, ‘There are some bits here you don’t recognize as a human being’s.’ The Spaniards had butchered the evidence. Dissected organs had been thrown into the corpse rather than sealed in a plastic bag. What remained of the lungs was full of water, but whether natural fluids, seawater or formalin was impossible to determine. The dissection of a remnant of the lung revealed some froth. ‘Consistent with both heart attack and drowning,’ the pathologists agreed. Examination of the liver revealed acute sclerosis, consistent with alcoholism. What remained of the other organs was practically worthless.
‘There’s no heart, nothing,’ complained West.
‘I think we should send the bill for this one to the Spanish,’ laughed West.
‘To the King, Juan Carlos,’ agreed the Israeli.
Suddenly, another assistant excitedly announced the discovery of a blood clot in the head. Further examination revealed no bruising. It was just accumulated blood fixed with formalin, West and Hiss agreed, a relic of Lamela’s butchery. A deep bruise near the right ear also contributed nothing to establishing the cause of death but was probably contemporaneous with the tearing of the muscles. The British pathologist’s earlier excited conclusion that ‘He’s been thumped’ had been jettisoned, along with his initial assumption of murder.
At 2.30 a.m., their work was completed. ‘I think it’s been a very bloody dissection,’ mourned West as he lit a cigarette. Stepping into the warm air outside, he walked towards his car. He would drive back to Jerusalem, where he had landed just twelve hours earlier on a Gulfstream jet formerly owned by the man whose corpse he had just abandoned. ‘I’ll look at Jerusalem before I go home,’ he decided as he sat back in the car for the fifty-minute journey to the Holy City.
The body would soon be transferred to the same destination for its funeral after a mortician had performed some rapid repairs. It would be buried with a mystery. Three pathologists – British, Spanish and Israeli – had ruled out murder but disagreed on the cause of death. Both Hiss and West discounted Lamela’s dismissal of drowning. The ambivalent evidence prevented any definite decision. But Hiss supported the Spaniard’s theory of a heart attack.
In the Israeli’s scenario, the deceased had suffered the preliminaries of the attack, left his cabin and walked to the rail overlooking the sea. Either stumbling or in the early stages of the attack, he had fallen forward, toppling over the ship’s rail or under a steel cord in the stern. At the last moment, he had grabbed at the rail, torn his muscles and, in pain, had plunged into the dark wilderness where the heart attack had come to a swift conclusion. ‘I think he drowned with an epidural haematoma,’ said Hiss.
Suicide was ruled out by the Israeli. In those circumstances, he argued, suicides never cause themselves violent harm before their death. Nor do those contemplating suicide jump naked to their death, and the deceased’s body had been found without the nightshirt which he had worn that night.
On reflection, West was dismissive of Lamela and Hiss. The Briton’s conclusions were determined by the torn muscles and coagulated blood. Lamela would say in retrospect that the muscles had torn during the convulsions of the heart attack. Both West and Hiss rejected that as ‘ridiculous’. Both agreed that the muscles had been ripped by a sudden jerk after the deceased’s left hand had grabbed something. The pain in those seconds would have been intense. West discounted a heart attack, although ‘he had a heart disease which was potentially lethal’. He had two reasons: first, because ‘I would expect him to have fallen on to the deck’; second, even if he had toppled over the railing, ‘He would have been acutely breathless, convulsing and unable to grab anything.’
West favoured the theory that the muscle tears were caused in the deceased’s passage towards suicide or by an intervening accident. He had left his cabin and walked to the railing of his yacht. After climbing over, he had held on pondering his fate. Either he had accidentally slipped or he had deliberately jumped. In either event, in a sudden reaction, he had grabbed for the rail to save himself. His twenty-two stone combined with the fall’s momentum had ripped his muscles and within seconds forced him to release his grip. He had fallen into the dark sea where he had drowned. But even that was supposition: ‘I think that probably death was due to drowning. I can’t prove it. Nor can I prove the opposite.’ In an English court, ‘The verdict would be an open verdict.’
Distillation of the pathologists’ opinions leads towards the most reliable conclusion. Feeling unwell, the deceased had