Down Among the Dead Men (25 page)

Clive looked sour. ‘Has he really? Very convenient,’ he said sarcastically.

Bill shrugged. ‘Of course, ideally we’d like him there, but the Coroner wondered if you wouldn’t mind stepping in . . .’

Clive erupted. ‘You must be joking! Me? Why should I have to do the work of that idiot all the time? The guy was a total womble. Are you going to pay me the same expenses as you’d
pay him?’

Bill, looking suitably embarrassed, mumbled something about making sure that Clive would be treated ‘properly’.

After Bill had gone, Clive went for a walk around the car park, a sure sign that he was stressed, then went up to see Ed, who had bad news for him. ‘Unfortunately, the Coroner’s
court is like any other court. If the Coroner requests your attendance and you don’t comply, he can summons you and then fine you; I think he can even imprison you.’

After which, Clive went for another, longer walk around the car park. Maddie and I were feeling pretty unsettled at this point. Our relaxed atmosphere had turned into one of anger and
uncertainty; we decided to busy ourselves so as not to cause too much more stress, and to stay out of the way.

In the end it was a big inquest, the court room packed out with barristers, solicitors, doctors, pharmacological experts and substance abuse experts. Clive went on his own, strikingly kitted out
in his customary bright waistcoat, tweed jacket and dark trousers. He claimed not to be nervous, but I knew him well enough by then to see the lie in that. Maddie and I waited in the office for him
to return and, when he did, were relieved to see that he appeared to have come through the ordeal with his customary swagger. It had been an open verdict, the Coroner unable to decide on the
available evidence the precise circumstances that had led to poor John Lester’s death. The GMC were continuing to investigate the clinic that inserted the implant, and further proceedings
might well follow.

‘Nothing to it, really,’ Clive told us. Ed had come down and was also interested to hear how it gone. Clive said to him, ‘He’s a nice chap, the Coroner, isn’t he?
Looks after you when you’re in the box.’

‘Oh, yes. Very fair.’

‘Doesn’t take any prisoners, though,’ he told us. ‘The younger brother of the deceased was in court and he was chewing gum. When the Coroner spotted it, he stopped
proceedings straight away. “Excuse me,” he said, looking straight at him. “Are you chewing?” Should have seen the look on the poor bugger’s face! He stopped chewing,
went bright red, and nodded sheepishly. “Well, don’t, young man. This is a court of law, not a football match.”’ Clive sighed. ‘Excellent.’

FORTY-SIX

I hope you don’t think that Clive, Graham, Maddie and I are horrible people because we have a laugh and joke as we go about our work. Some might think that it’s
wrong to listen to Radio 2 while you are pulling the organs out of a body, or do the morning
Pop Master
quiz (Maddie never knows any of the answers, much to Clive’s and Ed’s
delight) while opening up a skull, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t respect the people we are dealing with, or the people who have been left behind by their deaths. I honestly think
that we are more respectful and more concerned about both the living and the dead than anyone else, certainly as much as the chaplains and priests and rabbis and imams are.

We see everything. Certainly we see a lot more than most people do. Until I started to do this kind of work, I hadn’t appreciated just how separated we are from death now. When do most
people see a dead body? A hundred years ago, everyone had probably seen a dead person by the time they were five, because they cared for their loved ones in death just as they had done in life. The
dead person would be laid out in the house and there would be proper mourning over them; everyone would visit and view the deceased. Now, the body is taken away and it’s put into the hands of
professionals, people like me. Most of us do our best and get the job done with appropriate thought and compassion, but to us it’s just a job, something we are paid to do. Relatively few
people come in to view the body, and often the deceased receives no visitors at all. Once the life is gone from the body, people want to get the whole thing over as quickly and cleanly as possible,
paying to have someone else do the dirty work.

And how many of us – me included, I suppose – actually see someone as they die? Dying’s become a lonely business, done in private, so as not to distress others. Since starting
this job I have often wondered what it must be like to die, and to do so without someone there to hold my hand and talk to me softly. It makes me shiver and sometimes I have shed tears. I
wouldn’t want to go like that.

Charles Cartwright-Jones didn’t die alone at least, although things conspired to make his death long and slow. He lived with his wife in a large, rambling house in the Stroud valley. Clive
vaguely knew the place and said that it was partly derelict. Apparently they had been married over half a century and never had children, so all they had was each other. When he came into us just
before lunch one dull and cold but dry day in late January, all we knew was that it was some sort of gunshot wound. We hadn’t yet got any information from the Coroner’s office, so we
had to rely on what the undertakers told us, and that turned out to be one of the saddest stories I think Maddie or I had ever heard.

There was no suggestion that Mr Cartwright-Jones had set out to take his own life, and his death had almost certainly been a terrible accident. Clive, who knows a few things about guns, reckoned
from what he heard that he must been carrying the gun out of the house one morning with the safety off and a cartridge in the breech. Some guns have a very light trigger and Mr Cartwright-Jones
probably dropped it so that it discharged into his stomach. His wife heard the sound and came out to look for him, finding him near a garden shed. She had rushed back into the house and phoned at
once for an ambulance, then gone back to comfort him and try to stop the blood that was leaking from the wound.

Something went terribly wrong, though, because the Gloucestershire ambulance service, which is normally fairly efficient, took over an hour to arrive, although no one knows quite why; possibly
the message got lost, possibly the wrong address was noted down. Anyway, Mrs Cartwright-Jones didn’t dare leave her husband because he was bleeding so badly that she was afraid he would die
while she was away from him. So, in the cold of the early morning, she comforted him and tried to help him and lay down beside him while he died. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know what
they said to each other and I don’t think it would be right if we did know. They had been married for over fifty years and there must be a lot to be said after that long. Mr Cartwright-Jones
died ten minutes before the ambulance arrived, apparently just slipping away from loss of blood and perhaps the cold.

Mr Cartwright-Jones’ story ruined the day for me and, I think, for Maddie also. There wasn’t much banter the next day either as Peter Gillard did the PM with the radio turned low.
The gunshot hadn’t severed any major arteries and he died from blood oozing out of a thousand tiny cut veins. Clive reckoned it must have been quite a small calibre weapon because, apart from
making a hole in the front of the abdomen, the shot hadn’t penetrated deep inside. I couldn’t help wondering if he might have survived if the ambulance had got there in decent time and,
when I asked Peter Gillard, he shrugged and said, ‘Maybe. He had quite bad emphysema and a bad heart, so they wouldn’t have helped. Anyway, there’ll be in internal investigation
at the ambulance service, and the Coroner will want to know what happened as well.’

I tried to take comfort from the fact that he didn’t die alone, and I sincerely hope that being with his beloved wife at the end helped him. I think it might have done.

FORTY-SEVEN

It was at this time that the C word passed Clive’s lips. ‘You ought to think about taking the certificate, Michelle,’ he said. We were sitting in the office
tucking into a fish and chip lunch after a busy morning PMing. I thought, ought I? When I made a face he added, ‘Can’t get anywhere without qualifications, Michelle. Not these
days.’

The certificate is actually the Certificate in Anatomical Pathology Technology and it’s awarded by what was then called the Royal Institute of Public Health, but is now the Royal Public
Health Society. To get it you have to travel to an examination centre – London is the nearest – and sit a two-hour written exam, and then take an oral examination afterwards. Once
you’ve got this piece of paper, you can then go on to sit a harder exam for the Diploma in Anatomical Pathology Technology, and thereby progress to more senior positions, but I hadn’t
sat any exams for nearly fifteen years and I hadn’t been too hot at them even then.

‘It’s a bit soon, isn’t it?’

Clive shook his head. ‘Naw. You’ve made good progress. You’ll sail through. You’ll see.’

Maddie asked, ‘What do you have to know?’

Clive said airily, ‘Nothing you don’t know from doing the job every day. Procedures in the mortuary, some of the paperwork, health and safety, disinfection, that kind of
thing.’ When he said this I relaxed a bit. It didn’t sound too hard. Then he added, ‘Oh, and anatomy and physiology.’

I stared at him, all relaxation a thing of the past. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You know . . . the structure of the circulatory system, the hormone system, how the eye works, that kind of thing.’

‘But I don’t know that!’ I protested. ‘All I do is what you taught me to do, which is take out the organs. I don’t know the names or anything, and I certainly
don’t know how the eye works.’

‘You won’t have any trouble, Michelle. Not a smart girl like you. Seeing what you do every day will mean that the names and suchlike will come easily.’

‘But why do we have to know about that kind of stuff? I can do the job just as well without knowing what the spleen does or how the kidneys work.’

‘It’s background knowledge,’ Clive said, although he sounded a bit unsure of himself. ‘In any case, it’s very, very important that you’re up to speed about
things like disinfection and all the paperwork we have to deal with. Absolutely vital, that is.’

‘I know most of that already.’

‘This’ll prove it to everyone else.’

I looked across at Maddie, who looked just as sceptical as I felt.

I have to admit that I wasn’t keen on the idea of sitting another exam. When I had walked out of school for the last time I had been as high as a proverbial just thinking
that I would never have to have study again, at least not in a school-type way. The idea of doing just that and then having to travel all the way to London not only for a written exam but then to
be grilled across a desk made my heart sink. What did it matter if I didn’t have a piece of paper to show that I knew things? I wasn’t planning on moving to another mortuary.

And there was Gramp. Since the news about his illness had come to light, I had seen him grow older, weaker, more delicate by the day. He was fading away before my eyes and I couldn’t stop
worrying about him. How could I concentrate on anatomy and hygiene in the mortuary when my beloved Gramp was so ill?

Dad had very different ideas, though. ‘You’ve got to do it, Michelle,’ he said firmly when I mentioned it. ‘You’d be a fool not to.’

Dad is a real brain-box and I’ve always respected his opinion; if he says I ought to do something, then I listen. Yet I was still unconvinced that I wanted to ruin the next few weeks
hitting the textbooks. I wasn’t going to be left alone, though. Mum joined in, and so did Luke.

The final straw was when Clive mentioned it to Ed one morning. He was just finishing an autopsy on a drug addict who had been found in a cleaning cupboard on one of the campuses of the local
university. He perked up immediately when Clive asked him loudly and well within my earshot if he agreed that I ought to sit the exam for the certificate. ‘Of course she should!’ he
said at once. He turned to me and, waving the brain knife around as he is wont to do, told me, ‘I’ll get you through, no mistake.’

I felt backed into a corner but for once, instead of being stubborn for the sake of it, I sighed and said, ‘OK.’ Deep down I knew I had no choice on this one.

When he said he’d get me through it, I didn’t really appreciate what Ed had in mind. Over the next few weeks, he kept on at me remorselessly. The first thing he did
was to go through the ‘red book’ – this is the mortuary technician’s bible, containing as it does all you need to know about the principles of running a mortuary, including
the laws that govern us, the paperwork that has to be done, the special arrangements for different faiths and lots, lots more – and make me read a chapter every two or three days, then test
me on what I had read. I didn’t do too badly on that, but then he moved on to the anatomy and physiology.

He got hold of a simple anatomy book and went through each of the organ systems – respiratory, cardiovascular, nervous, urinary, genital, etc – making revision notes for me. At the
same time, I got hold of old exam papers and at least twice a week I would do one of them under exam conditions and he would mark it. He and I then went through them and he tried to teach me on the
questions that I got wrong. When we ran out of legitimate papers, he made them up. Because part of the paper is multiple choice and part of it is an essay-type question, he did both types.

There were times when I think he got a bit annoyed with me. Although I know plenty enough anatomy to do my job, I found the more obscure bits and bobs about it – the stuff I figured I
would never actually
need
to know in a million years – difficult to hang on to, but then that’s me all over; if I don’t see the reason for knowing something, then I
don’t remember it. It’s as simple as that. Which, I suppose, was why I didn’t have too much trouble with the questions about the stuff that I actually do consider important, such
as the paperwork and procedures you have to have in place so that there isn’t chaos in the mortuary.