‘You know what this means, Michelle?’ I did know. I had been doing the job long enough to appreciate that I would not be seeing my front door until late that evening, probably very late. It was not my first forensic PM, but it would be my first proper one, all the bells and whistles.
In these circumstances, we check that the body has been properly identified to us and no more. The body is placed in the fridge and we await instruction from the Coroner. To tamper with the body and risk upsetting any vital evidence is a big no-no. Clive had drummed this into me within my first week of training. As he called them, ‘some vital rules of the mortuary’.
No more than five minutes after Clive returned to the office, the phone had rung and he was informed that the forensic pathologist was just about to leave the scene and would be with us within the hour. It was at times like these that Clive would have a little inward panic. ‘Set up the PM room for a forensic, Michelle,’ he hollered from the office, and I had to walk around the PM room like a lost sheep wondering what I needed to do. The dissection bench was fully set up with tools for the pathologist, the eviscerating trays had clean tools and new sharp knives, so apart from making sure enough needles and syringes were available, a few pens and some paper for notes, pots for various body fluids or stomach contents, there was not much else I could do, although I was not about to make that obvious to Clive. The body of the elderly lady was already placed on the dissection table, still in the body bag, and I made sure that there were buckets full of hot water and disinfectant mops at the ready; after that I waited.
In the background, Clive was running around like a headless chicken making sure we had enough tea and coffee and milk for all the people that would be arriving, clearing his desk as this would be required by the pathologist (something he resented) and quickly phoning his wife to let her know he would not be home till later, just telling her briefly that he had ‘a forensic’.
Dr David Jones arrived at the mortuary in good spirits, considering the task ahead, and while Clive fussed about making hot drinks, I was secretly in the background feeling very nervous. I had not worked with Dr Jones before, and therefore did not know his expectations. Clive introduced me to him, and what stood in front of me was a short stocky balding man about thirty-five to forty years of age. Nothing quite like you would expect, well, what I would expect anyway. He was certainly a world away from Ranulph Twigworth. He was very friendly and shook my hand firmly, telling me not to worry and that he didn’t bite.
Within half an hour, the mortuary was full of police including scenes of crime officers (SOCOs), detectives and constables. Police radios where lying about everywhere, and for that afternoon I had a pretty good idea of all the criminal activity going on in the town I call home.
While Dr Jones sat in the office discussing things with the detective in charge of the case, Clive and I were talking to Malcolm. Malcolm was the lead SOCO, a pretty normal-looking guy about six foot tall, and Clive was firing questions at him left, right and centre about what had happened. It had turned out that the old lady on the middle table waiting to be dissected was a landlady of a quaint Cotswold-stone bed and breakfast in a quiet village favoured by American tourists. A very glamorous lady, as we saw by a photograph that the police had seized from her property. She had been having a relationship, although it was not known what sort of relationship, with a long-term lodger. From what they knew, as they had him in custody, he in turn had been having a rather bad relationship with alcohol, and needed it to function on a daily basis. His landlady had been giving him the cash to fund this need, but had eventually had enough of handing out money, and that morning refused to give him any. With that, he had taken the frying pan and promptly and very firmly whacked it round the back of her head. Clive commented that she definitely wouldn’t be able to give him any more beer tokens now, and Dr Jones had gone through to get changed, so we all moved into position in the PM room for the beginning of what would prove to be a very late evening.
A technician’s job with a forensic post-mortem is very limited for the first few hours. While the forensic pathologist removes the deceased’s clothes and jewellery, handing it all to the police for bagging up and labelling, and SOCOs take photos, and hair and swabs are collected for various technical tests at forensic centres, a technician is not required and does a lot of standing around and watching. You may be needed to turn the deceased over, or stand for a long time holding them on their side while the pathologist checks the posterior of the body for any marks or wounds. This can make your arms and legs ache, but is part of the job. On this particular occasion, I had nothing to do for an hour and a half, but could not leave the room in case I was needed. Dr Jones had left the removal of the brain until the end of his examination. After I had finished my duty of weighing the organs for him, he asked me if I would retract the scalp and look for the wounds on the head. I wanted to run away at that point. This was a possible murder case. This was going to require a precise incision around the back of the scalp, one which didn’t go through any wounds that might be there. And to top it all off, I had an audience. Everyone in the room would be watching me. I would just have to go for it.
I washed down the hair of the dead landlady on the table in front of me and, from the amount of blood that came off it, I thought the task of finding any wounds would be easy. I was to be proved wrong. I found a very small laceration measuring only four centimetres, but it continued to bleed. Luckily it was going to be above the incision line I was about to make, so I would not mess up any evidence. I pointed this out to Dr Jones, and then had to wait another fifteen minutes while he ordered photos to be taken and the wound to be swabbed before staring at the wound under the spotlight. Apparently, flecks of paint or enamel off the offending weapon can sometimes be found in wounds, and if they can match these up at the lab, it can act as strong evidence for the prosecution.
After he had finished, Dr Jones asked me to go ahead with the incision, but not to remove the skull, as he would do that. After the initial cut, the scalp retracted quite easily, and the smooth white bone of the skull was exposed. The thought that came into my head was that of a soft boiled egg, just after you have cracked it with your spoon. Whatever had hit this lady over the head, it had done so with great force, for the skull was cracked in several places. When the scalp was peeled forward, an actual piece of skull fell on to the table, which showed the extent of the injury.
After a lot more photos, as well as some brilliant bone-saw work by Dr Jones (amazingly, with nobody getting hit or injured by loose flying bone chips), the brain was removed, more photos were taken. At eight thirty I was finally given the go ahead to start reconstruction on the body. This, though, posed its own problems. I would have nothing to hold the wadding in place in the skull; the skull cap will usually sit nicely back in its former place after the brain has been removed, and gives the impression of no interference whatsoever, but this was going to be like the hardest jigsaw puzzle in the world to piece back together. It almost seemed a pointless exercise too, as within the next couple of days she would have a second examination for the defence, when all my work would be undone. In between, though, there was bound to be a formal identification, and my job was to make her as presentable as possible for that. I managed it with a bit of handiwork, but the next problem was going to be the small open laceration on her head. In any case where there is need for a defence, the wounds must never be stitched up. This will destroy evidence. It continued to slowly bleed; I would just have to wait for it to dry out.
My audience finally left around nine thirty, with Dr Jones going half an hour later. He thanked me for my time, and hoped I would be able to get away soon. After he left, it suddenly hit me that I was totally on my own in the mortuary, because Clive (having overseen me for most of the night) had gone too. Although day in and day out we can deal with the saddest stories, the most horrible sights, and are surrounded by death, none of this could prepare me for being in the mortuary at ten at night on my own. I have
to admit it felt very uncomfortable and I had the radio on very loud while I was cleaning up.
Occasions like this remind me what an unusual job I have, and also make me understand other people’s reactions when I tell them about it. Believe me, in a mortuary at that time of night, on my own, knowing full well that there were at least twenty corpses lying in the fridge no more than ten feet away from me, was not exactly where I wanted to be, even though I was getting paid for it.
TWENTY-SEVEN
The weather had been wonderfully warm and, although the days were now beginning to shorten, I had the feeling that there was still a lot of summer left to be enjoyed, when the E60 on Mr Martin Walker was faxed through by Bill Baxford. It had been a quiet few days, which was something of a relief because Graham was on leave; not that he’d gone anywhere, because he never did. Graham’s life revolved around killing things – either by shooting them or by hooking them in the mouth – and, when not doing that, decorating his house. Clive used to say that Graham had repainted his living room so often, he’d taken a couple of feet off the living space.
Without a word, Clive handed it over to me, his face giving nothing away. When I read what had happened, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Open-mouthed, I looked up at Clive who shrugged and said, ‘Agriculture’s a dangerous business.’
I looked again at the request. ‘Even so,’ I said.
Gloucestershire is mostly countryside and a lot of that countryside is farmed but criss-crossed with footpaths and bridle paths. From the information that Bill had supplied, it seemed that Mr Walker had a dog – Bill didn’t mention what kind of dog it was – and he used to walk it, as he should, every morning and every afternoon. He varied the route, though, and yesterday, because it was a sunny day, he had walked along a footpath near Tewkesbury, across a corn field. He had had a few pints with his lunch and, it being hot, he had decided to stop for a rest and let the dog off the lead. Accordingly, he had fallen asleep.
And then they had started to harvest the corn.
It might have been all right – after all, a combine harvester makes a lot of noise – except that Mr Walker was profoundly deaf, and so he had slept on in peace . . .
When Mr Walker entered the mortuary, I was out buying sandwiches for lunch. By the time I got back, Clive had received him and opened the body bag and I didn’t feel like having my sliced ham and cheese on granary any more.
‘Bet that hurt,’ was Clive’s comment, looking at me with a pinched face and puckered mouth that formed a pained expression while he sucked in some air. I could not argue. Poor Mr Walker had been caught up by the harvester and dealt with in no uncertain way. He had been pierced, then sliced, then crushed. His left arm had been almost severed, while his legs were so deeply cut across his thighs that I could see his femurs, which had both been fractured; his chest had been crushed and his abdomen split open, his intestines spilling out. That wasn’t nice, but what really made me want to dry heave was his head; I say ‘head’, but it wasn’t something I’d have wanted on my shoulders. For a start, Mr Walker’s brain was no longer inside it; what had subsequently been found now resided in a Tesco’s carrier bag between his legs. It had been forced to leave home because of lack of space, what with the fact that the head had been crushed and completely flattened; I tried not to, but I kept thinking that with both eyes on the same side, he looked like a bit like a flat fish.
Clive saw my pale face and asked, ‘You all right, Michelle?’
I nodded, took a deep breath, figuring I couldn’t keep on being a girl about it all. Clive, being Clive, just nodded back. He was forever saying, ‘We don’t do burning martyr here,’ and if I said that I was OK, then, as far as he was concerned, I was OK; end of.
Peter Gillard arrived. When he asked what he had on for the day, Clive kept a straight face and led him into the dissection room where Mr Walker waited, laid out on a dissection table. I followed to see his reaction, which was priceless. He almost physically jumped in the air, then squeaked. After that he was silent for a moment while he walked around the body before asking Clive in such a voice that I couldn’t tell if he was being serious, ‘Got any idea what he died of?’
In actual fact, autopsies like that one are fairly straightforward, because there is little question concerning the cause of death, and it’s just a matter of cataloguing the injuries and making sure there is no possibility that natural disease played a part; not surprisingly, since Mr Walker was only forty-two, Peter Gillard was able to show fairly easily that this wasn’t the case and that the cause of death was ‘multiple injuries’. The only other thing that needed to be done was to get samples, if we could, to be sent to the toxicology laboratory. It’s standard protocol to do this in all cases of accidental death, to determine just how much drink or drugs might have contributed to the deceased’s end.
Clive, who had been doing the autopsy with Peter Gillard, had previously got some urine using a needle and syringe on the bladder before he took it out; now that the body cavity was empty, he could get some blood. To do this, while I held an empty, sterile pot in the pelvis below the iliac vessels as they passed into the legs, he massaged first the left thigh and then the right, pushing blood out so that it squirted into the pot. I labelled the blood and urine specimens, then stored them at the bottom of one of the fridges.
Which meant that Peter Gillard was finished, but our job was just starting. While he made notes on what he had found, I poured the dissected organs back into a plastic bag inside the body cavity. Then, while I cleaned down the bench where Peter Gillard had done his work (he wasn’t too messy, by which I mean no blood on the ceiling, which sometimes happens with pathologists), Clive sewed up the body cavity.
The pathologist just walks away – some have a shower, some just get changed, perhaps before having a coffee in the office with us – and wanders upstairs to the laboratory to get on with other things, but there is still a lot of care to be lavished on the deceased, and it’s us who have to do it. Now alone, Clive and I stood either side of Mr Walker and discussed what could be done. Most of the damage would be hidden by a shroud, but obviously, should the relations want to come and pay their last respects, we would have to let them see his head and I couldn’t imagine they’d be too chuffed to be confronted with him as he now appeared. He wasn’t exactly looking his best. I said, ‘There’s no way he’s viewable, is there?’
Clive did what Clive always did, which was to smile knowingly and reply with a twinkle in his eye, ‘We’ll see, shall we?’
I knew better than to doubt him; Clive had twenty-six years’ experience and I, in comparison, knew sweet Fanny Adams. What I saw over the next hour made me relieved that I’d remained schtum and not expressed disbelief. Clive, concentrating very hard for nearly fifty-five minutes without stopping, somehow managed to transform the crunchy flesh pancake that had once been Martin Walker’s head into something that was at least vaguely a human face with cranium attached. He did this by packing the skull with cotton wool, very carefully moulding the facial bones back into something that resembled a normal human face, and some very intricate stitching; Martin Walker was never going to win ten pounds in the Monopoly beauty contest but I could imagine that, in the half-light of the viewing room and behind glass, the relatives would not be upset at what they saw.
In the late afternoon, as we were having some well-deserved coffee in the office, Bill Baxford rang to arrange a viewing. Clive picked up the phone. The conversation went on for a while, then he put the phone down and turned to me, shaking his head. ‘We don’t need to worry any more,’ he told me.
‘What about?’
‘The dog. Apparently he’s safe and sound. Ran away when the combine harvester came round and went back home.’ He laughed. ‘So much for man’s best friend.’
TWENTY-EIGHT
The first forensic post-mortem that I did on my own was Mrs Alice Taylor-Wells, who came to us from Amber Court.
I’ve said before that Amber Court had a reputati
on, and we’d been receiving a regular supply of residents from it throughout the year, all of them looking unkempt and uncared for, being thin and pale and sad-looking. Mrs Taylor-Wells, though, was altogether a different story. When the undertakers brought her in late one afternoon in November, the first giveaway was when it only took one man to lift her on to the tray; you could tell that she was as light as a feather. Then, when Graham unzipped the body bag, the second giveaway was exposed. Graham made a face, as did I when the smell hit me. It wasn’t the same stink as a decomposed body gives off, but it was just as unpleasant. I looked at Graham with a questioning look and he said only, ‘Bed sores.’
Bloody hell, did she have bed sores. Graham pulled her easily on to her side and I saw what looked like a gaping hole at the base of her spine that must have been four inches across and, I could see because the packing had fallen out, went down to bone. ‘Oh, my God,’ I whispered, feeling sick. The flesh at the sides was wet and slimy and covered in yellow-grey pus. This wasn’t the only one either; I could see others on the right hip and the heels of the feet.
Graham growled, ‘Bloody Amber Court.’
The phone rang a few minutes later, and when I picked it up I heard Bill Baxford’s voice. Instead of his usual cheeriness, though, he was distinctly down. ‘It’s about Mrs Taylor-Wells.’
I handed the phone over to Graham who was in charge, Clive being away for a long weekend. I watched him listening for a while, occasionally glancing up at the clock in the office and saying, ‘OK,’ a lot. When he put the phone down, he said, ‘The relatives aren’t happy about the way she was treated and the Coroner’s had enough. It’s going forensic’
I felt immediately nervous. I was on call that night, so it was going to be my responsibility. ‘What time?’
Down Among the Dead Men: A Year in the Life of a Mortuary Technician Page 12
