The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 9

by Maxim Jakubowski

  “What the fuck’s going on?” She looked at the dent on the fender, where Craven had hit the girl … throwing her little body in the air.

  “What happened?”

  I let her get inside the Toyota. She looked at Craven rocking to and fro and yelled at me again, “Tell me what the fuck is going on …”

  “Take this, keep it on him.” She took the SIG Sauer from me.

  “What is this?”

  “Never mind … Did you get the money?”

  Lois wrestled the rucksack off her back, stayed calm. “Every dime … let’s hope we hold on to it.”

  I gripped the wheel tighter; I was already upping the revs as we sped into the rain.

  Lois spoke, “What the fuck happened back there?”

  Craven was stirring. “We’re finished … the girl. That poor fucking girl.”

  “What’s he on about?”

  I tried to keep the needle below eighty, but I was desperate to put some distance between us and the scene.

  I felt a cold gun on my ear. “I’m not going to ask again,” said Lois.

  “We killed a fucking little girl … she was in the fucking road!”

  Lois turned back to Craven. He was still cradling his head in his hands as I yelled, “You fucking killed her … you dumb bastard! You killed that girl when you spoke to Pam in the diner.”

  “No. No. No!” Craven mumbled and sobbed.

  “You burned our luck … You fucking burned us!”

  Lois couldn’t take it any more. She exploded, “You spoke to her? You fucking spoke to the bitch!” She levelled the gun at him; I turned, saw her eyes widen, her breathing stilled. I tried to grab the gun – her shot broke the windscreen. I went to right the wheels but the car was on the verge already. I pumped the brakes but it only made matters worse. We fell into an uncontrollable skid.

  The second the car turned over on its roof, I thought we were all dead. As we rolled to a stop I wished I had died … Outside I tried to find the courage to go and take the SIG from Lois, but I knew Pam had been right about me all along, I was going nowhere.

  A little girl had died, but I did nothing.

  Sometimes it was the thing to do.

  TERATOMA

  Keith McCarthy

  * * *

  JOHN BARCLAY, the buffoon, greets me the next morning.

  “Got a cracker for you, Doc.” He guffaws at this – not “laughs”, not “chuckles”, not “titters”, but actually, really guffaws: the phone line can barely contain this amount of merriment. He is a Coroner’s Officer and I have known many of these people. Most of them have been very good at a very difficult job; they have to deal with the bereaved, perhaps having to ask them difficult questions, perhaps having to tell them things they do not want to hear. John Barclay, though, wings it; he does not just cut corners, he rips them apart; he lies by omission, by commission and by inference; he does not pass the buck so much as make sure that it never even knows he is in the room; he is, as Carter, the mortuary technician, says, a right “see you next Tuesday”, only Carter says it in a rich Gloucestershire accent that I cannot hope, and would not dare, to essay.

  “Have you?” I say. I am wary.

  “A right loony.”

  As I have just said, most Coroner’s Officers I have had the pleasure of working with have been exemplary; one used to be regularly on the verge of tears after speaking with next of kin, because of the empathy he could not help but feel. John Barclay does not consider empathy to be part of the job description; he looks on death as a source of amusement, as a substrate for his chortling.

  “Really?” I am in my office. It is Monday morning and it is October and I don’t want to be here. I could have taken compassionate leave, which is the type of leave you never want to have to take and the type you certainly don’t want to talk about when you do; I have decided not to, because it is better to work through these things.

  This time it is definitely more of a chuckle as he explains, “She topped herself because she heard voices coming from her stomach.”

  And the phone line again has to bear the strain of his inane hilarity.

  My secretary comes in. Joanna has the curse of being older than her name; a Joanna should be between forty and fifty, yet this one is sixty-three, cursed to have had avant-garde parents. She is not particularly efficient and irritatingly maudlin; work, to this Joanna, is an extension of her social life. I can see from her lax eyes and developing jowls that she is filled to the quivering brim with concern for me, and this is nothing more than an emetic to me.

  How does she know, I wonder. Clearly she does, though. I dare not let her guide the course of the conversation, so I say at once, “Morning, Joanna. John Barclay was just telling me about this morning’s PM.”

  Thankfully, I succeed in this misdirection. Her opening mouth closes again and, holding the paperwork out, she says, “There’s only the one. I expect you won’t be sorry to hear that.”

  As I take it, I say, “No, I’m not.”

  She does not leave; I can see her looking at me with that soppy look that I know so well; Joanna has never moved on from motherhood and never will. She trails maternal instincts like snail slime. I see she is going again to say something commiserating and so once more I pre-empt her. “I’d better go to the mortuary and identify the body so that Carter can start.”

  Her opening mouth closes again. I am aware that I am being brusque, but her sympathy is a weapon that I can use against her. I stand and she nods and smiles weakly – she does everything weakly, though – and she precedes me out of the office.

  Miss Valerie Templeman

  DOB: 14.4.1965

  Age: 45

  DOD: 14.4.2010

  Address: Flat 3, Millikan Road, Cheltenham,

  Gloucestershire GL51 9QQ

  Circumstance: Miss Templeman was found hanging in her bedroom by her boyfriend, Steven Damon, who had become concerned when she failed to attend a dinner date and had not been answering her phone. She had improvised a noose from an old brown leather belt. Mr Damon says that she had been acting very oddly for the past few weeks, claiming that there was a spirit inside her stomach that was talking to her.

  From the GP: Miss Templeman was lately a frequent attender at the surgery with gynaecological problems including subfertility and irregular menses. She was due to attend at the gynaecology outpatients department at Cheltenham General Hospital next month. She had recently become very depressed about her inability to conceive a baby. She had been having aural hallucinations of a spirit living within her for which she had been prescribed citalopram.

  Hangings are for men, usually, although that is far from exclusive; woman prefer tablets, something a little more sedate. The bloody, extroverted deaths are almost always men, or occasionally the severely psychotic woman. It’s the way of the world.

  Carter has the body out on the dissection table, although he hasn’t taken it out of the body bag. As I walk past his office he comes out and follows me into the dissection room. I put on some disposable gloves while he unzips the white bag and pulls the sides down away from the body. Tied around her left wrist and to her right big toe are labels; I compare the details on these – name, date of birth and address – with those on the post mortem request that has been faxed through from the Coroner’s office. Satisfied that we have the right body, I say, “OK, you can start.”

  Carter is in his mid-fifties with a bushy, greying moustache and long silvered hair. We get on well, and he knows me better than to ask how I am. He says, “You got anything to do upstairs first?” He is referring to the other tasks of a consultant cellular pathologist, such as dissecting or reporting surgical specimens. I want to hide down in the mortuary, though, and say, “Nothing that can’t wait for a while.”

  I retreat into the changing room where I send a surreptitious text to Anna - How are you? xxx – before changing. At the same time, as Ken Bruce earns his crust by providing brainless entertainment over the radio waves, Carter strip
s the clothes from Miss Valerie Templeman; he does this roughly, without thought for either dignity or decorum. By the time I am in my scrubs, she is naked. She is slightly overweight but otherwise nondescript; all corpses are nondescript, though. The belt has been cut from the neck and is in the body bag with her. Around her neck is a faint, broad mark that has reddened but barely indented the skin. I take the belt and compare it with the mark; it fits, more or less. The mark is deepest – but at that, only a millimetre or so – just beneath the angle of the jaw on the left-hand side, fading on the exactly opposite side. This pattern is what one expects when the body has been hung and not strangled, which I have to consider; the blood has pooled in the lower half of the body – “post mortem lividity is caudal in distribution”, in the jargon – which is another reassuring sign (at least, if you are a pathologist). There are no other significant signs to detect; no ligature marks around the wrists or ankles, no signs to suggest that she was not alone when she died.

  Happy that I am not going to make a prat of myself and blunder into a murder, I give the nod to Carter and he eviscerates her.

  e-viss-er-ate.

  One hell of a word for one hell of a thing to do, yet Carter does it once, twice, even three or four times a day, and he always does it quickly and efficiently, and without any deep thoughts. And I watch him do it, as I have done many times before, again without any serious consideration of what is happening. From the carcase – because now it is really only that – he lifts the “pluck”.

  Pluck.

  One hell of another word, only in a different sense. Anglo-Saxon rather than Latin, I fancy. How many people appreciate that all the organs bar the brain hang together from the tongue? How many people want to appreciate that?

  Valerie Templeman’s pluck, though, is different, for there is spherical grey mass at its base. Carter lifts it effortlessly – it is quite heavy, you know – from the body cavity, transferring it to a stainless steel bowl, then taking this to the dissection board where I am to do my bit. Carter says, “She’s got a tumour.”

  Ken Bruce prattles on, unaware of what he is talking over.

  I already know what the tumour is and so, when Carter asks, I say confidently, “It’s a teratoma.”

  Teratoma.

  Pathology is chock-a-block with interesting words, you see.

  This one is derived from Teros¸ which is Greek for “monster”. A teratoma is a tumour that is derived from the egg and, because eggs develop into all the tissues of the body, so the teratoma can grow anything. Most often, they grow skin and so you get a cyst which is filled with grease and hair, and makes the strongest of pathologists want to puke. When you look under the microscope, you will usually see small amounts of other things like bone and gristle; often there will be a bit of brain, muscle, fat, gut lining; rarely there will be retina, liver or thyroid. Disgusting rather than monstrous. It is benign and of passing interest only, because it did not kill her; death is so much more interesting than all else, you see.

  It is my job to determine why Valerie Templeman died; she appears to have hanged herself, but until all other possible causes are excluded, until I can be sure that she didn’t die of brain haemorrhage just before the noose tightened, that she didn’t swallow kettle descaler as well as gobble down some potassium cyanide, no assumptions can be made. Accordingly, although it seems obvious that she died from hanging, there is no cause for her death until I have completed all my investigations.

  I examine all the major organs, including her brain, which Carter has extracted from its osseous nook. I ask him to get blood and urine for toxicological analysis. This done, he labels the containers, then says, “How’s things, Doc?” He says it casually, so that it is bearable. I say, “Fine, thanks, Carter,” which is the end of that, because he nods and gets on with his job. Again, I wonder how people know.

  At the end, it is all as I have hoped: non-specific changes consistent with hanging, and nothing natural of significance. All the main stuff is done now. I examine the gut without opening it, slice into the bladder, slice into the uterus, then turn to the teratoma. The knife goes in and, as I suspected, sebum and black, coarse hair billow out. “Yuk,” says Carter. The grease is terrible, clings to everything with a stale, rancid odour; even through thick disposable gloves, the feel of slime is all too apparent. I hold it under the tap to clean it out, which is when I see that I was wrong, that this is no ordinary benign teratoma.

  As the grease releases its cloying grip on the inside wall of the cyst, there comes to light a small baby.

  “Anna?” I say as soon as the ringing in my ear stops, but her mobile just goes to answerphone. I hate it when it goes to answerphone, but I have to try to communicate with her. Impatiently I wait for the recorded voice to take me through its automatic inanities, then, “Anna? Are you all right? I’m getting worried. Can you ring me?”

  I put the phone down and wonder why it is suddenly important to talk to her.

  Because you’re worried about her. Because she is severely depressed. Because she has just lost her baby. And that brings me back to the thing on my desk.

  Carter swears. He is good at swearing, has a rich vein of obscenity and vulgarity to mine, and does so enthusiastically at times. This time, it is with awe that he digs deep into profanity. I am too stunned to do or say anything; my brain is numbed; for a moment I cannot even reassemble the components of what my vision is telling me into a coherent whole. I am temporarily autistic, only slowly beginning to function properly once again.

  It is about eight centimetres only. It is shaped as a baby should be, with two arms and two legs, all of approximately appropriate length, a torso and a head. It lies at the base of the cyst, fused to a small, solid, partly calcified area at the small of the back. It is the head that is really … really … disturbing.

  It is slightly too large, and not quite right. The eyes are open, and that is not right either. The mouth is open, although thank the Lord there are no teeth; it looks as if it has been caught in the midst of a scream …

  I become aware of Carter talking to me.

  “… What is it, Doc?”

  Homunculus.

  That is the name, and they have been reported before, although they make hen’s teeth seem tediously commonplace in comparison. An entire being, somehow constructed by the random forces of neoplasia. An oddity, nothing more …

  I explain to Carter, who whistles. “Spooky, or what?” he says, then asks, “Is it male or female?” He is peering shamelessly at it as he asks.

  My voice is soft and far away as I reply, “Insofar as it’s anything at all, it’s female. It has to be. No sperm has ever been anywhere near it.”

  He straightens up. He does not seem to have noticed that I am having trouble; trouble breathing, trouble thinking, trouble in not screaming. “What are you going to do?”

  What, indeed? This rarest of rare phenomena is nothing to do with her death, and I am forbidden by the oh-so-sainted Human Tissue Act to do anything that is unconnected with satisfying the Coroner and the law of this free and liberal democracy, at least without written, informed consent from the next of kin, which is never really possible. And it’s horrible, too. It gives me the creeps, if truth be told (which it so rarely is). It should be returned to the body cavity – “reunited” is the correct term – and thereafter disposed of, in a “fitting manner”.

  Yet …

  And Anna’s name comes into mind. Her name and her pain and …

  In my mind I go back to the Coroner’s information. “… Aural hallucinations about a spirit living inside her’ …

  No. No, no, no, no …

  Why won’t Anna answer? I am afraid … I look again at the “homunculus” – a nasty word, shot through with nasty connotations – and try to be objective. It is just a freak of nature; it has never been alive, never will be, never could be. It is also just a coincidence that it should come into my life now.

  It has to be.

  Carter says, “Sham
e we’re not allowed to keep things like that any more. It would make a fantastic exhibit if we could put it in formalin.”

  I know Carter. Sooner or later it would occur to him to “disappear” the exhibit, perhaps make a nice little profit on it. I smile, therefore, and point out that it is no longer legal to do such things, not since the Human Tissue Act promised miscreants the possibility of a £5,000 fine and three years in chokey. He sighs, the very model of an honest academic thwarted by unnecessary bureaucracy.

  But, having said that …

  I say, “I’d like to photograph it, though, Carter. Put it in a jar of saline. I’ll ring the Coroner’s office to get them to contact the next of kin for consent.” Now, we cannot even take photographs without somebody’s say-so, you see.

  He obliges me.

  Joanna comes into my office; my face freezes into a smile of rigid insincerity. She says, “It’s the monthly management meeting in an hour. Are you going to go?”

  It is a reasonable question for a secretary to ask, yet I hear subtexts in it, and react accordingly. “Of course I am,” I reply too brusquely, and have to rely yet again on her sympathy to protect me from her reproach. And I don’t even want to go.

  She sees the homunculus on my desk and her face betrays all those emotions at which I know she is so good – shock, surprise, disgust … the list goes on. I say at once, “Interesting, isn’t it?”

  She says nervously (why nervously, I wonder?), “Yes … I suppose so.”

  “I’m going to ask permission to keep it.” I see something on her face that tells me she does not think that this is right. “As a pathological exhibit,” I hasten to explain. She nods, but it is born of enthusiasm, that nod. She leaves and I am alone with the prospect of the monthly management meeting, a sorry affair and one that no one normal can enjoy. Desultory conversation about the problems of staffing, the problems of decrepit equipment, the problems of the backlog, the problems of the problems. I am not even head of department any more, so could make a more or less plausible excuse for my absence, but it is important to me not to appear the invalid, the one who is marked by tragedy, the one who has problems.