Down Among the Dead Men (11 page)

A young girl with tinted hair, too much make-up and a double chin asked, ‘Does everyone get a post-mortem examination?’

I was giving a speech I’d heard Clive give a few times before; when he did it, it came out fluently, but I thought I sounded hesitant and unsure. ‘If a doctor can issue a death
certificate, then it doesn’t need a post-mortem; if he can’t, it’s referred to the Coroner who will ask a pathologist to perform one.’

I knew exactly what was coming next. ‘When can’t they issue a death certificate?’

‘If they don’t know the cause of death, or if the cause of death is unnatural – accident, or suicide, or industrial disease.’

‘And murder?’

I had quickly learnt from listening to Clive when he did these talks that they always wanted to know about murder. I said, as if I had been doing the job for fifty years, ‘If it might be
murder, it becomes a forensic post-mortem, which is slightly different.’

And so they got on to forensic post-mortems, as they always did. It was forty-five interminable minutes before I could get rid of them and, by then, I was ready to lie down on a trolley and be
put into the fridges with the rest of the deceased.

NINETEEN

A few weeks later and I was again sitting in the pub with Luke, Mum and Dad, plus Michael and Sarah. Around the table the banter was flowing backwards and forwards as it always
did, the beer doing its job and doing it well, but for once I wasn’t taking part. Dad noticed first and asked, ‘Something up, Michelle?’

I looked at him and smiled. ‘Bit under the weather.’

Mum, bless her, said immediately, ‘It’s not a hangover, is it? You haven’t been overdoing the wine, have you?’

With a tired grimace I said, ‘No, Mum, it’s not that. It’s probably the start of a cold, or something.’

She looked suspicious but didn’t say any more. Luke, who knew the real reason for my quiet, said, ‘There’s something going around, she’ll be OK soon,’ hugging me
round the shoulder and shaking me in an affectionate manner as he spoke.

And that was that, as far as the family were concerned, but it wasn’t like that for me. I had to live with what I had seen that day.

My parents are aware that I’m not a particularly maternal type. I don’t see the pleasure in green, dirty and damp nappies, in sick down my back and piles the size of superheated
plums hanging out of my rear end. Each to their own is what I say; for me it’s evenings of easy friendship and chat, undisturbed nights and late mornings that float my boat. Ankle-biters are
all very well in their place, but my life isn’t that place.

Yet that doesn’t mean I didn’t want to go home and cry when we had finished dealing with the sad death of little Lizzie Dawes.

When I had arrived at the mortuary that morning, I could tell at once that something was different. The atmosphere was quiet, almost like a church, and Clive and Graham sat in
the office with their coffee talking in subdued tones, without any of the usual cross-talk; even when one of the young girls who worked upstairs in the path lab – one that usually caused
Clive to look pained and mutter something about ‘bazookas’ – walked past the window, nothing was said. As Graham made my coffee, I asked, ‘What’s up?’

Clive said, ‘Just had a phone call from the Coroner’s office. There’s a little girl coming in. Only three years of age.’ He spoke in a low voice and I could see that,
despite all the years he’d done the job, he was seriously upset.

‘What happened?’ I asked fearfully.

‘She was staying with grandparents. She went out to play in the front garden with a ball first thing. Granddad went to the garage to get out the car and didn’t see her. He reversed
it over her.’

‘Oh, my God.’ Suddenly I, too, felt like crying.

Graham, a grandfather himself, said in a low voice, ‘Bloody terrible.’

Even though it seemed obvious what the cause of death was, the law requires a post-mortem. We don’t normally do children’s autopsies in Gloucestershire – they go to Bristol
where a paediatric pathologist does them, because the diseases and problems are so different from the ones in adults and because they require specialized investigations – but in cases of
trauma, one or two of the more experienced pathologists in the county are willing to do them; that saves having to move the body and thus cause (if it is possible to imagine) more upset to the
family, should they wish to view the child. Clive rang Ed Burberry who said at once that he would do it, so all there was to do after that was to wait for the body.

Lizzie arrived at just after eleven. She was in a pathetically small temporary coffin, like a huge wicker basket, about two and half feet long. A single undertaker carried her in and that only
emphasized how small and precious she was; I could see that he, too, was terribly affected by what had happened. Graham took her and carried her straight into the dissection room, returning a few
minutes later with the empty basket. The request from the Coroner’s office had been faxed through about half an hour before, and Clive had already booked the case in and prepared all the
paperwork for Ed. First Graham, then I, got changed into scrubs and we went into the dissection room while Clive phoned upstairs to tell Ed that we were ready for him. There were butterflies in my
stomach as I approached the dissection table and I was afraid that I would not be able to stop bursting into tears when I came up close.

Well, my eyes filled with tears but I managed to sniff them back, although only just. She had been a very pretty girl, with long, pale brown hair that her mum had arranged into bunches, a chubby
face and blue eyes that were now clouded. She wore pink dungarees over a white blouse. I knew at once that she was loved and cherished, probably spoilt deservedly by all around her.

There was surprisingly little trauma to see. The right side of her face was badly grazed on the cheekbone and around the eyes, and blood trickled from the side of her mouth; also, it was obvious
that her right arm was badly broken from the way that it bent so sickeningly, and that her chest was crushed.

Graham, the seasoned old pro who had seen everything and done most of them, and who could heave twenty-stone bodies off and onto the table without help, undressed Lizzie with surprising
gentleness. He treated her with dignity and respect, even folding the clothes as he took them off in case Mum and Dad wanted to keep them. He said nothing while he did this and kept his head down,
so that it was only when he had finished and I glimpsed his face that I saw that he, too, had tears in his eyes.

By this time, Ed Burberry had arrived and changed. As a matter of routine he checked the ID, and then carefully charted all the external injuries – the facial grazes, the broken arm, the
crushed chest. Having done this, he told Graham to begin the evisceration while he went back to the alcove where the pathologists kept the paperwork and dictated their reports. While he mumbled
into the microphone, Graham started; for once the radio was turned off and there was no banter at all.

There was no difference in what Graham had to do with Lizzie when compared with what he did with an adult, except that the scale was different; the liver was a miniature, the kidneys were tiny,
the intestines as if seen in a telescope viewed the wrong way round. When he lifted the pluck out, he did so effortlessly and, when he put this in a stainless steel bowl that I carried over to the
dissection bench, it was almost as if it were empty. I don’t think that Graham’s face altered at all while he did all this; it remained set, as if carved out of stone.

Ed Burberry was normally a happy participant in the gossip and banter, giving as good as he got, but today he was similarly subdued as he went through his routine. I helped him by weighing the
organs and was able to see how it wasn’t just in size that Lizzie’s organs differed from an adult’s; the aorta – the main artery – was pink, not yellow and cracked,
the heart was compact and stiff, not soft and flabby, and the lungs were pale pink, without any sooty dirt. Even I could see the damage that had been done to Lizzie. The chest had been filled with
blood because the aorta had ruptured, while the ribs were all broken and the lungs lacerated.

After twenty minutes, he was finished. He thanked us both and left without another word to go back to the alcove to dictate his report. While he did this, Graham reconstructed Lizzie and I
cleaned up, once more in silence. In another thirty minutes, it was all over, the dissection room clean, as if it had never happened. Little did I know that the day was about to get tougher.

Lizzie’s family, understandably, wanted to come and spend time with her. Mr and Mrs Dawes arrived, your average-looking young family. I could see Dad was trying so hard to hold it together
for the sake of his wife. Even though I had by then experienced a fair few viewings, this was going to be difficult. Clive took charge of it but I was in attendance, and realized that I had a lot
to learn from the experience; yet I was finding it hard to know how to react, let alone where to look. ‘I’m sorry for your family’s loss,’ just sounded lame as it came out
of Clive’s mouth. Even I knew that no words would help this family.

Mrs Dawes entered the waiting area looking really shaky and was immediately made to sit down by Mr Dawes. He looked up at us and apologized for his wife’s behaviour. Apologize? I thought
she was holding it together well, considering. It was only the fact that her knees would not bear the weight of her body at that moment that gave away the signs of what she was going through. Clive
spoke to them both in a soft manner, and told them where Lizzie was resting, gesturing towards the door that led to the viewing area. Mr Dawes thanked Clive and helped his wife up out of the seat.
Clive slowly opened the door to where Lizzie was laid out, and her parents entered the room. It was only a couple of assisted steps that Lizzie’s mum had taken before her legs completely
buckled and she fell to the floor, beginning to cry uncontrollably. It was the most painful, heartbreaking sound I have heard. For the rest of the afternoon, all that could be heard though the
mortuary was Mrs Dawes wailing and asking why. I have never felt so helpless.

As I sat in the pub that night, it was only very gradually that I came to terms with what I had seen. It was the first time that I fully appreciated what death can mean. I also had feelings
about my own grandfather. I knew how much he loved me, and how much I loved him, and had done so for as long as I could remember. What if this had happened to my family? How would they interact
twenty-eight years on? I could not get my head round it.

TWENTY

Clive ended up spending most of the weekend in the mortuary with Lizzie’s family. Her grandparents had been allowed to come and visit her, but there was obviously a lot
of tension between the parents and the grandparents and their relationship had broken down. The two-hour slot for viewings at the weekend had gone out the window and Clive had spent a total of
seven hours each day over Saturday and Sunday just pottering about the mortuary while Lizzie’s family sat with her. Consequently, when Graham and I arrived on Monday morning all the weekend
work had been done by Clive. We were handed hot drinks and sat down to listen to Clive tell us in detail what had happened.

There had been a blazing row in the relatives’ waiting area between Lizzie’s mum, Josie, and her grandfather. Len, Lizzie’s grandfather, was obviously racked with guilt and was
under no circumstances coming to terms with what had happened, and neither was Mum. I was starting to learn that bereavement can take many different forms. After the initial shock of losing her
young daughter, Josie’s first reaction was pure grief, her body went into shut-down, her limbs refused to work and she could not speak. This turned to white-hot anger from what Clive was
telling us. Josie had lashed out physically at Len and had slapped him hard across the face while verbally abusing him, too. Charlie, Lizzie’s dad and Len’s son, had to physically lift
his wife away from the situation and take her, kicking and screaming, outside. Clive said it had appeared that Charlie was in complete control of the situation. He announced to his family that he
wanted to spend some time alone in the viewing area with Lizzie. He made his wife promise him that she would sit quietly for a few minutes while he stayed with his daughter.

Clive said that what occurred next had never happened to him in all his years as a technician. Charlie had gone into the viewing area alone, while the rest of the family sat in silence in the
relatives’ room. He had shut the door behind him, which was not uncommon, but it had opened only a few minutes later; he then came out with Lizzie in his arms and, before anyone quite knew
what was happening, was making his way towards the front door. Josie had screamed at this sight and her body again went into collapse. Lizzie’s grandmother took control of Josie while Len
blocked the door to his son and dead granddaughter. Clive said that he moved in as well at this point. He had tried to explain to Charlie that it would not be a sensible thing to do, and that
Lizzie needed to stay with us. Len had confirmed this, but Charlie was a big bloke and began to try to barge his way past his father and Clive. Clive said it took around ten minutes of coaxing
Charlie, with the distraught father eventually falling to his knees holding Lizzie’s small limp body in his arms until Len could take Lizzie off him and place her back on the viewing
trolley.

Clive needed some quick thinking on this, and decided it was time to get Lizzie to the funeral parlour, but it was three o’clock on Sunday afternoon. Luckily, he knew which funeral service
would be taking care of Lizzie and it happened to be a local firm that he had worked with for many years. He took a chance and rang the owner of the funeral parlour, who agreed to be there in an
hour. Clive then sat with Lizzie’s family and talked them through what was going to happen now.

When Tony, the owner of Phelps & Stayton Funeral Services, arrived, Clive had shown him in the back way to the viewing area where Lizzie was. Once he had concealed the
‘tradesmen’s’ entrance to the viewing area with the curtain, he invited the whole family in and Tony greeted them in his gentle manner. They had met before when Tony attended
Josie and Charlie’s home to settle the arrangements for Lizzie’s funeral just the day before.