Remains of the Dead

by Anne Morgellyn

  ‘Why should I? He’s right, I had nothing to do with it. I thought they found them all anyway?’ I said quickly.

  ‘Dr Androssoff has given us an inventory,’ said Scorer. ‘The remains that were found are still being tested. Course there’s fingerprints all over the jars.’

  ‘There would be,’ I said. ‘We all handled those jars. Chas – Dr Androssoff, Dr Fell, the other pathologists.’

  ‘And your mates, York and Stockyard,’ Scorer put in.

  ‘I’ll tell you everything about my involvement,’ I said, sitting down to face Harbin. ‘I met August again at Byrne’s the undertakers where I just started a part time job. He wanted to photograph the body – Eddie Kronenberg, I mean. That’s the first I’ve seen of either of them, Eddie or August, for several years.’

  ‘Bit of a coincidence you working at the morgue as well, though, isn’t it? Stockyard says he knew you were working there.’

  ‘He might have known it – he was friendly with Yorkie. But I didn’t know he knew it. How could he have known that Eddie would suddenly die like that? No one knew, it was an embolism. Didn’t Dr Androssoff tell you?’

  Scorer nodded. ‘We’ve seen the post mortem report. So where is Kronenberg now?’

  ‘I wish I knew,’ I said. ‘Believe me, I wish I knew. I’ve just come from his memorial service. His wife was there. You should ask her.’

  ‘This isn’t about Eddie Kronenberg,’ said Harbin. ‘This is about the theft of human organs from the hospital and a related offence of indecency. We’ve charged York and Stockyard on both counts already. And we’ll do our level best to see they both go down for this one – both of them, rich daddy or no rich daddy.’

  ‘Whatever August told you about me,’ I said, ‘I had nothing to do with it. I like my job too much to run the risk of losing it. I would never remove anything from the store without Dr Androssoff’s permission, and certainly not to take part in some freak show.’ I felt my ears burning at the memory of Eddie’s heart. Please God, let the fox have eaten it, I prayed. Please God.

  ‘But all these coincidences Louise,’ said Harbin. ‘I mean, you can’t blame us for wondering, can you? Especially after last time. You weren’t so scrupled in your dealings with Eddie Kronenberg when he was your employer.’

  My mind flashed back to the younger Harbin, in his fawn coloured raincoat, coming to finger Eddie at the drinks party he was throwing at the House to mark the launch of Percy Luckraft’s book about grammar school education.

  ‘Dr Androssoff is a life scientist,’ I said, feeling my ears get hotter. ‘His work is all about understanding disease. That’s the opposite of what Eddie was doing. Britfeed caused disease. What Eddie was doing was wrong.’

  That’s right, Percy. Separate out the sheep from the goats, Eddie had giggled. Who needs educated miners?

  Who needs miners? Mafalda had said, clinging on to his arm to the cries of hear, hear! Harbin had behaved with great discretion, allowing Eddie to take his leave of his guests on the pretext of needing to help sort out some trouble Gaia had got herself embroiled in. The guests had nervously straightened their ties. It was common currency in Eddie’s circle that he suffered Gaia like some kind of first century martyr – like an early Christian torched in the Circus Maximus on the thumbs down of some sadistic, flesh-eating Emperor. But I had given Eddie his thumbs down, not Gaia. My eyes had met Harbin’s as he was escorting Eddie out. And I still felt like Judas.

  ‘So you knew nothing of Mr Stockyard’s exhibition plans, nothing about the missing items from the hospital, and nothing about the treatment of Eddie Kronenberg after he was checked out of the undertakers?’ Scorer whistled. ‘Clean on all counts. You’re a remarkable lady, Louise.’

  ‘Coincidence or not, it’s the truth,’ I said.

  ‘York told us he saw you going into the store one day when you were meant to be off duty,’ said Harbin.

  ‘Of course I went into the store. It’s my job.’ I fought hard against the purple haze. ‘I’d probably gone in to look for Dr Androssoff. He invited me to a motorbike rally and I changed my mind about going. Yorkie had left the keys out. I thought I was tidying up.’

  ‘That’s neat and sweet, isn’t it?’ Harbin was looking coldly at me. I realised they didn’t believe me, but I also knew they could have nothing to incriminate me with, unless August decided to make up some story about my involvement, or – God forbid – they found Eddie’s jar. What had Chas done with the empty jar? I couldn’t remember. All I remembered was the sight of its contents, red and swollen, tipping over into that black hole.

  The officers got up. ‘Well, if you remember anything Louise, or there is anything you’d like to get off your chest, you know where we are.’ Harbin gave me his card.

  ‘And in the meantime, don’t be leaving the country,’ Scorer added. ‘We’ll see ourselves out.’

  There seemed to be a fire inside my bedroom, but it was only the answering machine flashing away. It must have picked up when I was waylaid outside by the detectives. It was a hang up. I dialled 1471, the auto callback code, but got a number withheld message.

  Switching on the TV, I caught the end of the news. The summary suggested that the organs scandal was blowing over, as Chas had predicted. The screen showed a hospital in the north with a crowd of white-coated consultants scurrying across its car-park, bound for an emergency meeting with the chief executive of the Trust who was about to tender his resignation. Charity’s got a brief mention as a linked item, but was clearly yesterday’s story. Then the doorbell rang and I answered it on a reflex, thinking Chas had come to get me.

  But it was August. ‘My, you’re hard to pin down,’ he said. ‘Listen, Louise, I’ve got to talk to you.’ He pushed past me into the kitchen.

  ‘Piss off,’ I said, too late. ‘You should be locked up, you tea-leaf.’

  He tittered. ‘It’s you who’s the thief, Louise. What about my Merlin cloak?’

  ‘Your what?’

  ‘The velvet cloak you nicked from my studio. A friend of mine at St Martin’s made that for me. It’s a treasure.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said. ‘And don’t sit down – you’re not staying.’ The red cloak I had taken from August’s house of horrors to wear against the cold that night must still be at Chas’s place, unless Chas had thrown it away.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ I said. ‘The police have just been here. What have you told them?’

  ‘But you’ve done nothing wrong, Louise.’ August widened his eyes. ‘Unless …’ His voice dropped to a theatrical whisper. ‘Unless my cloak is not the only thing that’s missing?’

  I opened and shut my cupboards, looking for alcohol I knew wasn’t there.

  ‘Sit down,’ August said. ‘Just relax.’ He took his tobacco tin from his jacket pocket and flicked open the secret compartment. Horrified, I watched him roll a joint, my head jerking over my shoulder at the shadows.

  ‘The police have just been here,’ I said. ‘Don’t you think this is reckless, August? You’ve just come out of the nick.’

  He grinned. ‘My daddy-o had a brief down there so fast I hardly had time to use the en-suite facility.’ The Rizla stuck to his lip. ‘What a shit hole.’

  ‘I hope they flush you down it. You deserve it, too. You’re sick.’

  ‘Ooo, you’ve got a nasty streak, Louise,’ he said. ‘A nasty, mean-spirited streak. But I don’t want to be wasting your time here,’ he said. ‘So I’ll come to the point. I’m here on behalf of Eddie Kronenberg. We need your help, Louise, your professional help – you know, with the top-up.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The top-up.’ August was whispering again. ‘You know, his fluids.’

  ‘See Mrs Jury,’ I said, my heart stopping.

  ‘We’ve got to keep him fresh until Winter Solstice.’ August passed me the smoking joint. ‘I told you, we have plans for Eddie. A Day of the Dead in the depths of frosty Devon.’

  ‘I’ve just come from Devon
,’ I said, before inhaling. I couldn’t help myself.

  ‘I know, with Doctor Rush-off. Yorkie told me. Was he good, Louise?’

  I opened my eyes through the fumes. ‘How the hell does Yorkie know?’

  August took up his works again and started rolling another, fatter spliff. ‘That’s not all Yorkie knows,’ he said.

  I looked at the flaming end of the joint. ‘This is stupid,’ I said. ‘The police could come back and then …’

  ‘And then you’d be fucked,’ said August simply.

  ‘Just what are you getting at? What are you doing here, August? I don’t want to see you.’

  ‘OK, Louise, OK. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. Let’s just say you never were a very good judge in the bloke department.’

  ‘Meaning you, I suppose? Well, you said it.’

  ‘Meaning dead Eddie, meaning Doctor Rush-Off. I mean, old Eddie was just a carnivore, but Rush-Off’s a fucking cannibal.’

  The fumes were spreading through my veins. August’s face became a blur. I couldn’t quite make sense of what he was telling me. ‘Chas …’ I said thickly. ‘You’ve got something to say about Chas.’

  ‘Yorkie said it, not me. He’s worked there longer than you have.’

  ‘Worked where?’

  ‘At Charity’s, where do you think? He worked with Rush-Off at first till he found little Emerys’s brain locked up in the store room.’

  The smoke went down the wrong channel. I lurched forward, coughing and spluttering. My eyes were full of tears and stars. ‘You always were a stirrer,’ I began.

  ‘No, it’s true, Louise. After that, Yorkie couldn’t countenance the bloke. That’s why Dr Fell took him under his wing.’

  ‘His wing? He worked for Sara Fell.’

  ‘Yeah, but Simon Fell made sure that Rush-Off didn’t fire him. Simon Fell is the senior, right?’

  I nodded. Swirls of dried chewing gum floated before my eyes. He wanted to monitor enzyme activity in the brains of the clinically mad, Chas had said. But that was someone else, that was in another decade. I was like Raskolnikov. I thought I was fucking Napoleon. But I wouldn’t do it again.

  ‘August, go,’ I said, struggling to keep conscious. ‘Yorkie would say anything now, to get himself off the hook.’

  ‘Yorkie is one sad man.’ August shook his head. ‘A man with nothing left to lose. He’s so gone on that dead niece of his, at first I thought he’d had something going with her – you know, just like the guy who killed her. But it wasn’t that. He’s just outraged. He’s eaten up with it. And who wouldn’t be after what that bastard did to her? Anyway, when he came out of the nick, he was glad to get the job at Charity’s. He doesn’t like people, you see. People frighten him. He’s like a fucking elephant that’s scared of a mouse.’

  ‘You mean a rat, don’t you?’ I said, expelling smoke. ‘That’s you, August – a rat. No – a vole, a shitty little vole. You used him for some crappy exhibition. You made a show of him.’

  ‘It was Simon Fell who brought us together,’ August said. ‘I told my dad I wanted to do some drawings at the mortuary. Rush-Off vetoed it, but Simon Fell arranged for me to go along and have a peek when Rush-Off wasn’t there. It was Yorkie who showed me around.’

  ‘He showed you the store?’

  ‘Oh sure, and the rest. Takes a strong stomach, doesn’t it, to do what you do? I admire you, Louise.’ He tugged my sleeve. ‘I’ve always admired you. What you did to bring the government down …’

  ‘Bring the government down?’ I laughed.

  ‘Sure you brought the government down. When the press got wind of the paper bags, that put paid to the whole house of cards. All we need now to tie the thing up neatly is for Rush-Off to come forward with the brains of CJD victims. Eddie should have been tried for fucking murder. You saw the Britfeed report. You saw the profits they were making. And from what? From shit mixed with animal feed. And when I say animal feed, that’s just what it was.’ He sucked furiously on his joint. ‘You know all I eat these days are fucking raw vegetables. Some fucking health minister your Eddie was.’

  ‘Howard Hughes,’ I said, dreamily. ‘Shove a plastic bag over your head and breathe in hard.’

  August gave me a hostile look. ‘Don’t lose it, Louise,’ he said. ‘I told you, I need you to be fit.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For the fluids top-up. Look, I’ll spell it out. We know you’ve got the heart. Yorkie told me Rush-Off had cut it out of old Eddie and you got in a paddy over what he’d done with it. Then it appeared on the list of missing bits the police were trying to pin on Yorkie and me. Well I’ve got news for you, lady. We gave them all back. The show is over now. I never hang on to old material, you know that.’

  ‘I don’t know …’ I began.

  ‘Yes, you do. You fucking do. You know that Rush-Off took it. Probably keeps it in his bedroom with the bits he took from little girls, the sick git.’

  ‘It wasn’t needed,’ I said thickly. ‘It was an oversight. He put it back.’

  ‘No he didn’t. He fucking didn’t put it back, Louise. So where is it?’

  ‘I buried it,’ I said. ‘OK, I buried it. Which is what you should do with Eddie.’

  ‘We will, on December 21. We’ll light up the sky for him. Rush-Off’s sister will be mistress of ceremonies.’

  ‘Stasia?’ I gasped.

  ‘Yeah, she’s secretary of an outfit called Natural Revival – woodland burials and all that. Didn’t Rush-Off tell you?’

  ‘He said there’s some old princess buried in the garden.’ My head was full of swirling smoke. Look to your left half way down the drive. I had marked the grave.

  ‘Yeah, well he put her there,’ said August, triumphantly. ‘He did the fucking post-mortem on that old woman. Stasia said they had to put a wig on the old girl to hide the stapling. Rush-Off stole her brain and put it in a jar to fix it, or whatever they do, so he could carry out his experiments at a later date. It fair freaked his sister out, I can tell you, but when she threatened to tell on him, he said he’d pull the plug on her plans for the business. Can you believe it? He said he would contest the old woman’s will. And that’s your man, Louise. You blew me out to blow a brain sucker.’

  August stubbed out the joint on the rim of a dirty mug. I couldn’t see him clearly, though I felt he was looking at me. Stasia fusses about me in case I pull the plug, Chas had told me. Was that the real reason she was scared of him? What did Stasia know?

  ‘Come on,’ August commanded. ‘I’ll take you to Eddie. The undertakers gave us some stuff. You’ve got to inject it.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh yes you will, Louise.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘You can.’ August bent over me. ‘You can. Now pull yourself together.’

  ***

  Chapter Eighteen

  The dirty white van was parked at the corner of the street. August yanked open the unlocked passenger door and pushed me inside.

  ‘I’m not going,’ I said as he started the engine.

  ‘Don’t make me grass you up, Louise.’

  ‘OK, prove it then,’ I said. ‘Prove I took it. Yorkie was caught on camera.’

  The van lurched down the street in first gear. ‘You know you took it,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t be able to contain yourself.’

  This was true. The police would have it out of me in no time – Chas had known that. But what could it matter, I thought, now that Chas knew all about it and had covered my tracks? I saw the jar tip over in the fox hole, the heart flopping out like a jellyfish left by the tide. Then again, I had form and, unlike August, no rich daddy to bail me out. It could mean prison for me this time, like Yorkie, if the police could make a case against me for aiding and abetting. They might even put me down for the theft of the other twenty six organs which August claimed had been returned. Chas had said that Jacques had handed them back to Charity’s after sorting out pig from person – a trail which led straight to my store.
I couldn’t face a stretch in prison. From what Yorkie had told us, it wasn’t no picnic. No, I thought. I bet it wouldn’t be, especially for me with my loose routines. Only one thing consoled me: there’d be plenty of dope inside, plenty of lethe wards to sink into and forget. How I wanted to forget: Eddie, Chas – Chas and the store. But what if I couldn’t forget? What if I couldn’t ever forget? To sleep perchance to dream, Hamlet had worried. Like he knew.

  We were heading north towards Hampstead Heath. August glanced at me, laughed meanly, and pulled over. ‘Put this on,’ he said, handing me a dirty scarf.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Over your eyes, Louise. No peeping.’

  ‘This is stupid,’ I said, clutching at my head, which made it ache all the more. August leaned over and tied the scarf tight over my eyes. It smelt damp and disgusting. I started to pull it off, but he slapped my hand and twisted it behind my back.

  ‘I said don’t look, Louise,’ he hissed, starting up the van again and driving with one hand clamped on my arm. The van veered off round a bend and I could feel that we were riding over potholes. Was this the Heath, I wondered? August had bolt-holes all over the place, thanks to his Assisi connections. He had once boasted of a secret matériel cache somewhere in Hampstead. Was this where he was storing Eddie – down amongst the hand grenades and shooters? If I hadn’t been so scared, I’d have seen the funny side. August took himself so deadly seriously.

  But the dope he had offered me was starting to kick in and anxiety was making my heart race. I saw demons and killers behind every corner. My teeth started to chatter. Then August pulled the van to a halt on the hand brake.

  ‘Get out,’ he said. ‘But keep your blindfold on.’

  ‘Don’t kill me, August,’ I said piteously. ‘I don’t want to die.’

  He laughed. ‘Don’t be so fucking stupid. Here, lower your head, the door’s very low. And mind the steps.’

  We were in some subterranean locus. The smell of must and damp and something else – something sweetish and sad – suggested that this was burial ground. I turned back in panic to ascend the steps, but August checked me.