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

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.