Remains of the Dead

by Anne Morgellyn

  ‘Goodbye, August,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t want it then?’

  ‘Use it in one of your representations,’ I suggested. ‘But the joke’s wearing thin. You know what Eddie said about you? You’re so derivative, he said. So unoriginal. It’s true, August. Even some artist in Plymouth beat you to it on the paperweight theme. A figurative painter called Robert Lenkiewicz. A man who could actually draw people, August – an Academician. He embalmed a tramp who was listening to Wagner and kept him in his studio to weigh down sketches.’

  August came up to me and pulled my arm. I could see that I had stuck a sharp pin into his amour propre. ‘That’s shit,’ he said. ‘If I’m so unoriginal, why do you think the papers have made such an icon of me?’

  ‘That isn’t because of you. It’s the hospital scandal that’s fired them up, not your work. If anyone’s the icon here, it’s Chas – he’s The Angel of Death. Granted, you drew it all to public attention, but anyone could have done that, any group of old ladies – old fannies,’ I said, ‘with placards and a protest march. Any old fanny could have done what you did. That isn’t art.’

  ‘Who are you to say what art is? You’re not an artist.’

  ‘Takes one to know one,’ I said, and got through the door.

  ‘I’ll prove it to you, Louise,’ he shouted. ‘I’ll prove it. You just wait.’

  ‘Can’t wait,’ I said, and went to find Chas in the Dickensian pub nearby. He was sitting over a pint of untouched porter.

  ‘This stuff’s terrible,’ he said. ‘You drink it.’

  ‘Take me home, please, Chas.’

  ‘No joy then?’

  ‘He offered me Eddie’s tie.’

  ‘I thought you were coming home with me.’

  ‘Not tonight.’ I scratched my head to displace the anxiety I felt about confronting him. ‘Look, Chas, the other day, in Plymouth. It wasn’t …’

  He held up his hand. ‘No need to tell me you have regrets, Louise. It’s fairly obvious.’

  ‘No, nothing’s obvious,’ I muttered. ‘I just don’t think it was the right time.’

  ‘Maybe there isn’t a right time.’

  ‘Maybe not. Take me home, please,’ I pleaded. ‘I’ve got to get fit again for work.’

  ‘Have you? Says who?’

  ‘So you’re firing me now, are you? Because I won’t go to bed with you?’

  He snorted. ‘Well, I’d be within my rights. If Maggie had her way, you’d be suspended.’

  ‘But I’m not,’ I said. ‘Am I?’

  He got up and pocketed his bike keys. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘If that’s the way you want it.’

  So he took me home.

  ***

  Chapter Twenty Two

  It was business as usual at Charity’s once the story had made its way north and east, infecting each hospital trust with the poison August had meant to spread. He was good at poisoning things – the hallmark of a destroyer, not a truly creative person. He was like a little boy who tears the wings off flies for sport, to raise a whole cats’ chorus of disapproval while changing nothing of the status quo. Chas let me back into work, largely, I suspected, because he didn’t trust me on my own, with August still planning more of his representations. I still didn’t trust Chas either. There were too many unanswered questions, such as why he had come back to Charity’s in the first place (for the store, of all things, for what it shamelessly contained), and about the old dead princess. He made that into a running joke with me.

  ‘Where’s the body?’ he kept on saying, as though to keep my mouth shut on the matter. Or was he alluding to the fact he had disposed of Eddie’s heart? Was he holding that over me like a witching spell – like a fucking paper bag? He had certainly kept the police off my tail. I heard no more from Harbin or Scorer, though Chas expected the Crown Prosecutor would call us to give evidence at Yorkie’s trial.

  At the mortuary, I got straight down to labelling slides, mulling over this relationship with Chas, which could have meant so much to me once, which could have been my saving grace, had it not been tainted by the business with Eddie and the business with the store. Paper bags by any other name. A paper bag had covered Eddie’s loot, while countless jars had covered Chas’s. And finally, a jar had covered Eddie’s heart. One of Chas’s jars, I thought. Because Chas had placed it in there in the first place. If Chas had not put Eddie’s heart in the store, none of this would have come to me. None of it. Chas and I could have been a single item now, not a couple split asunder, a couple sectioned for scrutiny.

  But maybe I was under an illusion there. An illusion contrived by a dead man. Because Eddie would not lie still. He was the uninvited guest at all my meals, the bogeyman that came to hoot and hiss at me in the depths of night, and, should I manage to drift off to sleep, the phantom that haunted my dreams. I took to going to bed each night with a prayer to my guardian angel. In the real world, the role had been taken by Chas, who had lied for me to the police, who had concealed incriminating evidence; but Chas was more of the demonic seraph, openly so since he had commissioned a skull and crossbones for the Harley following a reprimand from the hospital’s medical director, who felt he let the profession down by dressing inappropriately and having his picture in the press like an unkempt biker. It seemed a small reprimand to me, in view of how he had opposed them all on the plans to franchise the mortuary, of how he had consistently got up their noses since becoming chief pathologist. But in ways I didn’t care to fathom, Chas appeared to be saving Charity’s from ignominy and was clearly thriving on his efforts in terms of the respect he was garnering from all the senior medical teams, not to mention the Trust’s committee. In spite of refusing to take the fall for those bastards, he had actually decoyed the press away from the hospital by offering himself up for baiting with his Hell’s Angel performance. He had even done well out of this in the end by securing a public apology from the paper he called Tits and Bums on Sunday for impugning his professional reputation. His professor at the Harvard Medical School had e-mailed all the broadsheets extolling the virtues of Dr Androssoff’s regime at Charity’s, which was, she argued, one of the greatest British medical institutions. ‘So put that in your pipe and smoke it,’ Chas told me, which was, I guess, what he had told the medical director. His new broom swept throughout the mortuary, winkling out the creatures in the path lab (Sara Fell was soon to be history) and reaching into the furthest corners of the organs store.

  When I first went into the store after my temporary absence, I thought I had unlocked the wrong door. The shelves were empty, except for this year’s tumours and a series of tissue samples. Every jar now bore a special label stating that permission to store had been granted, by whom, what for, and when. All the other jars, in their many hundreds, had been removed to the safe-keeping of the medical school. Chas had battled with Professor Inch about this, but had prevailed on the grounds that the hospital was more exposed to public scrutiny than the medical school, which was glad enough to increase its archive, although storage, initially, would be a problem. ‘But no more of a problem,’ Chas argued, ‘than the stiffs the Trust forced us to store in the chapel because they’re too fucking mean to get the old fridges repaired.’ Those works, however, were to be taken care of by a mysterious endowment, widely believed to be coming from Sir Anton Stockyard.

  ‘But this is just blood money,’ I said. ‘I can’t believe you’d go along with that – with Sir Anton? He just wants to hush you up for the sake of August. Don’t you think August deserves to go down for this – well, don’t you? In fairness to Yorkie. Yorkie was the scapegoat in all this.’

  ‘It’s the way of the world,’ Chas shrugged. An all-too familiar echo endorsed this platitude in my poor brain. Well, Louise, it’s the way of the world.

  ‘Do you see us losing out here?’ Chas said. ‘Just get on with your job, Louise, and keep your head down.’

  I had just got used to it again, or as used to it as I could, under the circumstances, when they br
ought in another sudden death, another male of sixty odd years. As soon as I unzipped the bag, I knew what he had died of: heart: a hollow muscular organ that by its rhythmic contraction acts as a force pump maintaining the circulation of the blood … So the Chambers Dictionary put it, so Harvey had established some three hundred years ago from his carefully-studied dissections. Heart failure: (inability of the heart to perform adequately often leading to) cessation of the heartbeat and death.

  I could go on, I thought, as I peeled back the rest of the bag so Chas could start declaiming for the tape recorder. Stolen: past participle of steal. to take the property of another; to come or go secretly or unobtrusively; to take without leave, especially secretly or by force and with intent to keep; to appropriate entirely to oneself or beyond one’s proper share. I had been here before.

  Booted and gowned, Chas made the incision and peeled back the chest so that the breastbone was exposed. I stood miserably by, trying not to look at the purple face tilted upwards slightly on the block support as the Big Red Boss cut out the heart and lifted it up in his bloody gloves, then took it to the scales to weigh it. This weighing is just obsessive, I thought, although I knew why it had to be done: comparing organ weights was a way of establishing norms. This heart was clearly abnormal. Chas was dictating something about a blockage in one of the chambers. I shut my ears and walked over to the bench to look for sutures. These days, he put viscera back post haste. He might slice a bit off for the microscope, but the call on jars was not what it had been.

  ‘Shall I close?’ I called over to him. ‘Have you done yet?’

  ‘Well, cause was definitely heart failure.’ Chas left the heart in the scales and came over to me, pulling off his reddened gloves and throwing them into the bin.

  ‘Yes, close,’ he said, looking back at the stiff. ‘And make sure he’s tidy.’ He winked at me. ‘There’s a copy of The Express still on Sara Fell’s desk. Stuff him with that.’

  The running joke amongst the mortuary staff was to stuff the toffs with The Times, the student suicides with copies of The Guardian, medallion men with number one haircuts with The Sun, etc. Wearily, I fetched the newspaper and screwed it into stuffing balls to fill the cavity, but I couldn’t go through with it. It wasn’t funny anymore. It had never been funny. Death wasn’t funny, it was dreadful and mighty and it suffocated me.

  ‘You can’t handle this, can you?’ Chas said.

  ‘I find the coronaries difficult, you know, after …’

  ‘So why ask me if you could close? I’ll close, Louise. Go home.’

  ‘I can’t do that.’

  ‘Why not? You think I’m going to eat the fucking thing?’ He gestured towards the heart, still waiting in the scales.

  ‘I can’t just give up on it,’ I said. ‘It’s been a bloody awful week. I’m doing pretty well.’

  ‘Sure you are. You deserve a medal.’ He started scrubbing furiously at his hands.

  I tweaked the toe-tag on the corpse. John Moriarty, Wesley Flats, East One.

  ‘Poor sod. He had this coming to him for a long time,’ Chas said. ‘I expect his notes will bear that out – that is if he ever bothered to see his doctor. They should by rights have picked this up.’ He looked at his watch. ‘The Coroner’s Officer was supposed to be following this up. I don’t know where to check him out. It seems he had no relatives.’

  The bell went again. ‘Maybe that’s him now.’ I lifted the heart from the scales, exactly like a butcher making sure he gives good measure. The chest was peeled right back. Without looking at Moriarty’s dead face, I put his heart back into the hole and drew the edges of the wound across it like a yellow blanket, checking for lumps and hollows.

  ‘There,’ I said, looking back at Chas for approval. ‘How’s that?’

  The Coroner’s Officer was watching me, an amused look on his face. Beside him, a uniformed policeman was trying not to retch. This one was very young. An older officer – female – was talking to Chas.

  ‘It was just a mistake,’ Chas was saying. ‘We thought we’d stored it, then it turns out it went to the incinerator after all.’

  ‘So there were twenty-six items missing, Doctor, not twenty-seven, as you originally thought? And they have all been accounted for now?’

  ‘Happens a lot in this business,’ the Coroner’s Officer said by way of general comment. Like most of his colleagues, he was a semi-retired cop. He came over to the section table and nodded. ‘Looks like this one’s on the City,’ he said.

  ‘You can’t find any next of kin?’ I asked, fetching more suture.

  ‘No. Not a sausage.’

  ‘That about wraps it up then, I think,’ said the woman officer. ‘We don’t know yet what will happen about the evidence, but forensics are saying they’ve no room to store them over there.’

  Chas shook his head. ‘Out of my hands now.’

  ‘That Yorkie won’t be coming out for a very long time,’ the Coroner’s Officer said confidently. ‘I always thought he had a screw loose.’

  ‘Not as loose as August Stockyard,’ Chas said. A loose cannon, I thought, that was August.

  ‘I’d like to get him back in here,’ Chas carried on. ‘Lock him in overnight with some of the stiffs.’

  ‘August would probably enjoy that,’ I said quietly, and went on stitching Moriarty. He looked at peace now, not like that other one, the one with the blackened face, the one that dandled the dead baby in its arm and came to me at night, to sing a lullaby. They could search all the cemeteries for Eddie, but I knew where he was. He was inside me, hooting and laughing, having his revenge.

  Chas looked at his watch. ‘Let me know when you can take this one,’ he said to the Coroner’s Officer. I had finished stitching Moriarty. ‘We’ve got our own storage problems right here.’

  ***

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Four weeks went by, slower and less intense than the week of Eddie’s passing. We logged a hundred and sixteen corpses but stored only thirteen jars, which was something of a record. New brooms, I thought, looking at Chas. He had moved me over to slide-labelling work for the time being, which was more responsible work, and slightly better paid, although, for me, less interesting than prepping and closing corpses. I felt I had a duty to the dead in their entirety, not to random bits of tissue on a piece of glass. Chas could not keep me out of the cutting room for long, whatever he was thinking.

  But he himself was spending less and less time in there. A new pathologist had joined us, a New Zealander, who permitted no jokes around the dead and dictated her PM reports in what I thought an affectedly reverential tone, like a vicar intoning at a funeral. Although she refused to allow her technician to perform eviscerations, she rarely closed the bodies up, a procedure considered demeaning to most pathologists, in any case. I was happy to do it for her, but not as happy as I had been before the day they brought in Eddie. The winds of change had blown too fast and too cold for me in our part of the hospital. Working with Chas, after our Eddie-inspired adventures, was becoming a terrible strain, like carrying on with two people at once and getting caught out in the lies. I had slept with both of my bosses, and buried neither. I had definitely not moved on.

  And then the black-edged envelope of finest vellum landed on my doormat. It contained a stiff square card, inviting me to the Interment, at the Winter Solstice, of Edvard Maria Kronenberg, MP.

  I called August straight away to check. ‘Eddie was not an MP at the time of his death,’ I said.

  ‘You’re a devil for detail, Louise,’ he said. ‘It looks better, doesn’t it? More dignified.’

  ‘Are you sure? Can I be quite sure this is genuine?’

  ‘Call Gaia if you don’t believe me. Time to commit old Eddie to the sod. The more the merrier.’

  I made a mental note to invite Mafalda. ‘Is it really going to be at Chas’s sister’s place?’

  ‘Call Chas’s sister. But hurry up, Louise. She’ll be fully booked for Solstice. Lovely woman, Anastasia.’


  ‘Aren’t you going on trial, or something?’ I asked. But I knew that the charges against August for his part in the organs affair were in the process of being quashed. As usual with August, someone else would carry the can. Yorkie was still on remand.

  ‘It’s down in Devon,’ I told Chas, when I showed him the card that morning at work. ‘I was wondering if I should try to book in overnight at your sister’s B and B. August said she’d be full.’

  ‘You want me along for the ride?’

  ‘If you like,’ I said, embarrassed. ‘But I can stay in the mansion.’

  ‘Sure. I’ll sort it with Stasia. You need closure, Louise,’ he said, and gave me a funny smile.

  So he took me down to Devon on the Harley, a double set of thermal underwear inside my leathers. The grounds of the house were full of what Chas called Space Cadet Craft: a series of brightly-painted vans and trucks, the odd horse and cart, even an old steam engine. A couple of benders had been erected near the old princess’s grave, and the party looked as though it was set to go on all night.

  ‘Wassail!’ Stasia called, as we arrived. She looked as though she’d had a few already. Whatever was in her cup, it had done wonders for her confidence. She looked Chas straight in the eye. ‘This is a festive occasion,’ she told him. ‘Be happy!’

  We followed her into the kitchen where Chas drank a shot of vodka and started baiting Gustav, Stasia’s partner, over the vegan dishes he was cooking in the Aga stove. He was a short man with a puff of white hair like dandelion fluff. His skin was the whitest I had ever seen. He looked as though he had anaemia.

  ‘I fancy eggs on toast,’ Chas said, but Gustav wrinkled his nose and answered that eggs were the worst thing you could eat because of their negative karma. ‘An egg,’ he said, ‘contains an infinity of beings.’

  ‘What about a nut?’ Chas pursued.