Remains of the Dead

by Anne Morgellyn

  ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘You can take the scarf off now.’

  We were in a kind of dug-out, lit by a large flashlight which August was now positioning before a long chest in the corner. I closed my eyes and tried deep breathing. I knew what I would see in there. I didn’t want to see it. I so wanted to put it behind me.

  ‘Here’s the stuff,’ August said, holding out a small vial and a hypodermic syringe. ‘In the neck, the woman said. Give him a big squirt, and don’t worry about any air bubbles.’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘OK.’ August straightened up. ‘I’ll leave you here to think about it, shall I?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Go on then. Do it.’

  He pulled open the lid of the chest and dragged me forward. Eddie lay on a pile of old cloth, still dressed in his neat suit. His face was blacker than it had been at the wake, although maybe that was the shadows. So it has come to this, I told him silently. It has come to this. A clot of bile rose up in my throat and I turned away from the coffin. August handed me the syringe.

  ‘You’re handier with one of these than I am,’ I said, between my chattering teeth.

  ‘Gaia paid you well the other night, Louise. Get on with it.’

  He stepped back, positioning the light so I had a full-on view of Eddie’s ghastly face. Boo, he hooted. Stick me, bitch, why don’t you? It’s not as though you’re an amateur, is it? You stabbed me in the back one time before. Go for the jugular this time, why don’t you. Go on, stick me.

  Pulling down his stiffened collar with the tips of my fingers (I had no gloves) I looked for a vein. But of course he didn’t have a vein, not now. ‘Eddie, I’m sorry, I am so, so sorry,’ I said, and plunged the hypodermic into the waxy folds of his neck, feeling his resistance to the needle.

  ‘You called Chas a sick fuck,’ I said to August. ‘What the hell do you think you are?’

  But August wasn’t there.

  Don’t panic, I thought. Don’t panic. He’s hiding in the corner somewhere, like a cockroach. Besides, he has left you the light. I picked it up and stumbled towards the steps, trying to staunch the swell of hopelessness that was pulsing through my limbs. As I climbed, I saw that the door above me was shutting out the air. ‘August,’ I cried. ‘Don’t mess me about.’ I pushed the door and sensed that there was someone on the other side of it, trying to keep quiet. ‘Let me out, August,’ I said, as calmly as I could, knowing that if I panicked and screamed the place down, he would play me for all I was worth.

  ‘Let me out, please,’ I repeated. ‘August?’

  I waited a few seconds then I tried the door again. This time, it gave way. I saw a row of broken headstones and, above me, the north star.

  ‘Got you going there then, didn’t I?’ August said. He was like a little boy. Like a stupid, cruel, cat-tormenting little boy.

  ‘Shall I put the scarf back on?’ I asked him dully, watching his face fall.

  ‘You know your problem, Louise?’ he said, as we walked back to the van. ‘You have no sense of humour.’

  ‘So you’re just going to keep Eddie down there then, until the end of December?’ I said. ‘You seriously think no one will find him here?’

  ‘Why should they? This land belongs to my daddy. He just bought it from a developer that got it cheap from the council.’

  I nodded. Nothing would surprise me any more. ‘But he’s deteriorating,’ I said. ‘If you think that little bit of formalin is going to help, you’re very much mistaken. Mrs Jury took you for a ride. Call that the full works? I’d be surprised if Eddie lasts the week out without stinking.’

  August frowned. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I think you should bring it forward,’ I said. ‘Make it for Thanksgiving instead. Eddie loved America. Land of the Free Market.’ I started giggling – the black reaching its maximum effect. There was a crawling sensation on my arm; I brushed it off and giggled louder. The first time I ever smoked dope, I lost sensation in my arms and had played a game with lighted cigarettes, brushing the burning ends against my skin in bug-eyed wonder.

  August’s face brightened, then clouded over. ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘The Solstice party is all arranged. Let him stink. Shut up, Louise,’ he said, turning fiercely to me. ‘Pull yourself together.’

  We climbed back into the van. ‘You say anything about this and I’ll have you,’ August said as he started the engine.

  ‘Do your worst,’ I sighed. ‘I don’t care any more.’ We drove over the pot-holes in silence. ‘What you said before about the brains,’ I said. ‘You made that up.’

  ‘Why should I? You want it not to be true just because you go to bed with Doctor Rush-Off.’

  That was perspicacious of you, August, I thought, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. ‘Chas has integrity,’ I said. ‘He wouldn’t do a thing like that.’

  ‘You wish.’

  ‘I know,’ I said vaguely, but, of course, I didn’t know at all. Chas had spent three hours the other afternoon clearing shelves in the store. His shelf, he said, was empty, but I knew it couldn’t be. It would have been better, I thought, if it had not been empty. Then I might have believed he was whiter than snow.

  ‘Let me out here,’ I said as we reached the end of my street. ‘And keep on going, August. I don’t want to see you again.’

  ‘Aw, I thought we were friends.’ He put his hand on my knee. ‘You and me, Louise, we go back a long way.’

  ‘To the slime, you mean? Crawl back, slimy toad, more fish than man. Chas was good in the sack – very slippery. But then he wouldn’t have to be that good, would he?’ I started giggling hysterically. ‘I mean, all he’d have to do was get it up.’

  The door slammed in my face. The van pulled off. Doubling over with the pain of what I’d been containing, I reached my hands to the pavement to break my fall. I retched and retched. Strong arms encircled my waist. I saw the Harley logo on the sleeve and fell down to my knees again.

  ‘Inside,’ Chas said. ‘I want to talk to you.’

  ***

  Chapter Nineteen

  He wanted to know why I had been getting out of a van driven by August Stockyard, where I had been with August Stockyard for the last two hours. He wanted to know why August had not been remanded in prison.

  ‘August gets worse and worse,’ I said, although my teeth were chattering so much now, I sounded unintelligible. ‘His daddy bailed him out if you want to know, and now he’s got Eddie in some hole somewhere – some disused grave. He wanted me to go with him to give Eddie a shot of forma – forma in the neck. You know – formaldehyde?’ I had great trouble getting that word out.

  ‘Drink,’ Chas said, bending over me.

  The tea was hot. I scalded my mouth and pushed his hand away.

  ‘Forma,’ I said. ‘It’s supposed to keep things sweet, isn’t it? So you can go back to them later and poke them about and make slides of them.’ Forma made things sweet, and soma, the drug of the Brave New World, made people forget.

  Chas pulled a chair up next to mine and grasped my head. ‘Drink,’ he said. ‘You’ve had a shock.’

  I felt my limbs thawing, as they had done the other afternoon when he had run his long white fingers over them. Hands that had drilled into the baby’s skull, that had touched little Emerys’s brain and pulled out the brain of the old princess with a tool like a knitting needle. He was like some ancient Egyptian, hooking organs out like fish. Why not through the nose anymore? Why lift out the brain through the skull, through a perfectly drilled cap? Brains were intensely malleable – fresh brains, that is, not the stiff grey things fixed in formalin that Chas kept in his cupboards. I leant over his knee and was violently sick. My head felt heavier and heavier, and although I lifted my breastbone, as I was taught to do in posture class, I still could not support it. Chas pushed it back down and I was sick again.

  When I finally came up, like a fish out of water gasping for air, I saw stars overhead in a purple sky. Chas had his back to me. Then I saw him f
ixing a syringe.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘not my kidney, please. Not my kidney.’

  But it was too late. I felt a prickling on my arm, like worms crawling over my skin. ‘Fifty thousand dollars for a heart, you said, over the internet,’ I told him. ‘Don’t cut me, Chas. Don’t cut me up now, please.’ And then I fell into a deep black hole.

  I must have slept throughout the following day because when I raised my head from the pillow and clocked my plastic watch, it gave the time as twelve fifteen on Sunday. My room felt unbearably warm and the curtains were drawn. Something slid to the floor as I raised myself up. Then Chas was before me with a mug of something sweet.

  ‘No, no, no,’ I said, pushing it away.

  ‘Drink.’

  ‘No,’ I said, feeling a sharp, sudden pain in my side.

  Chas laughed. ‘It’s still there,’ he said. ‘You were completely off your head yesterday. I warned you, Louise. Blow is no friend to paranoiacs. You thought I was robbing your kidney.’

  ‘Have you been drugging me?’

  ‘I gave you something to knock you out. You were about to short-circuit yourself.’

  ‘You had no right to do that. What did you give me – rohypnol?’

  ‘Sure, I’ve had a real whale of a time with you while you’ve been out. Every which way but loose. It’s no more than you did with me the other day in Plymouth.’

  ‘That was a one-off.’

  ‘Yes, I saw that you were back with Mr Stockyard. We’ve got things to sort out, Louise.’

  ‘August doesn’t like you.’

  ‘It’s mutual.’

  ‘He said you’d got bits of Emerys York. And that Russian princess.’

  Chas laughed and held out his hands. ‘Clean,’ he said. ‘Show me the body.’

  ‘Well there’s a grain of truth in most fairytales,’ I said. ‘You came back to Charity’s from the US because Charity’s had the best collection. When you took over the path lab and the mortuary, you also took over the store.’

  He bent over me and touched my face. ‘You’ve cooled down now,’ he said. ‘Just lie there and think of England while I fetch your soup.’

  ‘Will you drug me again if I don’t?’ I asked. But I wasn’t scared of him now. I wasn’t scared at all now. I just felt tired and sick and grubby. My hands felt sticky. I looked down at them in horror. They had touched Eddie’s neck. I closed my eyes again. It was all the same to me.

  ‘Jacques brought them over to us,’ Chas said, bringing a bowl of mushroom soup – a grey congealed mess. I pushed it away.

  ‘The child had finally been released for burial and the Home Office lab just didn’t know what to do with the retained samples. So enter the store. I said I’d take them, not because I wanted them particularly, but because I didn’t think the family could stand any more revelations. I mean, I saw the post-mortem reports. Jacques showed me. She didn’t do them all, just the last three. They had to keep on going over it because of some flaw in the DNA matching and then the defence wanted their cut. Anyway, the police got their conviction, and the little girl got put under the sod. Then Yorkie came on the scene. At first we got on well together. He didn’t say too much – which was perfectly fine by me, and he was a brilliant stitcher. I used to tip him seventy quid a go to do eviscerations and close up. A tidy worker, never made a mess. You really should eat this, you know.’ He tapped the tray.

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ I said, voice croaking.

  ‘OK. I’ve started so I’ll finish. One day, I caught Yorkie with this black look on his face like I had just killed a baby or something. Said he wouldn’t work with me anymore. And why’s that? I said. You know, he said mysteriously, although I didn’t. Next thing, he asked if he could work with Sara Fell, and that’s when you come in, Louise, with that nice little vacancy. So you were working with me, and Yorkie was working for the Fell hag, who, as we know, was never too careful with her material. You can infer the rest: Yorkie lets August Stockyard into the place without my knowing it, and all the fucking lunatics come running out of the zoo.’

  ‘August knows Simon Fell,’ I said. ‘His dad eats at the same club.’

  ‘I know, I know that.’ Chas gave me a loaded smile. ‘I suppose that’s what will get the little bastard off. Fell already tried to justify admitting Stockyard to the mortuary on the grounds of being some kind of medical illustrator. What medical illustrator does his illustration after dark?’

  ‘Simon Fell couldn’t have known what August was really up to,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t make sense. Are you saying the Fells will give evidence in August’s favour?’

  ‘Since when have sense and the Fells been good in bed together? Stockyard gets off scot free for some airy-fairy jape about art, and Yorkie stays banged up on several counts of felony. I’ll do my best for Yorkie,’ he added.

  ‘Because of what you did to Emerys’s brain?’ I asked him. ‘You wouldn’t be feeling guilty, would you Chas?’

  ‘I’ve nothing to be guilty about, Louise, except one little thing. We left that in a foxhole.’

  I scratched my head. ‘About Yorkie and little Emerys,’ I said. ‘You say you inherited her brain from the police pathologist and stuck it in the store where Yorkie came across it and told August? You’re saying that the only person to come out of this with nice clean hands is Dr Chas Androssoff?’

  ‘I’m not blaming the Home Office pathologist.’

  ‘But you’re blaming me, along with August and Yorkie?’

  ‘And the Fells. They’re also guilty by association.’ Chas shook his head. ‘Is there no one at work I can trust anymore, not even the stiffs?’

  ‘Someone had to tell their story.’

  ‘That’ll happen now,’ he said. ‘We’ll be spelling it out in shiny new prose so that the rellies will know exactly what happens with post mortem procedure – organ removal, shrinkage, slippage, pooling, material retention – the lot. All the gory fucking details. The stiffs are rising up to tell the tale.’

  I screwed up my face at the thought of thousands of militant corpses. ‘What will happen to the store?’ I said.

  ‘Why should I tell you, Louise? You fuck about with August Stockyard, doing your Burke and Hare stint the other night. And you certainly don’t trust me.’

  ‘You might be a wolf in sheep’s clothing for all I know,’ I said, thinking suddenly of the book he had mentioned in the motorway services. ‘Like the Vicar in Jamaica Inn,’ I said.

  ‘I told you, I haven’t time for fiction.’

  ‘The Vicar comes over all nice and shiny too,’ I said. ‘He even rescues the heroine from the crooks, only to turn out as Mr Wolf.’

  ‘I thought you liked a bit of wolfish behaviour, Louise. Look at your record: August Stockyard, Eddie Kronenberg – even Yorkie, for all I know.’

  ‘He’s not clever enough to be anything other than he is,’ I said. ‘But you are. You still haven’t explained about that old princess.’

  ‘But it’s not for me to explain, is it?’ he said softly. ‘It’s for you to explain, to me, what you were doing with Stockyard the other night, all cosy-cosy in the van.’

  ‘I told you, didn’t I?’ Although I couldn’t remember what I had let out the other night. ‘We were topping up Eddie’s levels. August has Eddie hidden in some graveyard owned by his dad and they wanted me to inject him with embalming fluid.’

  ‘August’s dad?’

  ‘No, Eddie Kronenberg. They’re hiding him until it’s time for him to be buried. I think your sister has something to do with it,’ I said. ‘She knows August.’

  ‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ Chas said. ‘I told you she’s a fucking muppet.’

  ‘I think he should be taken out of there and buried properly,’ I said. ‘I think I should tell Mafalda and let her deal with it. She was more of a wife to him than Gaia was, all things considered. I have never liked Mafalda but what Gaia has done to Eddie makes me puke.’

  ‘All over my jeans,’ Chas grimaced. ‘I had to sling
them in your washing machine last night.’

  A cloud passed over my mind when I thought of what was hidden behind the machine. Then I remembered it was there no longer.

  ‘I should call Mafalda,’ I said. ‘Unless you go and get him.’

  ‘Get who?’

  ‘Eddie Kronenberg. He’s in a box somewhere. I should find him, Chas. I should …’

  Chas handed me his mobile. ‘Call Mafalda.’

  ***

  Chapter Twenty

  Mafalda was in conference when I rang, although she answered quickly enough when I told her assistant my name.

  ‘What graveyard is this?’ she asked, when I had made Eddie’s position quite clear.

  I told her it was somewhere in North London.

  ‘It belongs to Sir Anton Stockyard, if that’s any help. He bought it off the local council when your Party was selling them off. You can’t put someone’s photo on a grave in this country,’ I went on. ‘But you can offload the contents on anyone with a wallet big enough to exploit them.’

  ‘Get off your soapbox, Louise,’ Chas said softly. He was standing over the bed, like some eternal husband.

  Mafalda sounded as though she was making notes. ‘What is your role in all this?’ she asked abruptly.

  ‘My mission, if you like, is to see that Eddie gets a decent burial. I might not have agreed with him, or his policies, but he was a human being. I don’t like all this disrespect. What happened the other night at Gaia’s flat was nothing to do with me. I think August should be put away.’ I saw August’s needle sketching the red rose on Gaia’s arm while Eddie looked on with his corpse’s grin, and wondered if the tattoo was healing up now.

  ‘You certainly seem to enjoy his company,’ Mafalda said nastily. ‘How do I know this is not some other stunt you are pulling with Mrs Kronenberg and that appalling creature?’