Down Among the Dead Men: A Year in the Life of a Mortuary Technician

by Michelle Williams

  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.’

  Bill Baxford was duly promised that we would be able to do an identification of the motorcyclist for his family that day. It was booked for two thirty in the afternoon, which meant that we had approximately four hours to try to create the effect that his head had not left his body. We did not know whether his family had even been told of the horrific injuries. All we knew was that this man had been travelling at perhaps seventy miles an hour down a narrow country lane in the west of the county when he had lost control. His front wheel had then clipped a fallen tree by the side of the road; he had been catapulted over the handlebars into a field. Unfortunately, and with the cruelly perfect aim of fate, he had landed with his outstretched neck on the large circular blade of an old farrow abandoned among some stinging nettles, thus severing his head.

  The pathologist on for today, Dr Peter Gillard, arrived. Between them, he and Ed do most of our post-mortems. A strange little man but, honestly, I say ‘strange’ with affection. He was quite short, quiet, but deep down there lurked a wicked sense of humour. Graham and Clive had told me, and I had seen for myself, that he was also a complete pain in the behind because, they said, he lacked confidence and would often ask the technicians for advice. That said, he was not really any trouble – by which I mean in the sense that he was undemanding, to a degree unconcerned, and was happy to be directed. This may seem an unfair thing to say about a consultant pathologist but, believe me, I had very quickly discovered that some could be completely unreasonable and unmanageable with no respect for the mortuary technicians, whom they just saw as androids that can stand and eviscerate bodies all day long. At least Peter Gillard wasn’t like that.

  He looked at the headless corpse on the dissecting table. Clive had told me that his usual first question before he starts is, ‘Have you got a cause of death yet?’, but on seeing this case, all he said with a wince was, ‘Oh dear.’ He checked that the bodies we had got out were the correct ones and asked Clive to call him when we were ready. As I was preparing myself to start the evisceration, I began to wonder how we could hope to make any difference to this man. I stood over the body and placed his head, still in the helmet, to one side. Clive and Graham were at work on their bodies, and the radio was playing some Michael Jackson.

  As I picked up my post-mortem knife it occurred it me that it wouldn’t be very often that I would have to cut open a headless body. I felt uncomfortable, but I reckoned that I was experienced enough by now to put this to one side and prepare myself to dive straight in, so that within fifteen minutes the torso in front of me would be completely empty, with its contents in a stainless steel bowl. The more I studied the body, though, the more sick I felt; it just didn’t feel right. Despite this, I placed my blade between the clavicles and began to cut down towards the pubis. Still feeling nauseous, I started to retract the skin away from the ribcage and removed the sternum exposing the organs. Usually you would see some sign of disease, or evidence that disease was hiding somewhere behind something. Here, there was nothing apart from the fact that there were obvious rib fractures and subsequent crush injuries to the chest. It seemed a waste of a life. I continued to eviscerate and it was an easy thing to do; no tongue to remove for a start. This can always be a bit tricky as you have to do it blind without putting the point of the blade through the neck, chin or lips and causing obvious cuts to the face. Anyway, there was certainly no chance of that happening here.

  What happened after this was even weirder. After the evisceration of the torso, I needed to remove the brain. While Graham held the head on the table, I pulled the helmet off and, as I did it, I saw that even he found the whole thing a bit uncomfortable. He then had to continue holding it while I first retracted the scalp, then removed the top of the skull with the bone saw and took out the brain. Not a word was spoken between us while this was taking place, but the look on his face became more and more pained.

  During the post-mortem, I was quietly hoping that Dr Gillard would find a cause of death that was other than the obvious. I wondered if maybe this guy had had a massive heart attack which had caused him to come off his bike, but no such luck; it appeared that this was just a horrendous accident.

  With the PM over, Clive had decided that he was going to attempt to stitch the head back on to the body. He told me that he thought it best just to go for it and, after half an hour of stitching, the head was indeed reattached to the body, the shroud covered the stitching, so that the poor motorcyclist looked very peaceful as he lay in the viewing chapel. We all felt a huge sense of relief and also one of achievement. Although I could not expunge the facts of what had happened and the thought that the family would feel a sense of loss for the rest of their lives, we had managed to create an aura of unharmed peacefulness about him and hoped that therefore we would not add to the discomfort his family would be experiencing when they came to identify his body.

  Bill arrived ten minutes before the family and
we both stood over the motorcyclist in the chapel of rest. Bill is a tall, thickset man with a very loud voice. He is the lead of the three Coroner’s officers in the county and is very good at his job. Being ex-police force, he is an excellent judge of character and knows how to handle people. I stayed while the family arrived, and as far as identifications go, this went much better than I had expected. Of course the family were gutted, but because of the work on reconstruction that Clive had put in, we had achieved our goal. Although most of the time this goes unnoticed by the family (as my previous weekend had proved) it’s not always about the thank-yous, but about knowing we do our job well.

  On days like this, there is little room for humour. Graham had told me that when Peter Gillard first came to work in the mortuary, he had been so nervous and flustered that he had put a blue plastic overshoe – designed to be used when someone in normal shoes enters the PM room – on his head instead of the normal disposable theatre cap. He’d appeared in the dissection room looking like a member of the Thunderbirds family and no one had had the heart to tell him. Maddie came to the PM door, but had to turn around and walk away as soon as she saw this, as she could not hold back her laughter . . . Worse than that, for the rest of the day he had a red line running across his forehead where the elastic had bitten in. In honour of this, Peter Gillard will occasionally put one on again, just for a joke, but not today. Today was a day only for due respect and the right headgear.

  SIXTEEN

  When stuff goes wrong in the mortuary, it goes seriously wrong. For instance, a few weeks later, in among the masses we had two bodies with the same surname. Both were female, both were called Jones and both were for burial. The first Mrs Jones was going back to her native Wales, and the second Mrs Jones was staying in Gloucestershire where she had lived all her life. After four months of constant training from Clive, in which he had repeated himself over and over, I thought I had finally got it into my head: you check, check and then you check a third time to make sure that you are releasing the right body; you check not only the name but the date of birth and the address as well. It was one of his recurring themes.

  You’d think that anyone with that nagging voice in their ears would be incapable of any mistakes, but you’d be wrong. The local Mrs Jones had already been released when the funeral director arrived to take the second; as they had come from Wales, they had already had quite a drive and they still had two hours’ return journey to come. I happened to be the one releasing the body, because Clive was busy booking in PMs for the next day and Graham was dealing with a viewing. I pulled Mrs Jones out of the fridge and received the paperwork the undertakers had brought with them. As per instructions, I checked this with the identification tag on the wrist, and was horrified to see there the address of a local Gloucestershire village. It was with a sinking feeling that I turned to the tag on the foot only to discover that it, too, bore the Gloucestershire address. It could only mean that the Welsh Mrs Jones was with the wrong funeral director.

  This was a disaster, one that could prove very embarrassing. I knew that the family of the Gloucestershire Mrs Jones were due to go to the funeral directors that afternoon for a viewing, to say their last goodbyes. They were going to walk into a viewing room, probably feeling emotional, and when they looked into the coffin, they would be looking at a Mrs Jones who had no resemblance to their family member; then, quite rightly, they would want answers as to how it had happened. If they made a complaint, there would be a Trust inquiry, perhaps disciplinary action. What do you say to people? This makes us look like a shambles, a complete cowboy set-up. I could see that the Welsh funeral directors were none too impressed. I knew that I hadn’t released the wrong body, but that didn’t make me any less worried.

  I called out to Clive, who came at once. When I explained what had happened, he frowned and sighed, but remained calm. He asked the Welsh undertakers to wait in the office and told me to make them some coffee, then at once he rang the local funeral directors who, luckily, were only a five-minute drive up the road; even more luckily, the family had yet to arrive and no one knew of the mistake.

  Within an hour, the two Mrs Joneses had been returned to the appropriate funeral directors and were on their way to the right funeral homes. It turned out that it was Graham who had made the mistake. Clive didn’t go mad, but he did make it quite clear that this was unacceptable. I could see that Graham was very upset and contrite as Clive stressed once more that it didn’t matter how many years you did the job, you always checked, checked and then checked again.

  SEVENTEEN

  The one thing that confirmed I really was part of the team, now that I was regularly doing viewings, eviscerations and reconstructions, was when Clive announced that we were going to have a works outing on the Friday evening. I imagined he was talking about a large do, perhaps including the pathologists and even the Coroner’s officers and the rest of the histology staff from upstairs in the lab, which would give me a chance to meet a few more people and maybe sneak off with Maddie mid-evening, but it turned out that it meant just the three of us, not even wives and boyfriends. As Graham pointed out, ‘We’re the department, no one else really.’ He grinned wickedly. ‘Three morticians on the town; hope you can hold your ale, Michelle.’

  We finished work at four o’clock on the Friday and headed for our first stop, the local watering hole – the one that is in every town and looks the same wherever you are, the local cheap-but-cheerful chain pub with no character and, more importantly, no characters. It had the great advantage, though, of being only a stone’s throw from the hospital. It was definitely not my normal sort of a place but it served to get the evening off to a start and, because of happy hour, the beer tokens went twice as far when it came to getting a round in – strong lager, or as he called it ‘wife-beater’ (due to the younger generation not being able to handle it), for Clive, bitter for Graham and (I figured I might as well go for it) vodka for me.

  At about six o’clock, Clive asked, ‘Right, shall we move on?’ Graham gave me a questioning look and I realized that it was to be my decision where to go next. Luckily, what with Dad having been a publican in the area for over thirteen years, I knew where most of the pubs were and which were closest, but I had to be personally careful. The last thing I wanted was to go into a pub with a landlord or landlady I knew well while I was out with two men a lot older than me and, at the same time, I wanted to stay away from the town centre. I was fond of both of these guys, but I still had some street cred to hold on to and did not want to spend the evening explaining myself and my newish job to people I only see when I’m out on the town. We moved on to a few pubs in the opposite direction of town, and both Clive and Graham seemed happy.

  By nine o’clock we had been to four further watering holes and were slowly working our way up the Bath Road. When it came to the curry house, though, I had no choice. The Taj Mahal, an Indian restaurant that Clive and Graham both vowed was the ‘best bloody curry house in the Cotswolds’, was the only possibility. We were all fairly merry by then so I was not bothered where we ate, or even if we ate at all, and Clive, who I had discovered had had an interesting life, was about to take centre stage and tell some fantastic stories about it.

  Over our curry I learned just how fascinating life – or, to be more accurate, death – could be, and how the Coroner’s officers weren’t always as helpful as they are now.

  ‘John Parker was the best,’ said Clive, while loading a poppadom with mind-blowing chutney. ‘He was Bill Baxford’s predecessor. Completely and utterly useless, wasn’t he, Graham?’

  Graham, who was concentrating on rolling a cigarette, raised his eyebrows and answered in his deep burr, ‘He was that.’

  ‘Have I told you about the jogger who got struck by lightning, Mish?’ Four months in and Clive was now shortening my name.

  I shook my head and his face lit up. ‘It was some fitness fanatic who used to go jogging every night and every morning, no matter what the weather was. One night he go
es off as usual, but this time in a thunderstorm, and is found an hour later in the gutter by a passing motorist. Without even going out to look at the scene or the body, John Parker, the so-called Coroner’s officer, sends us the PM request with the last line suggesting that he might have been struck by lightning.’

  ‘Was he?’ I asked.

  Graham laughed; he had a deep, gurgling laugh, one that brought on his smoker’s cough if it went on too long. Clive shook his head. ‘I examined the body carefully and there were no burn marks anywhere, no entry or exit wound as you would expect,’ – Would you? was my initial reaction to this; I had a lot to learn still – ‘but there was a curious linear pattern on the back of his vest and an octagonal shape punched out on the middle of his back, about an inch and a half across.’

  My face must have said it all – I didn’t understand – at which Graham laughed again and said excitedly, ‘Listen to this,’ while pointing to Clive.

  Clive went on, ‘Stupid sod not only used to jog,’ – clearly something which Clive thought was a complete waste of time – ‘but every few hundred yards he’d drop to the ground and do press-ups. The night he died, he decided to do this on an unlit road in the driving rain, and some motorist ran him over. Probably thought he hit a deer or something. The octagonal mark was from the sump plug of the car.’ He sighed happily. ‘I was even able to tell Parker that it had been a Land Rover that did it. They’re the only cars that have that shape of sump plug.’

  I sat in awe.

  The food arrived, but that wasn’t going to stop Clive now that he was well and truly ‘lagered’, plus, there was now a curry in front of him. Then Graham leaned across the table to him and said, ‘Tell Michelle about Michael Walters.’ Clive’s face exploded with delight, and for a minute I thought I might have been in danger of getting covered in the contents of his mouth. ‘God, yes! I’d forgotten about him.’ I didn’t need to encourage him to tell me more. ‘Michael Walters was a head case, complete and utter. Lived with his parents, but kept himself to himself in his room when he wasn’t in the local funny farm. One evening Ma and Pa returned home with a fish and chip supper. They settled down in the kitchen, to tuck in. The kitchen was directly below the bathroom which was next to Michael’s room upstairs; they heard the bath running, so decided not to bother him but were content he was home and safe.