Down Among the Dead Men (4 page)

‘Mind you, that’s not the end of it,’ he said. ‘Someone’s always digging up things.’ I must have looked blank, because he went on, ‘Bones and suchlike.
The police bring them in here and ask Ed or someone to tell them if they’re human.’ This sounded thrilling, but then he spoiled it by adding, ‘They never are.’

‘Where do they come from, then?’

‘Most of them are from sheep and cows and other animals. Thankfully, people like Fred West only come along once in a lifetime.’

‘Still, I suppose they have to make sure.’

He nodded. ‘And we do occasionally get some weird ones. Once we had what looked like a severed hand in a lady’s glove brought in. Someone found it when they were cleaning out their
gutters.’

‘God! How did that get there?’

He laughed. ‘Poor old Ed had a bit of time with that one. For a while he was convinced it was real, but then when he probed about a bit more, he found it was just chicken bones and
mincemeat stuffed into the glove.’

‘Bloody hell.’

‘Someone’s idea of a joke, I suppose.’

‘Pretty sick joke,’ I said.

‘Pretty sick people about, Michelle.’

We were in the office drinking coffee. When he had finished his, he put his mug down and said, ‘A while ago, we had a real foot brought in here.’

‘Just a foot?’ I asked incredulously.

A nod. ‘In a trainer, it was. Rotted and all. They discovered it on the riverbank, near an old chapel.’

‘Whose was it?’

With a shrug, he said, ‘Dunno. I don’t think they ever found out.’

My head was filled with some of the things I had read about in my extensive library of true crime. ‘But there was a big investigation?’

‘That was the funny thing,’ he said. ‘They brought it into the mortuary one Saturday night, then left it here for a couple of days. No fuss, no nationwide alert. Someone came
in on the Monday and took it away. No fuss, no bother.’

‘Really?’

‘Nothing. We were expecting something along the lines of an all-points bulletin regarding blokes with only one foot, or a massive manhunt for a loony with a machete and a foot fetish, but
it all stayed silent. It was some weeks later that we found out what the police reckon had happened.’

‘Which was?’

‘It belonged to a tramp who fell in the Severn up Worcester way, they reckon. The body got caught up in some reeds, decomposed and eventually the current took his foot off, carrying it
down here. They already had a good idea that that was where it came from, so they weren’t too fussed.’

‘And they didn’t bother to tell you?’

He shrugged. ‘You’ll soon learn that we’re regarded as the lowest in the food chain, Michelle. We’re the bottom-feeders, the ones who do the dirty jobs for peanuts, and
know fuck-all about anything. No one thinks they need to tell us anything, and the only time we get any feedback is when someone wants to bollock us.’

He said this in a tone of resigned cheeriness, but I could hear the bitterness underlying the words.

SIX

It was the following week, the weather surprisingly warm for April, that Barry Patterson came into my life and, like most of the men I have known, he proved to be a problem. He
wasn’t just any man, though. Far from it. Mr Barry Patterson was forty stone and he made his first appearance on a Friday.

When the doorbell rings, you never know what you’re going to discover and, in this case, when Graham opened the door, what greeted him were four huge undertakers, all sweating and cursing.
They had between them a loose stretcher placed on a collapsible gurney; as it was pushed in, there was an ominous whining from it, as if the whole mechanism was under an intolerable strain and
liable to collapse at any moment. On it was a gigantic mound underneath a huge cover that could have been three bodies snuggled together; to cap it all, the cover seemed to be struggling to cope
with its contents. There were the usual greetings and then the undertakers took this monstrosity into the body store.

I was wondering what was going on, but Clive and Graham both knew and it brought them nothing but depression. I was desperate to find out more, but no one said a word as they manhandled this
mound, with a lot of struggling and no little swearing, onto our hydraulic trolley which then proceeded to collapse to its lowest point, as if giving up all hope. The cover was removed, and in
front of us lay the most obese person I have ever seen in my life. The undertakers began to tell us the whole story.

Mr Patterson had been complaining of shortness of breath (not surprising, weighing that much) and a doctor had been called but, unfortunately, he had died before the doctor arrived. The family
had rung for an ambulance but the ambulance crew did not have the equipment to cope with the removal of such a large human being. The Coroner’s officer had then been contacted, who had called
in some undertakers for the removal of the body, but not even two seventeen-stone men with hands like shovels and two assistants who were not much smaller could move him. The only solution was to
call on the fire brigade. Mr Barry Patterson had only been removed from his last resting place with the help of several burly firemen and a heavyweight hoist. After that, it took six men to lift
him onto the stretcher using various straps and lifting equipment. I often wonder if the family are present when such a body is being removed from a house; do they feel any embarrassment at the
events unfolding before them?

The undertakers left the mortuary and I began to discover all the problems that such people bring. Our only decent trolley had a forty-stone body on it, but it was designed to take no more than
thirty-five stone, and had therefore seized up under the weight. Moreover, the mortuary has enough fridge space for twenty-eight bodies, including four larger patients. A larger patient in the days
when the mortuary was designed was probably about twenty-five stone maximum. There was absolutely no way that Mr Patterson was going to allow himself to be refrigerated and so he was going to have
to stay on our trolley at room temperature until a post-mortem was ordered by the Coroner. As it was Friday afternoon, the earliest that that was going to happen was Monday. Since, if a body is not
cooled, it starts to rot, this was what was going to happen to Mr Patterson. A couple of days would not make a lot of difference, but any longer and Clive explained that he would start to become a
health hazard, especially given the fact that it had just turned unseasonably warm.

Clive rang the Coroner’s office and got through to Neville Stubbs who was dealing with this case. I didn’t know it then but this was not good news; I couldn’t understand why
Clive had such a pained expression on his face as he was explaining the situation. It turns out that Neville is a pleasant man, but not the sharpest tool in the box; he has a habit of typing
post-mortem requests for email (badly) and then forgetting to press the send button, or even sending them to some random person in the histology laboratory. Now that we know each other, though, he
is always pleased to hear from me, but I usually have to listen to a joke or two before I get to explain why I have rung.

Clive explained the situation to him and asked for the request for post-mortem by the end of the day so we could get this man done and dusted first thing Monday, and then back to the funeral
parlour as soon as possible. Neville said he would get on the case and both Clive and Graham expressed some relief as the phone went down. This was only the start, though, as Clive went on to
explain, because the next problem would be the autopsy – how the hell were we going to get the body on the post-mortem table?

As we locked up the mortuary that evening, I can’t say that any of us was filled with joy, but, as Clive said, at least we had done as much as we could for the time being; I wasn’t
looking forward to Monday morning, though.

After finishing with Mr P on Friday evening, I went straight home, threw some clothes in a bag, grabbed some money, put the dogs on the leads and then the three of us walked
the two and a half miles to my parents’ house; by six thirty that evening I was raiding Dad’s wine cabinet and informing them both that we were all staying the weekend and that Luke
would be joining us as well a bit later.

What had stuck in my mind the most from the first couple of weeks in the mortuary was the huge confidentiality thing that went with working for the hospital. It was massive and really important
to the Trust, as I knew from my previous job, but it seemed more real now and I felt protective of the patients in the mortuary, almost as if they demanded it now that they were deceased. It was a
matter of respect. I wasn’t going to gossip about them; that was not my style, and I had not heard any of my colleagues do this. The dead had little left except dignity and some things needed
to be left within the mortuary.

Another thing I had realized was that Luke was not fazed by what I had chosen to do with my life. I had fully explained my job role to him, expecting some sort of reaction – OK, to be
honest, expecting him to look at me like I had two heads – but no, nothing apart from support. He did not pry, question or treat me any differently from the way he had before. Luke has a job
as an engineer, requiring a lot of concentration, time and effort. We have been together a year or so, and I have yet to see him get stressed about anything professionally or personally (apart from
bad drivers, that is). He just has this amazing ability to leave work at work and very rarely discusses it.

As the evening drew to a close, though, Mr Patterson started to enter my thoughts and I couldn’t help worrying about what I was going to walk into on the following Monday morning.

SEVEN

When I arrived in the gloom of an early spring morning after the weekend, if I hadn’t already had Mr Patterson on my mind the faint smell that came to me as soon as the
door was opened would have reminded me swiftly. It was still relatively new to me in those days, but we had already had a body through the mortuary that was starting to go off, so it wasn’t
completely unknown to me. It was still faint, but it is like nothing else on earth and, no matter how many times you breathe it in, you don’t ever get used to it. I murmured a few silent
swear words and went quickly into the office where Clive and Graham were already sitting, the door shut tight in a fruitless attempt to keep out Mr Patterson. Graham made me some instant coffee and
we talked about the task ahead. Clive had still not resolved the problem of transferring him on to the PM table and, anyway, the atmosphere made it difficult to think of anything much.

The time passed slowly with the usual routine of paperwork and cleaning, but the PM request had still not arrived in Clive’s inbox by the end of the day. What the hell was Neville playing
at? He’d promised us faithfully to get the request through as soon as he could. Mr Patterson on the surface appeared to be OK, considering; going a bit green and marbled over his stomach and
across his shoulders, but not yet too slimy or unpleasant to look at. A bit of blistering on his upper thighs, but again, that could be sorted, so I was told.

Tuesday came and, switching on the computer, Clive had still not received the PM request. He could not ring Neville as he would not be in till nine, but we had two old ladies that required
autopsies so we at least had something to be getting on with, although not even Ed Burberry singing along to John Denver could distract from the smell that was becoming distinctly stronger.

During all this time, Clive was constantly pondering the way we were going to get Mr Patterson onto the dissection table. We were supposedly restricted by manual handling guidelines from moving
Mr Patterson without proper equipment, but the hoist we had only lifted a maximum of twenty stone, so he reckoned that the manual handling guidelines might have to go out the window in this case
and he would therefore just have to hope and pray that nobody got injured doing it. He wasn’t very happy about this but, as he pointed out, since there had been no PM request, there was no
problem yet.

Unbelievably, another day went by and there was still nothing from the Coroner’s office. Clive spoke to Neville on several occasions and was starting to get a little agitated, but Neville
was having trouble getting hold of Mr Patterson’s GP and needed more medical history before he could book it. Mr P still lay in the body store, on the collapsed trolley. He was becoming more
and more offensive; the green colouring was working its way up his chest and he was making his presence known throughout the whole department. People were starting to pass comments, as if we were
the ones making the stink. We needed this post-mortem done and out of the way as soon as possible. I had discovered that he had one advantage, though: after an hour or so in the mortuary, you
don’t notice the smell because your nose just gives up the struggle. But we were now having to put families off coming to see their deceased relatives because the odour was seeping through
into the viewing area and I could hear Clive lie to them on the phone about how we were fully booked with the police over the viewing times; and to top it all, there was still no news from
Neville.

And then, like a miracle, sitting in Clive’s inbox the next morning was the PM request for Mr P. One problem down, but another one to be resolved. We needed to get Mr P
on the table. The hydraulics on the trolley refused to work under the strain of the weight, so Mr P was at a level beneath the dissection table and we couldn’t slide him directly on to it. We
needed manpower so Graham rang the porters’ lodge and asked them to send two burly porters down to the mortuary. Within ten minutes, they arrived. They were astounded by what they saw and
smelled, but they got to work straight away. It took all five of us to do it, but we managed to raise the trolley by sheer force, and quickly pulled Mr P onto the table.

All of which effort only meant another problem: he was on the table, but now we had to get him undressed. Graham was not going to be able to carefully unbutton his clothes, fold them nicely and
place them in a bag. They were going to have to be cut up the middle and pulled away (complete with skin and slime) as Clive and I rocked Mr P from side to side on the table; that operation alone
left us feeling completely exhausted.