Down Among the Dead Men (8 page)

I had heard Clive and Graham mention forensic post-mortems before but didn’t really understand what they were. When I asked, Clive said, matter of factly, ‘You know, suspicious
deaths, murders, that kind of thing.’

‘Murders?’ I began to panic.

Clive smiled. ‘Every now and again, Michelle, every now and again.’

FOURTEEN

The next week flew by, being only four days, but without a lot of PM work – although we had had several deaths through the doors, most of them had been expected and did
not require autopsy – so we spent much of the week cleaning and I got to know Graham a lot better. Like Clive, he had also worked for the hospital for a long time; first as a porter, and then
he’d stumbled across the job in the mortuary, initially helping Clive out when he needed it, then ending up as a permanent fixture. He also loved his job, but was not interested in furthering
his career. Now, what mortuary technicians do is a recognized profession and you are able to sit exams which, once you have passed them, will allow you to climb the ladder in the technician world.
It will also allow you to work with national disasters if you choose; Clive had taken these exams, but all Graham wanted out of life was to do his job to the best of his ability, go home in the
evening, enjoy his whisky without being disturbed, and collect his wages at the end of the month.

Graham also had a habit of sometimes using the wrong words. He would say ‘defiantly’ when he meant ‘definitely’, and ‘poignant’ when he meant
‘pertinent’, both of which I could understand, but not when he swapped ‘skellington’ for ‘skeleton’. Still, it just made him all the more human as far as I was
concerned.

He was divorced, and had been for a long time. He told me about the many times he had had to climb out of the window at the nurses’ residence at some silly time in the morning, because the
Sister was doing the rounds and he had been spending the evening with whichever nurse he was seeing at the time. It appeared that he had had liaisons with a large number of nurses – certainly
lots of them spoke to him when we were out having a cigarette. He came across as a simple man, uncomplicated, who said exactly what he thought and knew what he liked and what he didn’t like,
and nothing was ever going to change that. He would have his breakfast at the same time every morning – two rashers of bacon, fried eggs and toast (always the same) – and revelled in
talking about what he was having for tea each evening, proud of the fact that he cooked it himself. Every morning Clive and I would have a running commentary on how good it had been and how he had
cooked it. I found this both boring and intriguing: boring because I know how to cook, but intriguing because of the passion he displayed when telling me about it and the type of food he ate. No
animal organ was safe from the frying pan in Graham’s kitchen. You name it, he had tried it, right down to sheep brains, which are very nice (or so he assured me). He offered to get me some
next time he went to see his old mates at the abattoir, but I refused politely.

Graham also told me about his love of shooting, and I tried my best not to look shocked. I don’t think I did this very well, though.

‘I never shoot anything I don’t eat,’ he said quickly when he saw the reaction on my face. ‘Apart from when the farmer asks me to sort out any “mixies” I see
when I walk his land; I don’t eat those buggers.’ I knew from this he was talking about rabbits with myxomatosis. ‘I just put the poor bleeders out of their misery; the foxes have
those.’

I warmed to Graham; not because I agreed with some of the stuff he enjoyed doing – I didn’t at all – but because he was so straightforward and you knew where you stood with
him. He also taught me a lot. Clive was a knowledgeable man, but his patience with me could be pushed sometimes. I am a very inquisitive person and have an annoying tendency to ask
‘Why?’ a lot. I like to have things explained to me, reasons given and what the end result is expected to be. I also like to know why I am asked to do something, but I am quite aware
that this can really annoy people; I know this because people like me can annoy
me
! Graham, though, was always ready and willing to give me an answer or a reason. He was never flustered or
agitated, but always gave a reply that was straight to the point, given in the language we both spoke, and without trying to impress or baffle me with long medical words that he knew I
wouldn’t understand. We worked well together and appeared to complement each other, and I could see that Graham was like me in that he wanted to get the job done. Whatever task was given to
him, he would jump on board.

By Friday I felt as though I was definitely part of the team and had been accepted. We started to relax fully with each other. And I loved the fact that the atmosphere was nothing like I
imagined it would be. There was a strong sense of companionship, lots of helping each other out, lunches together in the office, jokes and gossip shared and plenty of laughing and high spirits.
Working in a mortuary can be unpleasant; the sights that are brought through the doors are sometimes enough to make you want to turn around, walk out and never return. An attitude of extreme
levelheadedness is important, and the attitude that Graham and Clive had was healthy as far as I was concerned. Although dealing with the deceased every day, they had never forgotten the fact that
they were very much alive and lived each day to the full. The proper respect for the bereaved family and the dead was always there, but sometimes, given the normal everyday conversations and
laughter that would come from the office over coffee, you would never have believed that we were completely surrounded by the dead and all their finery.

So, this week had been my first week on call, and the working week evenings had gone by without an emergency. I had actually turned my mobile phone on and off a few times and
asked Luke to ring it to make sure it was working properly, which of course it was. From the stories relayed by Clive and Graham, I had thought it was going to be non-stop. This was about to change
when Saturday morning arrived, however. The first phone call came around eight in the morning. It was the A&E department to say they had an elderly gentleman who had died in the ambulance on
the way to be admitted. OK, I thought to myself, that is not a problem.

‘The trouble is,’ said the nurse on the end of the phone, ‘the family are coming down from Leeds.’

‘That’s fine,’ I replied. ‘What time are they going to be here?’

‘Could be any time. He was pronounced dead an hour and a half ago, we thought they would prefer to see him here, but they haven’t yet arrived and we can’t get hold of them to
see how far away they are.’

I knew that this gentleman would probably have been transferred to the mortuary by now. I finished my phone call, left Luke and the dogs in bed and made my way to the mortuary at eight
forty-five.

As I arrived, the porters were just bringing the patient over from A&E. I admitted him to our department and began making him presentable for his family. All the tricks Clive had showed me
worked to perfection, and by nine thirty Mr Jenner was in the chapel, laid out in the proper manner and awaiting his visitors.

By eleven o’clock there was still no sign of his family. I had rung A&E a couple of times, but they had heard nothing. I had told pathology reception, which was manned until twelve on
a Saturday, but they had had nobody wandering around looking lost.

In the time I had already waited, I had admitted a couple of other patients that had come in overnight, chatted with the porters for twenty minutes, drunk a fair few cups of coffee, run barefoot
through the biscuit tin and read the local and national news on the internet. I then spent another fifteen minutes chatting to Gramp on my mobile about random stuff, but I could tell he was getting
ready to go out and didn’t want to miss his bus, bless him. Luke had rung twice to see how long I was going to be, but I had told him to forget our plans for the day.

At twelve thirty, and still with no sign of Mr Jenner’s family, I decided I would have to ring Clive and take his advice on what to do. I had really hoped I could do this myself, if only
to give him a break from the place, but needs must.

‘What do you mean, you’re still there?!’ was Clive’s response. ‘Michelle, put the body away and go home! If we sat waiting for every family that
might
want
to come and visit a relative, we would have to have camp beds installed.’ I felt about an inch tall, my do-gooding had done no good at all for my staff relations. ‘You should always try
to get a definite time and speak to the relatives direct. This is what happens when the ward arrange things for the morticians, our time gets wasted. I want you out of that mortuary within half an
hour, Michelle. That’s an order.’

I finished my phone call and put Mr Jenner away in the body store. Luke said he would be outside at quarter past one to collect me. As we pulled up outside my house, I could hear Harvey and
Oscar barking as they recognized Luke’s car. Just as I placed the key in the front door, my mobile rang. The family had arrived. So back to the hospital for the viewing that was supposed to
have been hours ago. I met the family and they could not apologize enough.

So, after the formalities, Mr Jenner was met by his family at long last. I must have been able to hide my frustration, as I don’t think they noticed it. I explained to them, in a manner
that I hoped was acceptable, that we really needed direct contact with them as we are not manned 24/7, and they apologized again. I showed them into the viewing room and left them to it, pointing
out how to contact me if they needed me. There were four of them and they were there for each other, so my presence, I felt, would only get in the way.

I had told them how long I had waited for them, and thought this would mean they would take into consideration my time. How dare I be so selfish? Three hours later they were still with me. Five
o’clock came and I had spent all day Saturday in the mortuary.

I have to admit I was annoyed. Not physically annoyed, but inside annoyed. That helpless feeling you have when you know you should not be angry because you have to consider how other people are
feeling or accept them for what they are, and that it is not your place to say anything. But annoyed because you have not been considered in the whole picture, you are there and that is that.
Apologies begin to mean nothing at that point and frustration takes over.

I finally left the mortuary at seven that evening. I never knew how much I enjoyed my weekends until they had been taken away from me.

Once again, Luke collected me from the hospital and I got home and collapsed on the sofa. My mobile, I wanted to throw in the bin. Being on call meant that when I relaxed a bit at home, I had to
limit how much I drank. OK, I don’t drive, but I still have to be presentable and, if the evening needed it, attend for a forensic post-mortem should someone be so unlucky as to be murdered
or fall foul of an ugly death.

The phone remained silent for the rest of the evening, but that did not diminish my anxiety.

FIFTEEN

As I entered the mortuary through the double red doors, I heard a voice say in an astounded manner, ‘Bloody hell.’ Being a nosy person, I could not resist going at
once to see what had provoked such a reaction, but in the back of my mind I was thinking, ‘What now?’ after the weekend I had just had. As I entered the body store, Clive and Graham
were standing on either side of a trolley, looking at each other. Without a word more being spoken, I looked down and saw the usual white body bag, partially opened, and without even realizing it
spoke the same words.

What lay in front of us was a headless body; fully clothed, but headless. Curiosity got the better of me and I just had to pull back the top of the body bag to see what other injuries this poor
individual had sustained. Resting between his knees lay his motorbike helmet, so it was a road traffic accident, which gave me a little clue as to what had occurred to him.

‘Where’s his head?’ I asked, because it wasn’t with the rest of him.

What happened next, though, was enough to turn the hardest technician’s stomach. Clive picked up the helmet with his gloved hands and said in a voice of perfect seriousness, ‘He had
it gift-wrapped.’ Hanging from the bottom of it were ragged tatters of flesh and what appeared to be cervical vertebrae . . . I looked into the visor and found myself fixated by the face
behind it. Hardly a mark could be seen on the features, and his eyes were closed so that he actually looked quite peaceful.

Just then, the phone in the office began to ring. It was Bill Baxford from the Coroner’s office. ‘That road traffic you had in overnight. Are we able to do an identification on him
after the post-mortem?’

I knew enough to appreciate that this is important. All victims of unnatural death have to be identified by law and, obviously, this is usually done through visual identification by the next of
kin, but clearly in some cases this is not possible; no relative would want to see the head of their nearest and dearest a few feet away from the rest of the body, after all. In such cases,
it’s usually done by dental records; as a last resort, DNA is used. Both of these are expensive and time-consuming, and any sensible Coroner’s officer wants to do what’s easiest
and cheapest. Clive and Graham were in the body store, dealing with the body, so I said, ‘Can I ring you back?’

We would have to think seriously about this. From what I had seen of his face, he was certainly viewable, but the small fact remained that his head was at this moment resting between his legs on
a body tray in the fridge. I wasn’t experienced enough to be sure that we could reconstruct him well enough to allow the next of kin to see him. But I wanted so much to do it – and knew
that Clive and Graham would want to do it as well – not so much for our satisfaction, but for his family.

I went back to the body store and told Clive what Bill had asked. I had expected him to be hesitant but he said at once, ‘No problem, Michelle. We’ll have this poor chap looking as
good as new. No one will ever guess what’s happened to him, not from looking at him.’