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

by Michelle Williams

  ‘The pathologist should be here at seven. If I were you, I’d go home, get some tea and then come back. You’ll be fine, don’t look so worried. I’ll be on the end of the phone if you need me.’

  There are four forensic pathologists who come into the county when required. Apparently, three of them are fairly normal, sociable people, but the fourth isn’t. You can imagine my dismay, then, when I found I had drawn the short straw that evening, for I was to have the delight of Professor Ranulph Twigworth as the pathologist. Professor Twigworth is a very tall man, with greying hair, a slight bend in his back because of his height, and an outwardly friendly and sociable attitude. Don’t be fooled, though; he must be the most arrogant, chauvinistic man that God put on this planet. He thinks that he is more intelligent, more attractive and more important than anyone else on earth and, deep down, he clearly despises those of us who work in the mortuary, regarding us as nothing more than ‘bottom-feeders’, the lowest in the food chain. I had noticed that Clive always greeted him with a smile and a cheery ‘Hello, Prof,’ an attitude that switched off like a light when his back was turned.

  Up until then, he had pretty much ignored me, but even that made me feel unworthy. He seemed to look down on people even while he was smiling and apparently being friendly. You just knew that if he didn’t have to work alongside you, he would never give you the time of day. I would have to step up to the mark tonight, though, and try really hard to be confident around him,

  At least, I consoled myself, he was a very experienced pathologist.

  A full-blown forensic post-mortem is a bit like a circus with lots of people doing their bit at different times and the pathologist acting as the ringmaster. A scenes of crime officer will be taking photographs as directed by the pathologist, other police officers will be looking on and answering any background questions that the pathologist has, the mortuary technician will be moving around as directed, getting instruments, pots, syringes and swabs, then labelling samples. If it’s a high risk post-mortem – because of possible AIDS or hepatitis – there’ll be a second mortuary technician staying clean and just ‘circulating’, acting as general dogsbody.

  Mrs Taylor-Wells, though, wasn’t anything exciting like a murder; she was just a little old lady who had died in a nursing home where too many old people had died, and who looked as if she had been in a concentration camp. The question here was neglect and standards of care, which was not necessarily the business of the police. Professor Twigworth was on his own, taking his own photographs and with just me and Bill Baxford for company.

  In one way, a forensic post-mortem is easier for us, the lowly technicians, than a normal Coroner’s. The pathologist will always do the evisceration himself, requiring us only to saw through the skull. The downside is that they make a lot more incisions, which means a lot more reconstruction. In some cases, they take off most of the skin – including the face – and putting it all back without showing too much stitching can take hours. Professor Twigworth, being the man he is, cut down on all the bruises and marks, without any thought as to how I was going to reconstruct poor Mrs Taylor-Wells; after he’d finished with that and was at the dissection bench looking at the organs, I surveyed the mess he had made and I admit that my heart was in my clogs. I wondered about calling Graham – he had said that he would happily come and help if I thought I couldn’t cope – but decided at once that wasn’t going to happen. I was aware that Clive especially thought of me as a pretty good technician, but still just a girl. I felt that he would look on any plea for help as weakness.

  During all this Professor Twigworth kept up a constant stream of patronizing remarks, unfunny jokes and sexual innuendo aimed at me. I think he half-thought that I – a piece of pond life – would jump at the chance of a cuddle from a distinguished pathologist, and part of me wanted him to try something on so that I could put him straight about the facts of life. Bill Baxford chortled at much of this, but I couldn’t blame him for that.

  Professor Twigworth finished after three hours. He had taken small samples of most of the organs, as well swabs from the sores, and swabs from the nose and throat. I had already taken urine and asked him now, ‘Do you want to take some blood?’

  ‘Of course, my dear. Of course.’

  I went to the side where I had laid out, as instructed, all the equipment that might be required. I picked up a sterile pot and went back to the body to massage the thigh to push blood out. As I began to do this, Professor Twigworth said in a loud voice to Bill Baxford, ‘I’d pay good money to have her do that to me.’

  Boy, did I go red at that. Luckily, the mask hid this, and I kept my eyes down so that he couldn’t see how furious I was. How dare he? I just carried on working and after a couple of minutes, changing to the other leg as well, I had about 20 ml of blood, which would be more than enough. I made sure that everything was correctly labelled while Professor Twigworth made notes, then he packed up and moved off to the changing room. ‘Right,’ he said loudly. ‘I’m finished now, Bill.’ To me he said with a wink, ‘I’ll be ready to have my back scrubbed in about five minutes, Michelle.’

  It was the first time he had called me by my name, but I wished he hadn’t. I was dead embarrassed again but there was no way I was going to show it. I looked around the PM room, at the blood on the walls and the floor around where he had done his dissection, at the two bowls of sliced organs, at poor Mrs Taylor-Wells who was still a mass of cuts and skin flaps, and at her opened body cavity. In a loud voice, I said to him, ‘You’d better get Bill to do it, Professor. I’ve got a lot of work to do.’

  Once everyone had left, it was about nine thirty in the evening, and I knew that I would be there for a few hours longer. The porters were in and out bringing a couple of bodies from the wards – and thank God they were, or I thought I might start getting cabin fever.

  It was just gone midnight when I rang Luke to come and collect me from the mortuary. I was tired and my body ached. The fact that I had to return in seven hours was not a nice thought either. I think I was asleep in the car before we even left the hospital car park.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Luke and I were at Mum and Dad’s when Clive rang me one Sunday afternoon in late autumn. It wasn’t unusual to get a call from Clive over the weekend, but this time he had some bad news.

  ‘Graham’s in hospital.’

  I knew that Graham had had some health problems in the past, not helped by smoking since he was thirteen, drinking like a thirsty fish and eating a fry-up for breakfast most days, so I immediately assumed he’d had a heart attack. However, Clive soon put me right. ‘Stupid git fell down a steep riverbank while he was out shooting. He’s broken his hip. Lucky he didn’t shoot himself

  ‘Oh, crap. Is he all right?’

  ‘Yeah he’s all right, the clumsy sod. They’re going to operate this afternoon, but he’ll be out of action for months.’

  His voice told me that he was seriously concerned. The winter was nearly upon us – which was our busy time what with pneumonia and a sudden increase in suicides – and I knew enough to realize we wouldn’t be able to cope. I asked, ‘What about a locum?’

  Clive laughed. ‘I’ll ask, Michelle, but because of the money problems in the Trust, I bet they turn us down.’

  ‘Surely they know how busy we’re going to be? They wouldn’t think twice if it was the wards.’

  He said at once in a voice I was coming to know well, ‘We’ll cope, Michelle. We always do.’

  Later that evening, when I was alone with Oscar and Harvey, Maddie phoned for a chat and I had a brainwave. She had shown an interest in what went on down in the mortuary, and had also hinted that she was getting a bit bored with emptying out the processing machines, filling them up again, taking dictation when it came to describing the small biopsies, and being a general dogsbody. She had said more than once that if the right job came up she might go back to Wales, so I knew that she was seriously disgruntled. I took the plunge. ‘Suppose you could do a spell wit
h us in the mortuary? Do you think you might like that?’

  She was a bit taken aback, but it was only a few moments before she said in her sing-song voice, ‘I could give it a go, Michelle.’

  Clive was a bit sceptical when I told him the next morning as we sat in the office (me in Graham’s place now that he was on sick leave). ‘Maddie?’

  ‘She’s very keen.’

  Clive is a nice bloke, but a bit old-fashioned. He reckoned that it was a man’s job being a mortuary technician and, even though I thought I’d proved myself now, he still had reservations about me. ‘I suppose we could give her a month’s trial, if Ed agrees.’

  ‘She’ll be fine, Clive. Even if all she does is the paperwork, at least it’ll give you some more time in the PM room.’

  But he was not about to be convinced easily and said doubtfully, ‘Maybe.’

  Ed, though, was more upbeat. ‘If she wants to try it, why not? The lab isn’t too badly off for staff at the moment, so I reckon they could spare her.’

  And so Maddie came to work down with the dead men.

  THIRTY

  Clive had decided that as part of my education I should attend an inquest and, accordingly, asked Ed Burberry if he would take me to one. Ed thought about this for a moment and then said, ‘It so happens I’ve got the very one.’ He looked across the office and said to Clive, ‘It’s the hanging vet next week.’

  Clive laughed delightedly. ‘Classic!’ he said. ‘Absolutely classic!’

  ‘Is that a good one to go to?’ I asked, suspecting some plot.

  All Ed would say in reply was, ‘It should prove a little more interesting than the usual Drop Dead Freds.’

  As we walked to his car on the morning of the inquest, Ed explained about the inquest process. ‘If after we’ve done a post-mortem, the cause of death is either still unknown or is unnatural, then the Coroner has to hold an inquest. Our Coroner, Adrian Carter, is very good and will explain the purpose of the inquest, which is basically an inquiry to determine certain facts about the death – who it was that died, when and where they died, and then how they died. It’s the “how” bit that takes the time. I might have a medical cause of death, but he needs to discover what led up to it.’

  We got in his car and, as he drove out of the car park, he continued. ‘He hears all the facts and then comes to a conclusion. He may decide the death was natural after all, or may decide that it was accidental, or suicide, or an industrial disease, or even unlawful. He may not be able to decide definitely, in which case it’s an open verdict.

  ‘In most cases, the inquest is very quick – only half an hour – and uncontroversial; sometimes it’s just the Coroner, the Coroner’s officer, a reporter from the local paper and me in the court, without even a relative bothering to turn up. Occasionally it’s a lot more complicated though; like this one.’ He grinned. ‘This one’s going to be like a circus, with solicitors, barristers and all sorts.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Because Jane Mellors hanged herself in her garage in the nude.’

  At which I gawped at him. ‘Nude?’

  He nodded. ‘She was a vet,’ he added, as if that explained it. ‘She got out of bed in the middle of the night after a row with her husband and went down to the garage where she put a rope around a rafter and stood on a stool.’ Well, I thought, each to their own. He carried on, ‘Add to that the fact that she was having marital problems because hubby was playing away, and the family are convinced that he did it to her. They’ve got a barrister to represent them at the inquest, so the husband’s hired one as well; the family have accused the police of negligence because they decided that she did it herself, so they, in turn, have got their solicitor in to protect their reputation.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘She killed herself,’ he said with absolute confidence. ‘It’s bloody hard to hang someone who doesn’t want to be hanged.’

  ‘Perhaps he drugged her, or knocked her on the head.’

  ‘All the tox is negative and there was no other trauma. There were no bruises on her arms and no evidence that she had tried to remove the rope; her wrists hadn’t been tied, either. I always check, just in case.’ He pulled into the car park outside the magistrates’ court where most of the inquests were held. ‘Here we are.’

  As we walked over to the door to the court he said confidently, ‘I’m not going to have any problems with this one, you see.’

  Poor Ed. His problems started almost at once, because he discovered that his secretary had accidentally sent him to the wrong place for the inquest. He should have been at the County Council chamber, half an hour’s drive away. He made some desperate phone calls to Bill Baxford, apologizing mightily, then we rushed back to the car. During the journey he used some ripe language about ‘cretinous secretaries’.

  When we finally arrived, Bill Baxford was waiting just outside the court doors. ‘Hello, doc. We’ve started, but don’t worry, the Coroner understands.’

  ‘Thank God for that.’

  ‘There’s something else, though . . .’

  Ed immediately became suspicious. ‘What?’

  Bill’s a nice bloke; he was brilliant with the families and I had seen him almost in tears after interviewing them. He had a huge sense of humour, though, and was always ready to help if he could. ‘The family’s barrister has been in to see the Coroner . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘She had some new information for him to consider. He thought you ought to know.’

  Ed was looking more and more stressed. ‘Information? What information?’

  But at that moment the clerk of the court came up to us. Ed was due in the witness box.

  The small court room was packed. I just managed to squeeze in at the back. The Coroner was a large man with a round face and thick-rimmed glasses. He was dressed in a black three-piece suit and had a laptop beside him, and a pad of paper in front of him. Opposite and below him at the front of the court was a row of five people, all smartly dressed. Behind them was what I assumed was the family – some old, some young. Around me were police officers, paramedics and several others whose function I couldn’t guess. The witness box was on the left of the Coroner and Ed, having recited the oath from memory with a Bible held high, announced who he was and what his qualifications were.

  Then, at the Coroner’s request, he went through his PM report. It soon became clear that there were certain points the Coroner wanted to emphasize, because every so often he would stop Ed and ask for clarification. ‘So, you examined the body very carefully for signs of trauma?’ ‘You’re absolutely certain that there were no scratch marks on the neck?’ ‘There was no sign that the wrists had been tied?’

  At the end of Ed’s evidence, the Coroner asked, ‘How long have you been a consultant pathologist, Dr Burberry?’

  ‘Twelve years.’

  ‘And how many autopsies have you performed in that time?’

  ‘I would say over two thousand.’

  ‘And how many hangings?’

  ‘Certainly over fifty. Maybe close to a hundred.’

  The Coroner thanked him and then turned to the people immediately in front of him. ‘Miss Christy. Do you have any questions?’

  A small young woman with long blonde hair stood up. She was dressed in a white blouse and a black suit. I thought she was very nervous, which surprised me. ‘Yes, I do, sir,’ she said in a hesitant, almost trembling voice. Turning to Ed, she asked, ‘Mrs Mellors was naked.’

  ‘Apparently,’ he said.

  ‘Tell me, Dr Burberry. Have you ever before known a person to hang themselves in the nude?’

  Ed considered this for a moment. ‘No. I think this was a first.’

  ‘Don’t you think it’s a little odd that Mrs Mellors should have chosen to hang herself when unclothed?’

  The Coroner said at once, ‘Miss Christy, could I ask you what you consider to be an appropriate dress code for hanging yourself?’

  She looked s
urprised. ‘Well, I don’t know . . .’

  ‘So, I’m sure we can’t read too much into the fact that she was unclothed, can we?’

  She looked at him open-mouthed for a while, then agreed, ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Good. Carry on.’

  It was obvious that she had to spend a few seconds pulling herself together before she asked, ‘You did toxicology, Dr Burberry?’

  The Coroner said at once, ‘He’s told us that.’ He said it with a smile on his face, but I could tell from his voice he was annoyed.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ she said deferentially. To Ed she said, ‘And it was negative?’

  ‘Miss Christy . . .’ said the Coroner with a sigh.

  Quickly she asked Ed, ‘What about insulin? Would the toxicology lab have been able to detect that?’

  Ed was momentarily taken aback before saying, ‘To test for insulin is a specialized process. The blood sample has to be spun down in a centrifuge and frozen at once, otherwise the insulin degrades.’

  ‘Did you do that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So it’s possible that Mrs Mellors was injected with insulin – say, between the toes – thus rendered unconscious, and then it would be straightforward to suspend her by the neck. There would be no signs of a struggle.’

  Ed considered this. ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘Did you check between the toes for injection marks?’

  I could see that Ed was having trouble not smiling. ‘No.’

  ‘So what do have to say about this possibility?’

  Ed’s smile broke out. ‘I can’t help feeling that it would be difficult to stick a needle between someone’s toes without them noticing. I should imagine it would sting a bit.’

  The Coroner’s smile said that he liked that answer. ‘Well, Miss Christy?’

  She consulted her bits of paper. ‘Sir, I should like to bring into the record a letter the family have received from Mrs Fanshawe, who lives in Wales –’