Morpho

by Philip Palmer

  Instead, he found a pub and tried to get drunk. That, too, proved impossible. After fifteen pints he was barred by an angry and bewildered landlord, but he was still icily sober.

  Forgive me, Ursula.

  ‘Sorry to keep you waiting,’ said the younger copper with the blond hair and the steely blue eyes.

  Hayley knew damn well that he wasn’t sorry. Not one bit. He was one of those whippet-lean types, with a gaze like a headmaster crushing the will of a first former who has dared to jog down the corridor.

  She kept her good eye focused on the centre of the younger copper’s face, and hoped the bad eye didn’t drift.

  ‘Just a few questions, lass,’ said the older copper, in bluff, friendly tones. He was heavily set, with a huge beer belly and an unruly head of black hair, and a trustworthy look. His accent was local. He was smiling at her encouragingly, in a father-figure kind of a way. Hayley took against him instantly.

  ‘Do we have to do this?’’ she sneered. ‘I made a mistake, right, end of story.’

  ‘Let’s just take a few details, madam, if you don’t mind,’ the younger copper said, briskly. His accent was also Yorkshire, but he sounded posh to her. ‘I’m DS Smith, this is DC Barraclough.’ The younger one out-ranked the older one, she noted; bet that stung. ‘Can you confirm your name and age and occupation?’

  ‘Hayley. Hayley Faith Bradley, twenty-six. I’m a makework temporary contract might as well be bloody slave labour gofer.’

  ‘That’s not an actual job title.’

  ‘I’m assistant to the mortuary technician.’

  ‘How long have you worked in the mortuary?’

  She shrugged, thought back. ‘Six months.’

  ‘And can you tell us about the events that took place on your shift? Just start at the beginning, take us through it.’

  Hayley, you daft bitch – don’t forget to lie.

  ‘Nothing to say, like. Reflex cadaveric spasm. Gases in the gut. I freaked out. Ran to the office, told the boss. He told me it was – he laughed his bollocks off, to be honest – told me it was reflex cadaveric spasms, caused by gases in the gut. I felt so daft. Sorry, sorry.’ She was blinking now, that old habit was back. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Just tell us what you saw.’

  ‘I saw – the body –’

  Oh fucking hell.

  She remembered: The body sitting up. Still wearing its bloody clothes from the crash, the face bloodied and scarred, the throat jaggedly cut, the eyes staring, saying: ‘Please, whoever you are, help me!’

  ‘I ah.’ Hayley took a breath. She couldn’t risk coming across as a crazy woman. ‘The post mortem was due to be performed at 4pm. My job was to strip the body and prepare the instruments. Then it –’

  Hayley remembered: The dead woman’s hand reaching out, fumbling for contact, her fingers splayed...

  ‘Then,’ Hayley said, ‘the body seemed to twitch and I thought I heard a groan and I panicked. So I went to see my boss and he laughed, I told you all about that.’

  ‘That’s your immediate boss, Larry Braxton. ‘

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Chief mortuary technician.’

  ‘He’s the only mortuary technician, I’m just the assistant.’

  ‘There’s no chance the body could have been, like, alive?’ said the older one, with an attempt at a genial twinkle.

  Hayley made a ‘duh’ face.

  But in fact, that’s what she had thought at first. That they’d fucked it up at A&E. And she’d said so to Larry and to the pathologist, and to one of the doctors who had come down for something.

  And then everyone had started bullshitting her, using that annoying grown-up tone. Saying Oh no! A thing like that could never happen here, not in our hospital.

  You silly girl, Hayley.

  Ah, another trip to the hospital for stupid children.

  You are such a retard!

  Mam, shut up! Don’t tell me –

  Hayley knew a cover up when she saw one. That’s why she’d called the cops.

  But in the twenty minutes before the cops arrived, the pathologist had explained the medical reality to Hayley, with painstaking care.

  ‘Now listen carefully, Hayley.’ Sweet smile.

  Oh God. This again.

  The body, Hayley was told at length, had been partially decapitated after hitting the windscreen at speed. An artery in the victim’s neck had been severed and blood loss was very severe. After being pronounced dead at A&E the body had lain lifeless on a hospital trolley for more than four hours. Rigor mortis had subsequently set in.

  Mistakes happen, but no one ever recovers from that kind of dead, the pathologist gently explained. And so Hayley – bless her – was making a fool of herself.

  ‘Watching too many scary movies, perhaps’ was the phrase that stung the most.

  ‘Answer the question please,’ said the older copper. ‘Could the body have been alive?’

  ‘No,’ said Hayley. ‘Course not, mate. The PM has been rescheduled, it goes ahead tomorrow morning. End of story, like.’

  The younger one shrugged. False alarm, waste of time.

  ‘Thank you for your assistance.’

  ‘No probs.’

  Hayley stood up.

  The younger one was staring oddly at her. She guessed it was her hair. It was purple today, with lime green highlights: a ghastly combination.

  Pissed off at this attention, she licked her lips, to give him a better look at her tongue stud. That freaked out most blokes, though a few loved it.

  But she knew it was the eye. No matter what she did to her appearance, blokes homed in on the drifting dead eye. It was not, hand on heart, her best feature.

  ‘Take care of yourself, love,’ the older one said. DC Barraclough was his name, she recalled. He was looking at her too, but not unkindly.

  ‘Are we done?’

  ‘We’re done,’ Barraclough said firmly.

  ‘Right then,’ she said, and she turned and with a few brisk strides was gone. Out of their fucking hair.

  In the corridor she stopped and took a breath.

  And she remembered the lips that didn’t move, pleading with her:

  ‘Save my baby.’

  ‘Sweetheart, please don’t do that ever again,’ Larry said to Hayley, half an hour later.

  Larry was a broad man; that’s the first thing you noticed about him. Short, stocky, bald, tanned, with strong beefy arms.

  ‘I won’t – I didn’t mean to – I’m sorry, Larry.’

  ‘You made us all look like prats.’ His words were harsh, but as always his tone was gentle.

  ‘Just panicked. Sorry.’

  Larry nodded, eventually.

  ‘Have they gone now?’

  ‘No. They want to view the body.’

  Hayley was startled. ‘Why?’

  Larry made a face: how the fuck should I know?

  ‘You’re so good to me, Larry,’ Hayley babbled.

  He grinned, shyly. ‘Someone has to look after you, right?’

  ‘I appreciate it.’

  ‘No need. Only too happy.’ He was red with embarrassment now. Good old Larry. Where would she be without him?

  There was a knock at the office door. The older cop, Barraclough, opened the door, wanting attention. Larry got up and joined him, without a backwards glance.

  Hayley was left behind. She dithered. Her curiosity was killing her, like a toothache.

  I’ll be quick about it.

  She moved around and sat in Larry’s chair. She dabbed a key to unsleep the computer. Typed a user name: LBRAXTON59. Typed a password: MICKEY98. Larry’s dog, and the dog’s birth year. Then she typed a patient name.

  CARTER, JANE ALLISON.

  A PDF file appeared; she opened it. She scrolled down the file. Body brought in to Wetherby A & E Wednesday 25th of June at 10.30am, after failed attempts at resuscitation by paramedics in the ambulance. Brain damage was considered to be irreversible. The death was called at 10.45am.
The body was then taken to the seventh floor. Following the new protocols, a CT scan was performed, and also an MRI and then – Hayley felt a surge of interest.

  The body had already been autopsied, electronically.

  Hayley carried on looking. A 3D computer-modelled image of the body flicked on to the screen. It was a remarkable portrait of the entirety of a human being, like Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man. Except you could see the inside of the body as well as the outside. Hayley knew how to read it; she zoomed and toggled.

  Larry trudged with the coppers into the cadaver room. Part of him was enjoying this. Any disruption to the daily grind was worth something.

  ‘I do have a job to do, you know,’ Larry grumbled, out of habit.

  ‘Just routine, sir,’ DS Smith said, in the same tone another man might use to say fuck off and die.

  ‘Yeah yeah.’

  ‘Thank you for your assistance, sir,’ Barraclough chipped in.

  ‘Whatever.’

  Larry walked them to the cold chamber. He yanked the drawer open. The body of CARTER, JANE ALLISON rolled out on its metal tray, and slid on to the trolley in a single smooth movement. Larry pushed the switches and the crossed arms of the hydraulic trolley lowered. The corpse descended to hip level.

  ‘Help yourself.’

  The older copper, Barraclough, zippered open the white body bag, revealing the face of the RTA victim. Larry glimpsed blood and gristle and looked away.

  ‘You should wear gloves.’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ Barraclough said, tersely.

  Barraclough pulled the zipper down further, exposing the bloody mess of the torso.

  ‘She wanted for something?’

  ‘We’re pursuing lines of investigation,’ said DS Smith, with a thin, false smile.

  Larry gave them an ‘abashed’ look. ‘Sorry about that, earlier, with the girl like. We take what we get, you see. Last year we had an albino boy, he hardly spoke. Like a bloody ghost.’ Larry shook his head, bemoaning the incompetence of his staff past, present and future.

  Barraclough opened up his shoulder bag, took out a live-scan machine. No bigger than a credit card reader. Calmly, with practised ease, Barraclough fingerprinted the corpse’s right hand using the scanner. He was methodical. In the old days he’d have used an ink roller for this process and gone home with black marks on his fingers.

  ‘Who identified the body?’ Smith asked.

  ‘No one yet.’

  ‘No one?’

  ‘There’s a husband, apparently. Someone left a message. That’s all I know. ‘

  Smith looked at Barraclough.

  Barraclough took a deep breath through his nose; exhaled through his mouth. Then again. Then he nodded. Smith acknowledged with the faintest of facial movements.

  Larry saw all this but thought nothing of it.

  He didn’t realise that these two had been tracking and controlling this woman for more than twenty years. He didn’t know she’d been tagged, and told where to live, and who to live with, since just after World War II. He had no idea that in 21st century Britain such a state of abject slavery could still exist, or be state-sanctioned. He just thought the two coppers were making a mountain out of a, well, a nothing very much at all.

  Hayley kept reviewing the findings. Maybe there was a mistake. A smudge on the screen? She wiped the computer screen with her thumb. No smudge.

  Christ on a bloody stick. What am I going to do?

  Answer: Nothing. Pretend this never happened. Pretend you didn’t see –

  No, fuck that.

  Let’s think about this logically. Problem: No one can know I’m accessing these files. Or I’ll be in the shit. However, I can’t keep what I’ve found out a secret. It’s too big a thing. Front page story stuff.

  So maybe I could make an anonymous call? But who do I call? And what can I possibly say that doesn’t make me sound like a bloody nutter?

  On the screen, in full magnification, was the MRI image of the brain of Carter, Jane Allison. It had a shadow inside. An object the size of a small egg. A tumour? Or a bomb? Hayley had seen the episode of Spooks in which –

  She heard a sound at the door. The computer was put to sleep in an instant. Hayley took a handful of forms from the in tray and pretended to read them. Larry appeared at the door; peeking his head around the frame, but not his body. An oddly comic effect.

  ‘You still here?’

  ‘Evidently.’

  ‘You can knock off. Try and behave tomorrow, okay?’

  ‘Yes, Larry. Thanks.’

  Larry sighed, with exaggerated indulgence, and withdrew his head.

  Wanker, Hayley thought. And immediately felt guilty. He might be fat and bald and gross but Larry had always been lovely to her. Really kind. She ought to be more grateful.

  Hayley at ten years of age. Brown hair that didn’t sit up right and didn’t take product. Freckles like cancer patches. The eyepatch. The attitude. Sent home from school yet again, this time for calling her teacher a ‘cunt’.

  ‘Do you even know what that is, you stupid, offensive, waste-of-space little brat?’ her Mam had asked her. Mam was half pissed, of course, it was nearly half past four by this point.

  ‘It’s what you are. Mam the cunt!’

  If you expect and anticipate a punch to the face, Hayley always found, it actually hurts just as much. Was that one of life’s lessons, maybe?

  ‘How can I help you guys?’ Detective Inspector Taylor asked, warily.

  Barraclough said nothing. He just offered up his warrant card. Smith did the litany: ‘I’m DS Smith, this is DC Barraclough. We’re from Wetherby nick.’

  When he was a young man, Harry Barraclough used to help the village constable light the gas lamps. There were two, one outside the farrier’s and the other outside the pub. That was a job that was – lighting the lamps!

  Now, he worked for Leeds CID and he carried a mobile phone and used the internet on a daily basis. That’s how it goes. Time passes; things change. Harry remembered the old days fondly, but that was an eternity ago now, or so it seemed.

  It was all very different now. Ever since the day, back in 1956 it was, when there was a knock on the door of his cottage, and when he opened it, instead of seeing the Queen standing there clutching a telegram with a big smile on her face, as he was fondly and daftly expecting, he saw two men with those weird electricity-guns who pulsed him to the ground and took him into custody. Anxious, they later explained, to find out why an ordinary bloke like him bore no visible signs of ageing.

  Harry tried, he really did, not to be bitter about how much his life had changed since the powers that be discovered he was immortal.

  ‘Pleased to meet you. I’m DI Taylor.’

  ‘Yeah we know that.’

  Taylor shrugged. He shook hands with each of them in turn. Smith and Barraclough took the seats on offer.

  Harry took the measure of the other copper with a swift glance. Smooth, silver-haired. Easygoing, verging on lazy, was Harry’s guess.

  ‘We’re looking into an RTA that happened yesterday morning, sir. Jean Carter, sir.’ Smith said, brusquely.

  Smith was the youngest man in the room, and junior in rank to Taylor. But he carried with him an air of effortless authority. And when he said ‘sir’, he might as well have said ‘fuck you’. Harry was used to it; most folk weren’t.

  Taylor picked up a file – the only file on his desk. He riffled through it.

  ‘Jean Allison Carter,’ he said, reading from his notes. ‘Hit by a lorry. Head on collision. There’s a depot, you see, just outside Leeds, the lorry was heading for the main road. She took the corner at speed, it wasn’t his fault. Front of the car was totally caved in. Her air bag didn’t work. It was an old car, she’d never had it checked.’

  ‘Why?’ Smith’s manner was abrupt, as if he spent his life talking to idiots and was getting fed up of it.

  ‘Why what?’ Taylor said patiently.

  ‘Why did she take the corner at spe
ed?’

  ‘Bad driving?’

  ‘Was there a vehicle in pursuit?’

  Taylor stared. ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘Skid marks?’

  Taylor checked his notes again. ‘We did a skid mark analysis to determine the speed of the respective vehicles. You’re welcome to read the report from the Collisions Investigation Unit. A reconstruction was performed, we estimate that Carter was driving at eighty-five, maybe ninety miles an hour on a winding country road. The lorry was doing forty-nine, below the legal limit for the road. Carter was –’

  ‘Yes but where was she going? And from where?’

  ‘She lived in Harrogate, she was on the road to Leeds.’

  ‘We need to inspect the scene.’

  ‘You’re better off looking at the photos and the laser scans.’

  ‘We need to inspect the scene.’

  Barraclough nodded in a friendly fashion to Taylor. His manner silently disowned Smith’s flat, annoyed tone.

  Taylor nodded back at Barraclough. No sweat, I’m used to this; that was his nod. His tone remained friendly. ‘I’ll get one of my men to drive you out there. What’s the context?’

  ‘Ongoing investigation.’

  Taylor shrugged, not taking offence. ‘Lorry driver not to blame, as I say. He’s in shock, really. ‘

  ‘We’ll need his name and address, as well as the details of his place of work. Sir.’

  ‘No worries.’ Taylor leaned back, relaxed, inviting confidences. ‘What was she up to then, our lady driver?’

  Smith smiled thinly. Said nothing.

  Barraclough favoured Taylor with a smile. ‘She’s red flagged as part of a major CID case, sir. We were hoping to interview her.’

  ‘Too late now.’

  ‘Aye, that’s true enough.’

  The two men shared a moment.

  Smith glared at Taylor; all business.

  ‘I’ll get you those details now,’ Taylor said. ‘Just wait here.’