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

by Michelle Williams

  ‘So, there they are, about to have a right old nosh up, when Mr Walters senior notices that there’s some tomato sauce on his plate when he sat down at the table after making a brew, which is not what he asked to be put on his plate by Mrs Walters; he’d opted for HP. He’s about to ask his wife what she thinks she’s playing at when he just happens to look up to the ceiling to see blood dripping off the light fitting.’

  Graham chortled at my expression. Clive was getting into his stride. ‘They found their son in the bath, with the walls, floor and ceiling drenched in blood. He had been stabbed seventy-three times and hit on the head with a hammer three times.’

  I winced. ‘Seventy-three times! Who did it? His girlfriend? Boyfriend?’

  Clive grinned his usual wicked grin. ‘The house was completely secure, and none of the neighbours reported seeing anyone around the house while the Walters were out; also, because of his mental problems, as far as his parents knew there was no significant other.’

  ‘Then how . . .?’

  Graham was almost wetting himself, because he knew what was coming. Clive, being Clive, tucked into some lamb vindaloo, leaving me waiting and itching to hear the rest of the story. At last he found time for me. ‘John Parker decided that since there was no evidence of a third party, it didn’t need a forensic PM and faxed through the details and request, exactly as if Michael Walters had keeled over after chest pains. Like this was an everyday post-mortem request, with no suspicious circumstances! Idiot.’

  ‘The pathologist on for that day was Martin Apse – nice bloke, wasn’t he, Graham? Wouldn’t normally say boo to a goose, but he really had the heebie-jeebies when he read that particular E60 – the request from the Coroner’s office for a post-mortem to be done. I thought he was going to faint. He started to shake and kept muttering, “I don’t believe it,” to himself He went up to his office and twenty minutes later, John Parker phoned through to say that it was going to have a forensic PM after all.’

  ‘And?’

  This time Clive needed a long drink, followed by calling for a refill before he could continue. I could have collapsed with the anticipation. ‘The forensic pathologist took eight hours to determine that each and every wound – including the hammer blows – could (and he would only say “could”) have been self-inflicted.’

  ‘You are joking ,’ I decided at once, but Graham rushed to confirm what Clive had said.

  ‘He’s not. The poor bugger did it to himself. Took slices of flesh off his own legs and everything. I never saw such a mess of a body, and to do it to yourself, well, unbelievable.’ With that, they both tucked into their curries as though they had just told me a fairy story, and I contemplated that, with time, I was also going to become this blasé about my job.

  Another half hour went by with talk about the mortuary, and at that point I really had started to have enough of work. Yes, I loved my job but, as fascinating as I found Clive’s reminiscing, I am a breathing human being, and enough was enough for one week. I wanted now to forget death for the weekend and get back to the living. While I had nipped to the Ladies, I secretly texted Luke to meet me at eleven and, as luck would have it, as I placed my cutlery on my empty plate, a familiar face entered the curry house and I introduced Luke to Clive and Graham. Clive insisted that Luke stay and have a drink before we left, and he had to listen to ‘how well’ I was doing and what an asset to the team I was.

  Although it felt a bit like parents’ evening at school, deep down I was so chuffed I had been accepted by two people who had been doing an exclusive job for so long and who obviously had faith in me, let alone allow me into their world.

  EIGHTEEN

  Until I started this job, I’d never really thought very deeply about suicide and, if the subject did come up during conversation in the pub, I suppose I’d thought that people usually offed themselves by taking an overdose of pills, hanging themselves, or jumping in front of trains. I hadn’t been in the job long before I found out that I had been very, very wrong.

  What first made me realize just how wrong I had been was when Dr Gerald Beaumont was brought into the mortuary. We had no warning from the Coroner’s office that he was going to arrive, so only had the undertakers’ word to go on concerning what had happened. Dr Beaumont was a successful anaesthetist who lived in a big house with plenty of land in the country. He must have earned pots of money from private practice and ought to have been as happy as Larry, but he wasn’t. He had made a mistake, resulting in the death of a patient. Referral to the General Medical Council was pending, which apparently is very bad. ‘Basically, as far as doctors are concerned, it’s pretty much “end of’,’ Clive said.

  Dr Beaumont had come home early that morning, leaving the hospital without saying anything. He had got into his Land Rover, then driven out to a remote pasture on which grew an old oak. He had taken a tow rope, tied it to the tree, then fed it through the back of the Land Rover. He had got back in, tied the other end around his neck and driven off as hard as he could.

  When we opened the white body bag, we were relieved to see that his head had stayed on, but it had been a close call. Poor Dr Beaumont’s neck had been almost ripped apart, and was now held together only by the spine and a few tethers of flesh. The head had been smashed, too. ‘Bloody hell,’ and I spoke almost reverently.

  Clive nodded, then said matter of factly, ‘When people decide to duff themselves in, sometimes they really go for it.’

  ‘What on earth made him think to do it like that, though?’

  When Graham saw Dr Beaumont, he winced and said, ‘Bet that stung a bit.’

  Back in the office and over coffee, I said, ‘I can’t believe he’s done that to himself’

  Clive shook his head. ‘You’d be surprised, Michelle. We get all sorts in here. Most of them are the usual, of course – overdose, hanging etcetera – but some people seem to think that, as it’s the last thing they’ll ever do, they’ll do it in style.’

  Graham said, ‘Like that old girl and the weedkiller.’

  Clive nodded enthusiastically. ‘Now that was an unwise way to end it all.’

  When I inquired what they were talking about, they were keen to tell me. ‘She went to the garden shed and got out the weedkiller, Paraquat. On its own, it’s pretty lethal but she decided to spice it up. She cooked it with some herbs, then swallowed it like soup. I reckon it might have tasted nicer but she still died about week later on ITU, and it wasn’t nice, by all accounts.’

  Graham added brightly, ‘And there was that poor sod who drank a bottle of kettle descaler.’

  Clive nodded and said sorrowfully, ‘Descaled him, no doubt about it.’ There was a moment’s silence, but only a moment, before he added, ‘Don’t forget that woman who set fire to herself in her car.’

  Graham shook his head. ‘Don’t think I ever will forget that,’ he said.

  Clive said to me, ‘Poor woman set fire to herself in her car. A passing motorist sees the flames, stops and runs over to drag her out of the car. You know what she did? She struggles and fights, tells him to sod off, then slams the door shut and locks it.’

  Graham sighed. ‘Bugger that.’

  Peter Gillard, who was on for PMs that day, came in. When he was told what had happened to Dr Beaumont, he looked rather worried, but all he said was, ‘Oh dear,’ which is a typical Peter Gillard thing to say. Clive asked, his voice completely genuine, ‘Think you’ll find a cause of death, doc?’ And Peter smiled shyly.

  After the post-mortem – cause of death, ‘neck trauma’ – the four of us sat in the office over coffee and Peter Gillard talked to us about suicides. I’d always thought it a very selfish thing to do and said so, but Peter was more easy-going. ‘A lot of them just aren’t thinking normally.’

  Graham said simply, ‘Not right in the head.’

  To which Clive added, ‘Reckon you’ve got to be if you’re going to stick your head on a railway line and wait for the train to come. Remember him, Graham?’

 
‘Oh, aye.’ He shook his head. ‘Cleanest dismemberment I’ve ever seen. Been trying to do it for years, poor bloke, but people kept rescuing him. Very unlucky he’d been, up until the seven-thirty to London came along.’

  Peter said, ‘Usually, though, if you really want to do it, there’s not a lot that can be done to stop you. They’re always succeeding in prison.’

  ‘And in the local loony bin down the road,’ added Clive. ‘We must get two or three a year from there. They take away all the sharp objects and their belts and shoelaces, but they still manage it.’

  I asked, ‘How?’

  ‘One bloke used three pocket handkerchiefs tied together, then hooked them around the door knob.’

  ‘Surely that wouldn’t be high enough?’

  Peter shook his head. ‘A surprisingly high percentage of people dying by hanging are in contact with the floor when found.’

  I was really surprised by this. ‘How?’

  ‘Death in hanging is almost always due to excitation of the nerves in the neck that slow the heart and may even stop it. Add to that some constriction of blood supply to the brain and it’s usually enough to cause unconsciousness and death within a few seconds. Once you black out, of course, it doesn’t matter how low down you are.’

  ‘Really? That quick?’

  ‘Less than ten seconds, sometimes.’

  ‘Never!’

  He nodded. ‘Most people don’t appreciate that. It’s likely a lot of hangings are just cries for help but they die a lot more quickly than they thought they would. And that makes it difficult for the Coroner.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The Coroner won’t confirm a death as suicide unless he is absolutely certain that that’s what they intended to do. All we do down here is find out what caused them to die, but it’s the Coroner who decides how that came about. If there’s a chance that it was a cry for help and they thought that someone would find them before it was too late, he won’t call it “suicide”; similarly, if there’s a remote possibility that when they fell off the bridge, they tripped because they were drunk, he won’t call that “suicide” either.’

  ‘What does he call them?’ I asked.

  ‘He calls those “accidental”.’

  Graham said, ‘I don’t see that it matters what you call it, bloody stupid if you ask me.’

  ‘It does to the relatives,’ pointed out Peter.

  It was Clive who brought us back to Dr Beaumont. ‘Well, I should think that the Coroner’s going to have a problem calling his death “accidental”,’ he said grimly. ‘I wonder what type of Land Rover it was.’

  Early afternoon and, with PMs over and the dissection room cleaned down, we thought we could relax for a few moments – but, as is often the way in the mortuary, this was not to be. Three firms of undertakers arrived at once, all collecting patients, two of them collecting two each. One of the undertakers was Vince, a large man with a cheery smile who always stays for a cup of tea and a chat. Quite often, he brings in pieces of steak for us which, the first time it happened, gave me the creeps as thoughts of the League of Gentlemen and ‘special meat’ came to mind. It turned out, though, that Vince’s family also owned a butcher’s shop.

  Anyway, for twenty minutes, it was absolute chaos, with Graham and me running around while Vince and Clive reminisced in the office. As if all that wasn’t bad enough, no sooner had Vince left than the doorbell rang once again and in came a group of three trainee nurses; Clive had completely forgotten that he had promised to give them a short talk about the work of the mortuary. I think he thought about telling them to go forth but politeness got the better of him, although I expect they could see it on his face. He took me to one side and said urgently, ‘Look, Michelle. Can you take care of these girls? Normally I would, but I’ve got to go and see Ed in his office. He just rang.’

  ‘What do I say to them?’

  ‘Just tell them what we do. That’s why they’re here.’

  ‘What about Graham?’

  ‘I’ve just sent him off to the wards to collect cremation forms.’

  I didn’t feel that I was totally qualified for this task but took a deep breath and went out to the nurses. I led them into the dissection room – now clean and tidy – so that we were out of the hurly-burly. ‘This is not only a hospital mortuary but also a public one, so we receive bodies from the community as well. They come here if there is a possibility that they might need a Coroner’s post-mortem.’

  A young girl with tinted hair, too much make-up and a double chin asked, ‘Does everyone get a post-mortem examination?’

  I was giving a speech I’d heard Clive give a few times before; when he did it, it came out fluently, but I thought I sounded hesitant and unsure. ‘If a doctor can issue a death certificate, then it doesn’t need a post-mortem; if he can’t, it’s referred to the Coroner who will ask a pathologist to perform one.’

  I knew exactly what was coming next. ‘When can’t they issue a death certificate?’

  ‘If they don’t know the cause of death, or if the cause of death is unnatural – accident, or suicide, or industrial disease.’

  ‘And murder?’

  I had quickly learnt from listening to Clive when he did these talks that they always wanted to know about murder. I said, as if I had been doing the job for fifty years, ‘If it might be murder, it becomes a forensic post-mortem, which is slightly different.’

  And so they got on to forensic post-mortems, as they always did. It was forty-five interminable minutes before I could get rid of them and, by then, I was ready to lie down on a trolley and be put into the fridges with the rest of the deceased.

  NINETEEN

  A few weeks later and I was again sitting in the pub with Luke, Mum and Dad, plus Michael and Sarah. Around the table the banter was flowing backwards and forwards as it always did, the beer doing its job and doing it well, but for once I wasn’t taking part. Dad noticed first and asked, ‘Something up, Michelle?’

  I looked at him and smiled. ‘Bit under the weather.’

  Mum, bless her, said immediately, ‘It’s not a hangover, is it? You haven’t been overdoing the wine, have you?’

  With a tired grimace I said, ‘No, Mum, it’s not that. It’s probably the start of a cold, or something.’

  She looked suspicious but didn’t say any more. Luke, who knew the real reason for my quiet, said, ‘There’s something going around, she’ll be OK soon,’ hugging me round the shoulder and shaking me in an affectionate manner as he spoke.

  And that was that, as far as the family were concerned, but it wasn’t like that for me. I had to live with what I had seen that day.

  My parents are aware that I’m not a particularly maternal type. I don’t see the pleasure in green, dirty and damp nappies, in sick down my back and piles the size of superheated plums hanging out of my rear end. Each to their own is what I say; for me it’s evenings of easy friendship and chat, undisturbed nights and late mornings that float my boat. Ankle-biters are all very well in their place, but my life isn’t that place.

  Yet that doesn’t mean I didn’t want to go home and cry when we had finished dealing with the sad death of little Lizzie Dawes.

  When I had arrived at the mortuary that morning, I could tell at once that something was different. The atmosphere was quiet, almost like a church, and Clive and Graham sat in the office with their coffee talking in subdued tones, without any of the usual cross-talk; even when one of the young girls who worked upstairs in the path lab – one that usually caused Clive to look pained and mutter something about ‘bazookas’ – walked past the window, nothing was said. As Graham made my coffee, I asked, ‘What’s up?’

  Clive said, ‘Just had a phone call from the Coroner’s office. There’s a little girl coming in. Only three years of age.’ He spoke in a low voice and I could see that, despite all the years he’d done the job, he was seriously upset.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked fearfully.

  ‘She was staying with gran
dparents. She went out to play in the front garden with a ball first thing. Granddad went to the garage to get out the car and didn’t see her. He reversed it over her.’

  ‘Oh, my God.’ Suddenly I, too, felt like crying.

  Graham, a grandfather himself, said in a low voice, ‘Bloody terrible.’

  Even though it seemed obvious what the cause of death was, the law requires a post-mortem. We don’t normally do children’s autopsies in Gloucestershire – they go to Bristol where a paediatric pathologist does them, because the diseases and problems are so different from the ones in adults and because they require specialized investigations – but in cases of trauma, one or two of the more experienced pathologists in the county are willing to do them; that saves having to move the body and thus cause (if it is possible to imagine) more upset to the family, should they wish to view the child. Clive rang Ed Burberry who said at once that he would do it, so all there was to do after that was to wait for the body.

  Lizzie arrived at just after eleven. She was in a pathetically small temporary coffin, like a huge wicker basket, about two and half feet long. A single undertaker carried her in and that only emphasized how small and precious she was; I could see that he, too, was terribly affected by what had happened. Graham took her and carried her straight into the dissection room, returning a few minutes later with the empty basket. The request from the Coroner’s office had been faxed through about half an hour before, and Clive had already booked the case in and prepared all the paperwork for Ed. First Graham, then I, got changed into scrubs and we went into the dissection room while Clive phoned upstairs to tell Ed that we were ready for him. There were butterflies in my stomach as I approached the dissection table and I was afraid that I would not be able to stop bursting into tears when I came up close.