Down Among the Dead Men: A Year in the Life of a Mortuary Technician

by Michelle Williams

  ‘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.

  ‘Larger lorries seemed to be able to get through, though, so I had a brainwave and hitched a ride on an oil-tanker that was in the queue. Only trouble was, just as we were about to go through, the lorry in front got stuck so my driver decided that he was spending the night in his cab.

  ‘It looked as though I was going to have to get what sleep I could back in my car. I rang Anne to tell her the news, but then she had a brainwave. We have some friends who live on this side of the flooding. I rang them and thank goodness they were in. They made me very welcome – cooked me a meal, poured wine and beer down my throat and then gave me a bed for the night.’

  ‘Better than a night in the car, then,’ said Graham.

  Ed nodded enthusiastically. ‘I woke up at seven the next morning, dressed and left without waking them, hoping that some of the flooding had gone down. I managed to get nearly all the way home, driving through countryside that looked like there’d been a nuclear strike with abandoned cars by the road, and mud and rubble all over the place.

  ‘The really, really irritating thing was that I was two hundred yards from my house when I finally misjudged the depth of a stretch of flooding; I managed to get through it but it was touch and go, and when I reached the other side, the engine conked out.’

  Clive asked, ‘Water in the air intake?’

  ‘Luckily, no. The RAC came out and said that it hadn’t got past the air filter. I dried that out and it seems to be running OK.’

  ‘You were bloody lucky,’ was Graham’s view of this.

  Ed said nothing, but his face suggested that he was less than convinced.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The first casualties of the flooding were brought in two days later. Two men had been in a cellar using a diesel pump to lower the water level but had not thought about the lack of ventilation in such an enclosed space. They had both been overcome by fumes and, as post-mortem examination showed, had died of carbon monoxide poisoning. After that, though, it all went quiet and we in the mortuary thought that we had avoided the worst of the cost of the floods. But then the Reverend Ken Samuelson died on the Intensive Therapy Unit at the hospital and nobody knew why. The E60 from the Coroner’s office, though, told us that he had lived in Tewkesbury and, on the night of the worst of the flooding, he had repeatedly dived into the basement of his house to retrieve his collection of expensive porcelain. He had been submerged for quite a long time in total, but had been rescued by the fire service and taken to hospital. After a full medical check-up and a night of observation, he had been discharged, apparently no worse for wear, but after a week he had gone to his GP complaining of pains in his legs. The GP had done some tests but these had all proved negative, so it had been assumed that this was just a reaction to his ordeal in the floods.

  Two days before his death, the Reverend had returned to the GP, this time extremely unwell and apologetic that he was once more wasting his time, but the pains were worse than ever. Within an hour he was in A&E and within a further two he was in the ITU.
None of the tests they did had indicated what was wrong with him; they had been able to keep him alive for four days, but he had deteriorated gradually over all of this time and eventually the inevitable had happened.

  Our first look at the Reverend Samuelson told us that he must have been very, very unwell indeed, because he was bloated with fluid and bright yellow in colour due to jaundice. He had so many tubes coming out of him, he looked like a puppet whose strings have been cut. He was thin, unshaven and, when we removed his clothes, the skin on the front of his abdomen was starting to turn green, which sometimes happens, even when the body is refrigerated straight after death.

  Ed beavered away over the autopsy for over an hour, a long time for him and a sure sign that it wasn’t straightforward. He took swabs of the lungs and the bladder mucosa, as well as a blood sample for microbiological tests, then asked for Clive to get some more blood for toxicology although, as he said, he didn’t think it would help much. Eventually, he looked up from the dissection bench and said to Clive, who was sewing up, ‘Well, I know why he ought to have died . . .’

  ‘Why’s that, boss?’

  ‘Leptospirosis.’

  Both Clive and Graham nodded, but it was a new one on me, so Ed explained. ‘It’s a bug that’s carried by rats and excreted in their urine. Normally, the only people who are at risk are sewage workers and farm labourers, people in those kinds of jobs; in a flood, though, it’ll get washed all over the place. It causes liver failure, like the poor Reverend here has.’

  ‘Nothing else wrong with him, then?’ asked Clive.

  ‘Yes, and that’s the trouble. He just looks rotten. His heart looks knackered, his kidneys are falling to bits and his lungs are manky, none of which should happen.’

  He stood at the dissection bench staring at the organs before him for a long time, a sure sign that he was flummoxed, then abruptly peeled off his gloves and his other protective clothing and went to the phone. He rang the ITU and was deep in conversation with the consultant there who had been looking after the Reverend. When he put the phone down, he looked no happier. ‘They don’t know why he died either,’ he sighed, then added, ‘Bugger.’

  The likely cause of the Reverend Samuelson’s death did not become clear for several weeks, and in the meantime another flood victim came into the mortuary . . .

  Paul Collins lived on an estate with not a very good reputation. He was well known by all who lived there as a heroin user, and had been the main suspect for many of the robberies on the estate, although no one had yet proved his guilt. On the night before the floods, Paul had just scored with his dealer, then found an unoccupied Wendy house in a secluded corner of someone’s back garden. As it was late and dark, he went unnoticed, and it was perfect shelter from the rain for him.

  He injected himself and fell into unconsciousness. The rain continued to fall, and the occupants of the house began to move their furniture upstairs as the levels started to rise in the garden; all the time, they were unaware that Paul was in a comatose state huddled up in their young daughter’s Wendy house.

  Unfortunately, in his stupor Paul failed to wake, and so high did the water rise that the Wendy house could hardly be seen. It took a few days for the water levels to go down and even then the householders had plenty of other things to attend to before trying to retrieve garden furniture and assessing the damage done outside. I can only imagine their surprise when they found the lodger in the Wendy house.

  When he reached us, Paul was bloated, slimy and a very dark shade of green, probably the most horrible sight I had seen. The water had completely swelled his body and the smell was disgusting. Amazingly, he still had a needle in his arm.

  Clive was not impressed by this in the slightest. ‘You know what this means,’ he said in an annoyed manner. Graham spoke the word ‘Forensic’.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘Isn’t it obvious why he’s dead?’

  ‘So how do you think he died, Michelle?’ Clive asked me. I then felt out of my depth, and probably should have kept my mouth shut.

  ‘He’s drowned?’ I replied sheepishly.

  ‘That is the whole point, has he drowned, or was he dead from the heroin? If it’s drowning then Ed could do the PM, but if he overdosed from the drugs, the police will need to be involved and Dr Twigworth will do it.’

  ‘How will we tell?’ I asked.

  ‘They’ll go down the forensic route anyway, to cover all the possibilities. Serious stuff, supplying drugs, Michelle. If he has died from the overdose, the supplier could be in a lot of trouble, even go down the road for a long time.’

  ‘They never find them, though,’ Graham said disappointingly. ‘Filthy, dirty habit, and the users would rob their own mothers.’

  He was clearly not impressed, and thought nothing of showing it.

  Within the hour, Dr Twigworth had arrived and Clive had decided he was going to treat him with a firm hand. ‘I’m not having any messing around with this one, he’ll be in and out, I’ll make sure of it.’

  One thing I had learnt about Clive was that, when he wanted something done, it was done and no doubt about it; not even the great Professor Ranulph Twigworth was allowed to get up to his normal tricks on this one. As soon as he was changed, Clive was chivvying him up, reminding him that the rest of us had homes to go to, even if the Professor didn’t; he kept mopping the floor around Twiggy every time he spilt a drop of blood, tutting loudly and sighing. He sprayed air freshener around like it was going out of fashion, and pointedly refused to enter into any chat with him.

  It worked, though. We were cleaned down and everyone was out by five that evening. Twiggy had informed us that Paul had no water in his lungs, so in all likelihood he had overdosed before the floods rose, and that he would be residing with us for a while because more tests would need to be done. This news was not the best we could have received in view of poor Paul’s choice of eau de toilette, but at least he could be tucked away in one of the isolation fridges so we wouldn’t be too aware of him as we went about our daily business.

  Ed ended up tussling with the Reverend Samuelson’s death for a long time. As he told Clive, examination of tissues under the microscope showed only generalized degeneration with no clues as to the cause. The microbiological tests all came back negative, as did the toxicological tests. It was a mystery why he had died, with nothing suggesting either a definitive natural disease process or anything unnatural. ‘He’s got a touch of furring of his coronary arteries but not enough, I would say, to have killed him,’ he sighed.

  He went back through all the medical notes, not for the first time, which was when he had a brainwave. He came at once down to the mortuary office. ‘Hypothermia,’ he said. ‘I reckon that’s what did it. He was immersed in that flood water for a long time, and I reckon his core temperature went way down.’

  ‘But he recovered,’ I pointed out. ‘Is that what normally happens?’

  ‘Yes, he was lucky enough to recover but I think that during the episode of hypothermia, he suffered some sort of generalized ischaemia of the heart muscle. He developed heart failure and that, in turn, led to poor blood supply to other internal organs, which failed in turn. Hey presto.’

  He left looking a lot happier than he had for some time, but it didn’t last long. A few days later, he confessed, ‘The Coroner asked for an expert opinion from a leading intensive therapy consultant. He says that the Reverend didn’t suffer clinical hypothermia.’ He shook his head. ‘Why did that bloody man die?’ he asked despairingly of no one and everyone as he trudged off.

  Ed never did discover exactly why the Reverend Samuelson met his end. He had long discussions with the intensive therapy consultants, the microbiologists and the Coroner, but all he could do was to exclude things. He knew that the Reverend hadn’t suffered major trauma, and there was no toxicological reason for him to die so, he told us, it was going to be a ‘best guess’ as to what actually killed the poor man.

  ‘Which is?’ asked Clive.

>   Ed shrugged. ‘It has to be the sewage. He was in the water a long time and there was a lot of sewage being washed out. He went under several times by all accounts, so he would have taken in a fair dose of some pretty nasty bugs.’

  At which I felt slightly sick. ‘But the microbiology tests were negative,’ Clive pointed out.

  Ed explained, ‘They wouldn’t pick up viruses, only bacteria and fungi and things.’

  Graham nodded knowingly at Clive. ‘Remember that bugger who fell in the slurry pit? He didn’t do too well, neither.’

  Clive winced but said nothing.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Gloucestershire plays host to a lot of fairs and circuses and this, in turn, brings a lot of travelling families. Graham and I were busily getting all the stock levels of cleaning chemicals up one Friday afternoon in August ready for any unexpected disasters at the weekend, when the A&E porters arrived with Mr Jack Diggins of no fixed abode. As I opened the door, while smiling and laughing at a joke Graham had just told me, and assuming that it would be one of the many undertakers that come to collect bodies, I was totally taken aback by what I saw. Standing in front of me, outside the double doors to the ‘deceased’ entrance – the one that is hidden from the public – were two porters, the covered mortuary trolley in which the deceased are moved from the wards or casualty to the mortuary and, surrounding this, a large crowd of people.

  These turned out to be Mr Diggins’ family, and they wanted to make sure their Jack was transferred from A&E to us in the proper manner. What they were also hoping for was to stay with him in the mortuary. I was embarrassed that I had opened the door laughing, as it must have given the impression that I didn’t care about my job. I excused myself and asked the party to give me two minutes, and literally ran to the office to get Clive. Clive was deep in conversation on the telephone and I began to panic. I couldn’t get his attention and realized from what I heard that he was going to be a long time on the phone. Graham was going to have to sort this. ‘You need to go to the front door,’ I told Graham.