Down Among the Dead Men (18 page)

Ed frowned. ‘Why? What happened?’

‘Complete shambles. Twiggy was organizing it and so no one bothered to tell me what was going on until the day before. Graham had booked annual leave and had to cancel it, and we only just
managed to get suitable cases. Then one of the idiots taking the exam decided he was going to cut up too high, and we had to perform some magic trying to cover the stitching under the bloke’s
collar once he was dressed ready to be presented to his family.’

‘Well, Professor Twigworth isn’t organizing it this time, I am; and that’s why I’m here. To make sure that you know exactly what’s going on.’

‘And we got no thanks. Not so much as a “kiss my arse”.’

Ed smiled. ‘I think you know me better than that, Clive.’ Times like these felt weird. Clive was the Mortuary Manager, but Ed the Head of Pathology. It was like Ed was trying to
pacify Clive, just for an easy life. Whatever it was, it was working.

Clive still looked a little unhappy but didn’t keep on, asking instead, ‘When is this?’

‘Two weeks tomorrow. I’ll let you know the details of the candidates when I get them. I haven’t finalized the timetable, but I should think they’ll turn up down here just
before nine and we should be finished in the PM room by one thirty in the afternoon.’

Clive had done this kind of thing plenty of times before and gave us the low-down after Ed had gone. ‘Actually, it can be quite good fun,’ he said. ‘Poor
buggers are so nervous, most of the time they can’t even speak properly.’

Maddie said, ‘I hope you’re not nasty to them.’

Clive was actually quite offended. ‘Of course I’m not. The mortuary staff are supposed to be helpful and courteous at all times, and we always are. We always tell them where all the
protective equipment is, give them a full set of instruments, and open the head for them, as we’re supposed to. I know that some places deliberately give them difficult cases to work on, like
large or rotting bodies, and make them use crap, blunt, outdated instruments, or make the opening in the skull too small, but not here. We’re professionals. No matter what we think, we keep
it to ourselves on examination days.’

I knew Clive quite well by then and could tell that he had only told half the story. ‘But . . ?’ I encouraged him to carry on.

He grinned and shrugged. ‘Nothing wrong with a bit of light entertainment to make things go with a swing, is there?’

We were playing host to Dr Mirza and Dr Merkovich. Dr Mirza was a short, dumpy young woman of Indian extraction with glasses and long hair tied in a bun; Dr Merkovich was
Polish, tall and clearly under the impression that his Hitler-like moustache was a real turn-on (he could not have been more wrong, as the look of disgust that Maddie threw at his back as he walked
past testified). Ed brought them down to us at ten to nine and introduced them. As Clive had predicted, they had a serious case of nerves, with Dr Mirza visibly shaking and Dr Merkovich walking
into the hat stand in the vestibule, but Clive and Ed were patient and eventually we got them into the PM room with scrubs on, where Clive helped them to put on the personal protective equipment
– or PPE – that we all have to use.

We had already stripped and laid out the two patients that Ed had selected for the examination, and he had given each candidate the details, including the hospital notes. He now looked at his
watch and said, ‘Right. It’s now ten past nine. You have three hours, after which Dr Peter Gillard and I will be back down to talk to you about your findings. Please start.’

He then took Clive to one side and I heard him say in a low voice, ‘Make sure they identify the bodies properly, and keep an eye on how well they do the evisceration.’

Clive nodded. ‘Don’t worry, boss. You can rely on me.’

Ed stayed another ten minutes or so while the candidates scribbled notes on clipboards, and Maddie and I chatted in low voices about
Saw II
, which she’d watched the night before.
After this, first Dr Merkovich, then Dr Mirza identified their bodies and began the eviscerations.

It became immediately obvious that Dr Mirza was at a disadvantage, because she was so short. She was all right with the initial incision but as soon as she had to push her hands deep into the
body cavity to reach the kidneys, she was on tiptoe and almost left the ground. ‘Would you like a box?’ asked Clive brightly, and I’m not sure that he was joking. Dr Mirza, bless
her, shook her head and said in a voice that was muffled because of the mask, ‘No, no, thank you.’ Dr Merkovich, meanwhile, might not have been having similar troubles, but both Maddie
and I could see that he was the APT’s worst nightmare; he was messy. The primary incision had been jagged and there was blood everywhere; on his mask, down his apron, on his goggles, on his
wellies, all over his tools, the table and the floor. When he finally got the pluck out, he left a trail of blood spots as he took it over to the bench. Clive looked on with unconcealed disgust and
murmured to me, ‘I’ll wrap the mop round his ankles in a minute; that’ll stop him. Even better I’ll give him the bloody mop and he can clean it up himself.’

Dr Mirza, meanwhile, had another problem; her glasses kept falling off into the body. Eventually, after they’d landed in the abdominal cavity for the third time, Maddie quickly stopped her
from replacing them on her face, even though they were covered in blood and fat, cleaned them up and then had to tie them on behind her head. Clive could hardly contain his laughter and his eyes
were starting to water; had it not been for the mask, I think the effort of keeping a straight face would have killed him.

Over the next two and a half hours, the two candidates beavered away at their task while the three of us kept an eye on them and tried to amuse ourselves. Maddie and I were chatting about each
other’s plans that evening, when I happened to look over at Clive. He stood supporting his body on two mop poles, while gesturing that he was doing a ski slalom. I think, by the look on his
face, he actually believed he was on the French Alps. I nudged Maddie and we both stared at him for a couple of minutes. When he did finally make eye contact with us, he just exaggerated what he
was doing with that twinkle in his eye that lets you know he is on a wind-up.

With thirty minutes to go, Ed returned, this time accompanied by Peter Gillard. During the morning, apart from his slalom, Clive had sung into plug sockets, told a few jokes, mopped the floor
umpteen times and broken wind loudly twice. They asked us what we thought of the way the candidates had eviscerated, and Clive gave his full opinion, then they watched silently as Drs Mirza and
Merkovich finished. Both candidates had laid out the sliced and dissected organs on boards on the bench, but they had done so with varying degrees of success. Dr Merkovich had managed to display
them in a neat, logical way and had wiped away most of the blood, but poor Dr Mirza’s display was to my eye a complete mess; and I think Ed and Peter thought so too. Clive had told Maddie and
me to watch Ed and Peter’s faces as they walked over. I know I saw them wince when they were confronted by the random display of blood and organ slices that she had prepared for them. Each of
the candidates had to present the case, including the clinical information that they had been given, their external findings and their interpretation of the appearances of the organs. We
couldn’t really hear what was going on, because by then we were busy starting the reconstruction of the bodies after what felt like a lifetime of waiting, but I got the impression that things
weren’t going well for Dr Mirza. Her nervousness had been obvious from the start, but when Peter and Ed moved in, she all but fell to pieces. She was shaking so badly that she was spraying
spots of blood up the wall and even, to Clive’s disgust, on to the low ceiling above her. She kept apologizing and there were long silences after either Ed or Peter asked her a question. The
low point came when she couldn’t find the spleen and there was a great deal of rummaging about in the steel bowls and even back in the body, which meant she had to push Maddie out of the
way.

Eventually they moved on to Dr Merkovich and things appeared to go much more smoothly. He was still nervous, I could see, but he managed to get out some coherent answers and there were none of
those long, embarrassed silences that Dr Mirza seemed to specialize in. Eventually Ed and Peter had finished, and went to the door where they pulled off their disposable gowns and overshoes.
Outside, in the body store, they were just talking to Clive when suddenly Dr Mirza uttered a little squeak and, newly found spleen in hand, she rushed across the dissection room and barged into the
body store, completely ignoring health and safety. ‘I’ve found it! I’ve found it!’ she cried.

They all recoiled and Ed said, ‘Yes. OK. If you could just take it back into the PM room, please . . .’ Clive nearly fainted. ‘NOT OUT HERE!’ he shouted at her. Even I
jumped.

She withdrew, apparently delighted that she had found the spleen and completely unaware that she had done her chances great damage because of the way she had behaved. Clive followed her with the
mop, cleaning up the blood splatters, shaking his head and mumbling, ‘Not a bloody clue; all brains and no bloody common sense .’

By the time the candidates had gone, the bodies had been reconstructed and returned to the fridge, the surfaces had been cleaned down and everything mopped and dried, it was after three
o’clock and none of us had had a lunch break. Two PMs which would normally have taken three hours had taken closer to seven. Clive was in a bad mood because he likes his routine and
doesn’t take well to having things disrupted. Over coffee, he kept on and on about how much trouble trainee pathologists were, and how things were going downhill. ‘Would you want your
nearest and dearest PMed by one of those two?’ he asked Maddie, who shook her head. ‘Not a chance,’ he continued. ‘I wouldn’t trust the dumpy one to find her own
backside with the lights out, let alone a cause of death.’

Maddie said timidly, ‘Everyone has to learn.’

Clive was taking no prisoners, though. ‘Some people can’t learn. Some people are untrainable.’

If we thought that by saying nothing we would calm him down, we were wrong. ‘And they’re getting so precious now. Do you know, we had one chap who refused to do autopsies if the body
was too fat or a bit decomposed. Even got a bit of paper from the Royal College of Pathologists to back him up. Bloody disgrace. Supposing everyone did that? It’d be chaos; complete chaos . .
. What if we started to refuse to do the unpleasant ones?’

And so he went on until four thirty came and we could escape. Maddie and I went for a drink because we reckoned we deserved one, or maybe three . . .

THIRTY-TWO

In early November Luke and I, together with Ed and my brother Michael, had a weekend away at the rugby. Ed and I had discovered that we were both huge rugby fans, and we had
got hold of some tickets to see England take on the Pacific Islanders in one of the autumn internationals; it was the first time I’d ever been to ‘HQ’, which I later learned was
the insiders’ name for Twickenham. I had only truly got into rugby by watching the Six Nations earlier in February that year, but was hooked straight away and was still a bit unaware of the
terms the diehard fans used. Ed, who had been before, waxed lyrical about how impressive it was and what a fantastic occasion it would be, especially as England might even win, and I have to admit,
I was blown away when we turned the corner and Twickenham stood in all its glory in front of me. Michael, who is not the greatest of rugby fans (and I’m sure Luke would rather have been at
the football), was really just along for the jolly, but I knew neither of them would spoil the party. They are very similar in the way they are quiet and easy-going, and just rub along with whoever
is around; they also both have a really dry wit which only becomes apparent when they have got a few beers under their belts.

Because Ed lives out of the town, it was agreed that he would drive, calling in early to pick us up. Luke and I had had a party the night before to celebrate something or other at our local pub,
and only rose about twenty minutes before Ed arrived, true to his word, at nine o’clock on Saturday morning. After a quick cup of coffee, we set off in good spirits, all dressed in England
shirts, apart from Michael, and all keen on one thing and one thing only, that we were going to have a good time. Halting for a quick refreshment stop at a service station near Swindon, we made it
to Twickenham in a little over two hours. We had rooms booked at a small hotel in Richmond which Ed’s satnav found without difficulty; it wasn’t exactly a five-star luxury job –
in fact, it was pretty dire, what with plastic headboards and dodgy carpets – a fact that was reinforced in no uncertain manner when Luke and I first went into our room and there was a
strange little man sitting on the bed with his shoes off, bed unmade, apparently making himself at home. He soon skedaddled, but it was a rather unsettling experience. Luke mentioned this to the
owner when we went back to reception, and he was as bewildered as we were.

With our bags stowed in our rooms, we assembled outside the hotel with the receptionist’s instructions regarding the nearest pub fresh in our minds. It proved to be a charming, typical
London boozer and we settled down to pass the next hour or so by putting the world to rights and boosting their profits a little. What amazed me was the number of England shirts that came through
the door during that time. I felt part of a huge – and very proud – group. At one, after Luke and Michael had visited the betting shop over the way to check out the afternoon sporting
action, we called a local taxi firm. What arrived was a highway robber who demanded thirty pounds to take us the two miles to the stadium, a sum that Luke negotiated down to twenty-five; not
surprisingly, Dick Turpin didn’t get a tip. At least the real one wore a mask.

The atmosphere as soon as we got among the crowds was better than I could ever have imagined; there was no sense of menace, just one of togetherness and camaraderie and enjoyment, with a lot of
families and ankle-biters, most of whom were well behaved. It was past two o’clock by now so we made our way around the stadium, through the gates and up inside the giant concrete stadium.
Our seats were on the upper tier, so by the time we arrived we were out of breath and fairly thirsty, requiring a stop off at the nearest stadium bar. Such were the crowds that it took fifteen
minutes to get served, but I did manage to sneak through, and so, by the time that we were lagered up and in our seats, the teams were all set to come on to the field.