by M. R. Hall
‘What’s her name?’
‘Abigail.’
She opened the fridge door – a heavy hunk of metal eight feet by four – and pulled out the drawer. She observed McAvoy instinctively cross himself as she reached down to pull the plastic back from the face. They both started at the sight that met them: the face staring up with empty eye sockets.
‘Dear God,’ McAvoy whispered.
Jenny flinched and looked away. ‘Sorry about that. She did have glass ones. Someone must have removed them.’
He leaned down for a closer examination. With her peripheral vision Jenny watched him examining every detail of the face, then tug back the plastic a little further to reveal the top portion of the torso.
‘No. It’s not Abigail,’ he said, straightening up. ‘She’d a dimple in her chin and a wee birthmark on the side of her neck. Thanks anyway.’
Jenny nodded, hesitating to look down again and cover the face.
‘Let me,’ McAvoy said, and pulled the sheet across before she could reach out a hand. ‘Nothing but dust once the soul’s departed – that’s what you’ve got to tell yourself.’ He pushed the drawer back into the cabinet. ‘Another torment the godless majority have to live with – thinking flesh and blood are all there is.’ He pulled the fridge door shut and glanced at the bodies lined up on trolleys along the corridor. ‘Leave an unbeliever down here for the night, he’d soon be crying out for his Maker.’ He flashed her a wicked smile. ‘I’ve not seen you before, have I?’
‘No.’ She pulled off the glove and dropped it in the bin.
‘New?’
‘Relatively.’
‘Some job for a woman.’ He studied her for a moment then nodded, as if having satisfied his curiosity. ‘Yes, I can see it now.’ His smile became kinder: a window to a gentler side of him, perhaps. ‘Oh well, don’t spend too much time with these fellas. See you around.’ He turned and walked away, tossing his hair away from his eyes, hands pushed deep into his coat pockets.
She stood and watched him until he’d gone, half-expecting him to steal something on the way out.
Jenny entered Dr Kerr’s office to find him busy at his computer, his scrubs replaced with a T-shirt that hugged his pecs. She guessed he was thirty or so and still single, with plenty of time to spend on himself.
‘Have we got rid of him yet?’ he said, firing off an email.
‘Yes. She wasn’t the one he was looking for.’
Dr Kerr swivelled on his chair to face her. She noticed he’d rearranged the furniture, and replaced the shelving and carpet. The row of textbooks on the shelf behind his desk looked new and unthumbed; next to them were a number of Men’s Health and Muscle and Fitness magazines.
‘Pleased to meet you, Mrs Cooper.’
He extended his hand. She tried and failed to match his powerful grip.
‘And you. I’ve had just about all I can take of dealing with locums.’
‘Then you’ll be glad to know I type my own post-mortem reports and like to get them out of the way before I go home each night.’
‘I see you’ve been got at already.’
‘No comment,’ he said, smiling.
Jenny realized the trace of accent she’d detected in his voice was Ulster. For some reason she found it reassuring: solid, reliable.
Dr Kerr said, ‘I noticed that your Jane Doe had been sitting around for a while, so I had a look at her this morning.’ He handed her a three-page report. ‘I wasn’t sure whether it was you or the police I should speak to first, but I saw on the file that you’ve opened an inquest.’
‘Opened and adjourned while I try to find out who she is.’
‘Aren’t the police interested?’
‘They will be if anything incriminating turns up. Till then they’re more than happy to farm out the legwork.’
He nodded, though his expression was one of surprise. Jenny hoped his pathology was better than his grasp of professional politics.
‘From an initial examination it’s impossible to say what killed her. Most of the internal organs were missing – seagulls, I read.’
‘Apparently so.’
‘There was some lung tissue left, enough to give a suggestion that the bronchi were distended . . .’
‘Meaning?’
‘Drowning is a possibility, but I couldn’t prove it. One thing that does interest me, though, is two nicks in the stomach side of the lumbar vertebrae. They could have been caused by the gulls, but equally I couldn’t rule out stab wounds.’
‘Is there no way of telling?’
‘Afraid not.’ He continued a little less confidently. ‘Two other things. Firstly, her teeth: no decay, no fillings, so dental records probably won’t help. And, secondly, I dissected her neck looking for evidence of strangulation. I didn’t find that, but she has an early-stage tumour on her thyroid gland. It was large enough that she may have begun to feel it. She might have gone to the doctor complaining of pressure on her windpipe.’
‘Thyroid cancer? What would have caused that?’
‘What causes any kind of cancer? Unless she had a dose of radiation or something it’s impossible to say.’
‘Radiation?’ She remembered the Crosby family and their daughter who worked at the decommissioned power station. ‘There’s a young woman missing who works at the Maybury nuclear plant, out on the Severn.’
‘Right. I was going to say that it’s the kind of tumour that’s most common in Eastern Europe, in the Chernobyl footprint. Her cheekbones have a touch of that Slavic look.’
‘The family’s arranging a DNA test. If that doesn’t turn up anything we could try something more sophisticated – geographical mineral analysis or whatever.’
‘Not on my budget, we can’t.’
‘We’ll see,’ Jenny said, with a half-smile. ‘We might persuade the police to pay for it.’
‘I guess I could rustle up a radiometer from somewhere – there’s some pretty accurate radiological data I could match her with. If she is from Eastern Europe, I might be able to get a rough location.’
‘Anything would be helpful.’ Jenny got up from her chair. ‘The sooner we ID her, the sooner you free up your fridge space.’
‘About that: couldn’t the body be moved to an undertaker’s or—’
Jenny cut in. ‘You’re on a permanent contract, right?’
‘Yes . . .’
‘Then you can afford to flex your muscles. If you don’t start making demands first they’ll bleed you dry – you’ll be stealing cutlery from the canteen to conduct your postmortems.’
‘It feels a bit early to start rocking the boat.’
She felt an almost maternal concern for him – not yet thirty and in charge of the repository of the hospital’s darkest secrets. ‘Listen, Andrew – can I call you that?’
‘Sure.’
‘They’ll give you a week, then the consultants will be on the phone trying to lean on you to cover up their mistakes and the management will be suggesting you do anything but record hospital infection as cause of death. Get corrupted once and you’re stuck with it for all time. Ask your predecessor.’
‘Right,’ he said uncertainly. ‘I’ll bear it in mind.’
The rain had passed and given way to a hard frost, which glinted on the tarmac as Jenny drove back towards home across the vast span of the Severn Bridge. The lights of the factories of Avonmouth to the left and Maybury to the right reflected off the flat water on a windless night. Reaching the far side and entering Wales, she waited for the tensions of the day to leave her as she slipped past Chepstow and plunged into the forest. The knots loosened a little, but somehow the sense of release wasn’t as profound tonight. Meeting Mrs Jamal and the ordeal of dealing with the Jane Doe had roused a stubborn anxiety that refused to let her enjoy the glimpses of a crescent moon through the skeletal trees.
She tried to analyse her feelings. Random, unjust and terrifying were the inadequate words which came to mind. Why, for the last three years of her life,
she had been haunted and occasionally overwhelmed by such deep and unsettling forces she was scarcely closer to knowing than when they had first made themselves felt. She had made some modest progress. Only six months before, she was limping through the days only with the help of handfuls of tranquillizers and bottles of wine. Dr Allen had helped her break both habits. She was medicated, but holding herself together: she functioned. And she had proved that the mask she hid behind was not as flimsy as she feared. In six months it hadn’t slipped. No one who didn’t know her history would ever guess.
Her pocket-sized stone cottage, Melin Bach, had lights at every window, meaning Ross was in. He’d taken to getting a lift home most evenings from a recently qualified English lecturer at his sixth-form college who lived further up the valley. From what she could tell, they passed their journey smoking cigarettes and listening to indie tracks they’d download and swap with each other. The teacher was as much of a kid as Ross.
‘Do we have to have every light on?’ she called up the stairs. Music pounded from his room: raw guitars and vocals that sounded like a weak mimic of the Stones. ‘What about the planet?’
‘It’s already screwed,’ Ross shouted back from behind the door.
Great. She hung up her coat. ‘Don’t suppose you thought about dinner?’
‘Nope’. The music got louder. Jenny retreated into the living room, slamming the door behind her.
She scooped up the plates covered with toast crumbs, dirty cups and glasses, and kicked aside the discarded trainers in the middle of the flagstone floor as she carried them into the tiny unmodernized kitchen at the back of the house. Her ex-husband had laughed when he’d seen it – his had cost £80,000 and been installed by a team of German craftsmen who had arrived in a Winnebago – which was precisely why she clung to her ancient Welsh dresser and the erratic coke-fired range which dated back, neighbours told her, to the early 1940s.
As usual, there wasn’t a scrap of food in the house. Ross had eaten everything except a jar of dried lentils and a packet of sugarless muesli some self-improving and misplaced instinct had urged her to buy the previous summer. She rooted around in the back of the cupboard and found only a can of evaporated milk and a mouldering jar of curry paste.
Ross thumped through the door wearing a combat jacket. He stood over six feet tall; her eyes were on a level with the underside of his chin.
‘You should shop online, get a home delivery. You must be the only person who doesn’t,’ Ross said and dropped an empty Pepsi can in the bin.
‘Hey – recycling.’
‘Yeah, right. Like that’s going to save us all.’ He headed back for the door. ‘I’m going out.’
‘Where?’
‘Karen’s. Her mum actually feeds her in the evenings.’
‘There’s nothing to stop you—’
‘Cooking? You have a panic attack every time I come in here.’
‘You never clean up after yourself.’
‘You wanted to live with a teenager. Reality check.’ He shrugged, gave a sarcastic smile, and left the room.
Jenny went after him. ‘How are you going to get there at this time of night?’
‘Walk.’
‘It’s freezing.’
‘So’s this place.’ He crashed through the door into the hall. ‘Steve called.’
‘What did he want?’
‘Didn’t say.’
Slam. He was out of the front door and off into the night.
Jenny let him go. She was feeling too fragile to face another verbal assault. She understood that pushing her away was part of his growing up, but that didn’t make it any easier to bear.
She contemplated her options: driving out to find a supermarket or sitting down hungry to clear her backlog of death reports before an early night. Neither appealed. She dropped into an armchair and tried to work out how she could organize her domestic life to keep Ross happy for the remaining eighteen months before he took off to university. She needed a system to replace the ad hoc trips to petrol station convenience stores. She needed to make the cottage more comfortable: it was all wood and stone; Ross preferred his friends’ charmless, carpeted, centrally heated homes. She needed to behave like a proper mother.
She had forced herself upstairs to tidy his tip of a bedroom when the doorbell rang. She peered cautiously around the curtain and felt a flood of relief: it wasn’t Ross returning to berate her, it was Steve.
She opened the door to find him standing on the doorstep in walking boots and thick coat, carrying a flashlight. Alfie, his sheepdog, was sniffing around the front lawn.
‘Haven’t seen you in a while,’ Jenny said, with an involuntary trace of reproachfulness.
He gave an apologetic smile. ‘I thought it was about time.’
‘You want to come in?’
‘I’m walking Alfie – he’s been cooped up all day. Thought you might want to come along. It’s a beautiful evening.’
They walked briskly up the steep, narrow lane with its high, enclosing hedges, and turned right onto the dirt track that led into a thousand acres of forest. Alfie skirted ahead of them, nose to ground, making forays into the undergrowth. Jenny stayed close to Steve, their arms brushing together but neither of them willing to reach for the other’s hand. Since they’d met the previous June they’d spent no more than half a dozen nights together and had only once discussed their ‘relationship’. They had come to no conclusion except that after ten years in the wilderness Steve was ready to go back and take his final exams to qualify as an architect. To make ends meet he’d rented his farmhouse to some weekenders from London and moved into a makeshift one-room apartment he’d cobbled together in the upper storey of the barn. He’d never suggested moving in with her and she’d never invited him to, but she couldn’t pretend she hadn’t thought about it. Living alone was manageable, but co-existing with a moody teenage son could be painfully lonely. There had been times when she’d longed for a man’s solid energy to dissolve the tension.
The frozen mud crunched beneath their feet. A tawny owl hooted and from deep in the trees another screeched in response.
Steve said, ‘You know what I love about coming out here at night – you never see a soul. Everyone’s stuck in front of the TV not realizing all this is outside their back door.’
It was a point of pride that he didn’t own a television and never had. Jenny had once told him that for a dogged anti-materialist he managed to find plenty of things to get competitive about it. He hadn’t got the joke.
‘Is that your idea of happiness, not seeing other human beings?’ she said.
‘I like the peace.’
‘Being alone frightens the hell out of most people.’
‘They must be frightened of themselves.’
‘Aren’t you ever? I am.’
‘No. Never.’
Another thing that changed about him: since he’d quit smoking grass he had a keener edge. He’d give straight answers where once he’d just shrugged or smiled. She liked the new attitude.
‘You don’t mind being in an office full of people all day?’
‘I survive. Most of us have a lot in common.’
‘I thought idealists always fell out with each other.’
‘Haven’t yet.’
Despite her cynicism she liked the idea of Steve and his self-styled ‘ecotect’ colleagues spending their days trying to make the world a more beautiful and harmonious place. Her work had always been one long fight and it showed no sign of letting up.
‘You don’t regret renting out the farm?’
‘I hate it, but it won’t last. Give it a year or two and I’ll take it all over again.’
‘You might like a change, or to build something from scratch.’
‘Who knows?’
His response surprised her. He had always talked about the farm as the one thing that gave meaning and stability to his life. The woods he worked and the vegetables he grew were his reality; everything else was a means of al
lowing him to remain there immersed in nature. She felt for a moment as if she didn’t know him, yet she’d prompted him: on some level she must have suspected.
‘You’d really consider moving?’
‘I’m open to change.’
‘Wow.’
He glanced at her. ‘You were the one who started it for me.’
‘Maybe I was just the excuse you needed?’
He looked away. ‘You never take a compliment.’
They walked on in silence: Steve retreating into private thoughts and Jenny trying to fathom them. She wasn’t used to him being touchy. He was always easy-going, taking whatever she said lightly. Her disquiet at his brooding turned to unease. She realized how badly she wanted them to get on, how much she’d like to spend the night with him, to push aside the images of the dead and the missing which were never far from her thoughts.
She slid her arm beneath his, squeezing it close to her body. She felt for his hand and threaded her cold fingers between his. They slowly relaxed. They were warm and softer than she remembered, an architect’s hands not an artisan’s.
‘Sorry it’s been so long,’ she said quietly. ‘It’s not that I haven’t been thinking about you.’
‘It’s OK.’
‘It’s not . . . I get caught up in myself. Work, Ross . . .’
Steve hesitated, then said, ‘Are you still seeing the psychiatrist?’
‘Yes. I’m doing all right.’
‘Sure?’
‘Why? Do I seem strange?’
‘No . . . not at all.’ There was a trace of uncertainty in his voice.
‘Then what’s the matter?’ Jenny said. ‘You’re not yourself.’
‘Nothing . . .’
She gripped his hand tighter, determined to get it out of him. ‘Tell me.’
‘Really it’s nothing . . .’ He sighed. ‘It’s just that my ex, Sarah-Jane, showed up the other day—’
‘Oh.’ Jenny felt a knot of jealousy form in her stomach. She had always thought of Sarah-Jane as belonging to the distant past. The few times Steve had mentioned her he had painted her as a monster: artistic, emotional, erratic, and not at all ashamed of having put him through years of hell before taking off to sleep her way around the world.
