Down Among the Dead Men (12 page)

Clive felt it was important for all of the family to be able to move on a step with Lizzie’s death as, in his experience, it helped them with the grieving process. This was something the
family were not dealing with. Clive told me about how he once had a body in the mortuary for three weeks with a viewing every day because the dead lady’s husband did not want her to leave the
hospital. In the widower’s head, if his wife left the hospital, and was released from our care, it would become final. Clive had to spend the last week of this gentleman’s visits
convincing him to make funeral arrangements for his wife. ‘There is only a certain amount of time that you can halt decomposition by refrigeration, Michelle,’ he had explained
tiredly.

That afternoon, Lizzie was placed slowly in the small white coffin that had been lined with pink silk with a pink pillow. Painted daintily on the coffin lid were pink bows, and once this was
placed over her, Tony sealed the coffin and the family left the room.

TWENTY-ONE

I had decided shortly after this that I needed a break and thought that I would ring Dave. Dave is my soul-mate. We worked together for ten years, and from the first day we met
we got on. No sexual attraction or complicated stuff like that, just pure friendship. Anyway, Dave moved to Lancashire about four years ago to be near his partner, Chris. They met online, and after
a few weekends up there with him, Dave decided to move up to Lancashire permanently. I was pleased that he had met someone, but so disappointed he was leaving.

Dave is a few years older than me, eight to be precise. Sometimes when we are together though you would be forgiven for thinking we have a mental age of about five. Dave is super-intelligent and
has a definite opinion about most things, and he fascinates me with the stuff he has locked away in his brain. A bit of an old glam rocker, Dave had hair down to his backside when I first met him,
and always wore ‘Kiss’ T-shirts, jeans and Converse boots; the only thing different about him now is that he’s had his hair cut. He’s very focused, but I believe the world
is missing out on a great man, a talented painter and a wealth of knowledge. He should be in the limelight, in my eyes.

We had vowed never to lose touch, and we haven’t. We see each other at least three times a year, always at Christmas and birthdays, and try to get a week abroad together once a year with
partners and family. We saw each other Christmas Eve last year, but I knew he wouldn’t be disappointed to see me again, and I felt that I could really do with the break.

I spoke to Dave the next morning and, as luck would have it, he said that he was due some time off and could take it the following week. After checking with Clive that it was OK to have leave at
such short notice and after half an hour of teasing from him, I arranged to go on Friday for two weeks. Luke and I would have the weekend with Dave and Chris, then just potter about till he
finished work on the other days, when I was sure we’d end up in the pub, and that was just fine by me. The beauty of Lancashire is that it is such a friendly place. Steeped in history, loads
of old architecture, fantastic countryside and not forgetting the fact that everything is about twenty per cent cheaper than Gloucestershire. Maybe I will move up there myself one day, but until
then a fortnight would have to suffice.

We had the best time with Dave, two weeks of pure relaxation, food, ale, laughing, crosswords in the daily paper, hot chocolate – and starting with a champagne breakfast on the train on
the way up which Luke organized, just because. The weather was still pretty shitty, but when I’m with people like Dave, Luke and Chris, it doesn’t matter.

As soon as I got back to the mortuary I knew that something special had occurred from the fact that Clive and Graham were laughing loudly. When I went into the office, Graham
was red in the face and in danger of choking, and Clive’s eyes were watery.

‘Morning, Michelle,’ he said brightly, while Graham tried to get his breath back.

‘What’s going on?’

‘Nothing much,’ he said, although this was obviously a big, fat lie. ‘It was fairly quiet last week, wasn’t it, Graham?’

And Graham, who had been rolling some cigarettes in preparation for his morning break later on, began to laugh and choke again, just about managing to splutter, ‘Very quiet
indeed.’

‘What’s so funny, then?’ I was beginning to wonder if the joke was at my expense.

‘Just a funny story I heard.’

‘Go on then, tell me.’

He said at once, ‘First things first. When you’ve checked the bodies in, we’ll have some coffee and I’ll tell it to you.’ This struck me as a bit odd, because
normally we had coffee first thing and caught up on small talk before starting the serious work.

‘OK,’ I said cautiously.

‘There’s only two,’ he said, and Graham began to laugh again. ‘Both women.’

I looked at the book where the porters write down the details of the bodies that they have admitted to the mortuary. As Clive had said, there were only two, but Graham had been wrong because
although one was called Ethel Smithson, the other was called David Harcourt. Oh well, I thought, we all make mistakes.

I went to the fridge bay where Mrs Smithson had been put to check her over. In order to do this properly, I had to pull the tray out of the fridge onto the hydraulic trolley so that I could get
a good look at her, making sure that she wasn’t leaking, that if necessary she was viewable and that any valuables were properly accounted for. Having done this, I turned my attention to
David Harcourt who was residing in the top space of the fridge next door. I pulled the door open, positioned the trolley and pumped it up to the right height, then pulled the laden tray onto the
trolley before lowering it again to waist height. I unzipped the body bag and was surprised at what was inside. It wasn’t Mr Harcourt at all; it was a buxom blonde with long hair and an ample
chest, dressed in a long flowing nightie. Obviously, the porters had made a mistake, I thought, except that when I checked the name on the wristband and the Coroner’s label, they both said
that it was Mr David Harcourt.

I looked again at the face and saw that underneath the heavy make-up there was a faint trace of stubble, and the hairline was slightly crooked. When I pulled at his hair, it came away to reveal
the close-cropped black hair of a man. I looked up and saw that Clive and Graham were standing in the doorway to the body store, both grinning like lunatics. Graham asked, ‘Isn’t she
lovely?’ Clive said, ‘Meet Davina Harcourt, Michelle.’

I looked back down at the body. The ample chest was in fact made out of rubber.

Clive explained. ‘According to Neville, by day David Harcourt was a respectable inhabitant of the town of Cirencester, a member of the Round Table, hard-working chartered surveyor, father
of three and keen amateur golfer. By night – or at least on those nights when his wife went off to the Trefoil Guild or Women’s Institute or whatever – he became Davina by
rummaging through his wife’s drawers and by the appropriate application of make-up and other accessories.’

Graham added, ‘He did the job properly. He’s got some nice frilly knickers on.’

Everyone’s heard of people like this, but I never thought I’d get to meet one, so to speak. ‘Why?’ It seemed a pointless question, but I couldn’t help asking
it.

Clive said knowingly, ‘Ah, well, the story doesn’t end there, Michelle, because Davina didn’t just get his rocks off by getting into high-heels and squeezing into Mrs
Harcourt’s Ann Summers crotchless panties. He’d gone to the trouble of buying a cylinder of helium from the local party and joke shop, as well.’

He lost me completely with this. ‘Helium?’

Clive explained patiently. ‘You get a plastic dustbin bag, and a dressing-gown cord or something to tie around your neck so that no air can get in, then you pop the end of a hose from the
cylinder up inside it. You switch the cylinder on and lie back.’

This seemed so bizarre as to be insane. I briefly wondered if he’d done it to make his voice go squeaky ... At my bafflement, Clive said, ‘Auto-asphyxiation, Michelle. Eventually,
you begin to lose consciousness and have trouble breathing; apparently, for some poor bastards, it brings about a massive hard-on as good as the real thing.’

I must have looked like a codfish because both Clive and Graham collapsed back in fits of giggles. When they had calmed down again, Clive went on to say that although this kind of thing
wasn’t common, they got to see them on a fairly regular basis. ‘Especially because of GCHQ,’ he said.

GCHQ – the country’s top intelligence analysis centre – was located not far from the hospital. I asked, ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

Clive pursed his lips and shook his head. ‘Very funny place, Michelle. Very funny. People who work there go doolally quite regularly.’

Graham agreed. ‘Driven bonkers by the work,’ he said.

‘And when they do die unexpectedly, my God, all hell’s let loose. Coroner’s officers, police, forensic pathologists, even men in black suits with suspicious bulges come
knocking at the door.’

‘Who are they?’

‘SIS. Special Intelligence.’

‘But why?’

‘Because the balloon goes up if somebody who might know things dies suddenly, just in case it’s suspicious – killed by the KGB with a poison dart from an umbrella – or,
if they did it to themselves, it was because they were being blackmailed and finally decided they’d had enough. They have to cover all the bases, at least until they’re sure.’

Graham said cheerfully, ‘Bloody hard some of those guys are, too. Bloody hard. You can see it in their eyes.’

‘We had one senior GCHQ guy in here once a bit like Davina in there, only he floated his boat by auto-strangulation. Used to stand on a chair in the kitchen dressed only in a rather
fetching bikini and with a rope around his neck tied to an old butcher’s hook. Took the weight off his feet by bending his knees and waited for bliss to come. Unfortunately one day he went
too far, panicked, kicked out and knocked the chair over. After that it was very rapidly – “licence revoked for Mr Bond”.’

‘There was a bloody great fuss about that one,’ agreed Graham. ‘Strangely enough, the precise details of how he came to hang himself never got out.’

Clive nodded. ‘Can’t think why.’ He sighed. ‘I don’t suppose the same discretion will be shown when it comes to Davina.’

I looked back into the body store while drinking my coffee. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for Mrs Harcourt. It seemed unfair that she had not only lost her husband but was going to lose
her dignity too.

TWENTY-TWO

Nobody realized what was going to happen that July when it started to rain and then just didn’t stop. It had been a very wet few weeks – raining most days –
and the rivers were already high, but around here that’s not unusual. Especially in autumn and winter, it’s quite common for roads and villages near to the Severn to be under water for
a few days at a time, although this doesn’t usually happen in the summer. Consequently, even though there were flood warnings in force, I don’t think anyone thought much about it.

In the morning of that Friday we beavered away in the PM room with Peter Gillard on good form doing his pottering about trick and being told off by Clive for leaving trails of blood spots
wherever he went, while outside it rained. Late in the morning Ed came down for some chat and coffee but, apart from Graham moaning about how little wildlife he’d managed to blast to death
that week because it had been so wet, nobody said much about the weather. We were all used to it by then.

At three o’clock, Graham and I were doing a thorough clean of the PM room when Clive came in, looking concerned. ‘You lot had better get off home,’ he said.
‘There’s traffic chaos in the middle of town because they reckon they’re soon going to have to close the motorway and a lot of the side roads are flooded.’

‘What about you?’ Graham asked.

‘I’ll hang on a bit, just in case any undertakers come knocking.’

As I left the mortuary I saw Ed rushing off to his car; he lives a good way out and was clearly worried that he would have a bit of difficulty if the motorway was shut.

My usual twenty-minute journey home took over an hour. It kept raining for the rest of that day and during the whole night; in fact, it was still drizzling the next morning when Luke and I took
the dogs out. The ground was soaked and there was a huge amount of standing water where the drains had just given up and died; in one or two places small lakes had formed. The local TV and radio
told us of the true extent of the flooding. The Severn and the Wye had burst their banks in numerous places; Tewkesbury, where they converge, was almost completely flooded and cut off from the
outside world. Several people were missing although there were no confirmed deaths as yet, which was something of a relief to me.

On the following Monday morning, we compared notes about our experiences getting home on Friday. I had given up waiting for the bus and walked most of the way home: it had taken Graham nearly an
hour and Clive an hour and a half to complete their relatively short journeys. It was Ed, though, who had a real tale of woe to tell. He came in late, looking strained, and over coffee told us what
had happened. ‘I got on to the motorway hoping that would be the easiest and quickest way, but how wrong was I! The traffic ground to a halt on all lanes within about a mile. Then it
literally just crawled along for about an hour and a half. I heard on the radio that they had closed the M50, so I had to get off at the next turn-off, which took another thirty minutes. Only
trouble was, it was the turn-off for Tewkesbury, which was the last place I wanted to go.

‘I managed to avoid going into the town centre and struck off cross-country, coming across stretches of the road that were flooded and sometimes risking going through them, sometimes
trying to find a route around them. It took another two hours but eventually I made it within five miles of home, but that was it. The only road was deeply flooded for a stretch of twenty yards;
there was no way I was going to manage to drive through it. I couldn’t even leave the car and strike out on foot.