Costel’s Reviews > Unnatural Causes: The Life and Many Deaths of Britain's Top Forensic Pathologist > Status Update

If the body’s core temperature falls below approximately 32°C then heart rate and blood pressure fall and there is a dulling of consciousness. If the body’s temperature falls below about 26°C then death must almost certainly follow, although there is a famous case of someone who reportedly recovered, albeit mutilated by frostbite, from a body temperature of 18°C.

The law recognised that there could be a “disturbance of a mother’s mind which can result from giving birth”, something which today we call postnatal depression, or its even more serious sister, puerperal psychosis.

It was alarming to understand at the beginning of my career that the pathologist is assumed to be right, whichever side he is working for. The day I became a fully qualified forensic pathologist was the day I turned from a not very sure trainee who still probably had a thing or two to learn, into an expert who can never put a foot wrong. Allegedly.

At least working with death has helped me recognise it can arrive most unexpectedly and therefore I do appreciate the good things life has to offer.

These days I wouldn't experience the slightest shame in pausing to think but then I so wanted to appear entirely in control that I had to pretend to scribble notes for a moment to buy myself time. I wished the staff would turn off Radio 1 but was too shy to ask them.

Chris de Burgh was singing about a lady in red.

According to her notes, she had said she was determined to get better and go to her granddaughter's wedding in a month's time. And then was dead within the hour.

At one of those lunches he told me how, after my mother's death, he had many times come close to committing suicide.

I stared at the dead's man face, a blank testament to its owner's long absence. What had he seen? What had he known? He had been a part of the same world as us but in the year since his death that world had changed and moved on and he had not.

I learned that the forensic pathologist was called to any suspicious death at any time of the day or night, and that might mean to the actual scene of an actual murder.

There is a small black-and-white picture of my father with a large, leggy child, who must be me, enveloped in his lap. Both of us are asleep. This picture is most unusual for its time. Post-war men, on the whole, had been brought up by Victorian fathers and simply did not know how to show their sons such a degree of love and kindness.