Grave Truths

by Anne Morgellyn

  Grave Truths

  Anne Morgellyn

  © Anne Morgellyn, 2012, all rights reserved

  Anne Morgellyn has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published 2012 by BeWrite Books at SmashWords, 2003.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  The hospital saw death as the ultimate failure, a thing to be spoken of in whispers, to be hidden away behind screens and under sheets. Some of the clinicians here regarded death as no more than a change of condition, a change with ever shifting shades of meaning.

  What did death mean in the Twenty-First Century? Heart-stopping death pre-dated the dawn of defibrillators. You could keep a brain stem alive when everything else had ceased to function, so what did it mean when the brain stem died if everything else was functioning artificially, though, to all intents and purposes, quite normally (or what passes for normally), courtesy of a machine?

  And what of all those organs – kidneys, hearts, livers, eyes – removed from accident victims at point of death and transplanted into the sick? Did that mean the donors weren’t really dead, at least not in their entirety, or had they somehow been transposed into another system, efficiently recycled by modern metaphysicians?

  Thanks to my line of work, I knew what death looked like on the face of it, but even now I couldn’t say, I couldn’t even begin to say I knew what death is.

  But Chas had been quite unambiguous regarding my old lady. A quick in and out for the Coroner.

  Cerebral haemorrhage resulting from ruptured aneurysm in anterior cerebral artery. Note: superficial scalp wound, sustained by a heavy fall, likely to have been precipitated by the rupturing aneurysm (stroke).

  ‘And that’s it.’ The administrator put the print-out in a folder for me. ‘All done and dusted.’

  All in a day’s work, I thought. A mayfly of a case. The mayfly gestates at eight o clock in the morning and dies at eight pm. How can it understand the word ‘night’?

  I took the report and went out. Were it not for this Roy, I could ring the undertakers right away and be done with Edith Mary Woods.

  About the Author

  Anne Morgellyn was for several years a London-based broadcast journalist, covering soft news stories in Russia, France, and the former Yugoslavia. She has lived in France, Egypt and Finland and used her European Script Fund award to spend some time in a rainforest house in Dominica - the Caribbean Island which inspired Jean Rhys’s novel, The Wide Sargasso Sea. After moving to Cornwall, Anne continued to travel widely throughout Europe and the USA with her young daughter while teaching part time for The Open University and for Exeter University where she was Creative Writing Fellow. In 2009, she won an Arts Council award for her blog topicofcancer.blogspot.com

  Her blogs and network links are at www.about.me/annemorgellyn

  Also from Anne Morgellyn at Endeavour Press:

  Remains of the Dead, 2012

  All the lonely people, where do they all come from?

  All the lonely people, where do they all belong?

  Lennon, McCartney

  Prologue

  The park is getting ready for its bloom-time. The gardeners sweat freely in the late spring sun, working hard over the starlets in their beds: Bergenia Morgenrote, Potentillia Yellow Queen, Phlox Prospero. I am heading for Queen Mary’s Gardens, where the fountain shivers and the sun yet fails to warm and the roses are no more than brackish stems. Roy holds the statue pose, his gaze fixed hard upon the prize bush, Ena Harkness, the one he wants renamed in memory of his mother. What’s in a name? I tell him. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. But he ignores me, riveted by guilt and grief, a stickler for that one last detail.

  I slide up the bench as far as his upturned cap, which at this hour and season of the year contains but one green penny. Since business can hardly be brisk, I add a couple of shiny pound coins, but this still fails to move him. I know he can spot a hundred and fifty a day in July from all the gawkers and snappers who haunt his post, but can he last out till the tourists come back? Is he eating well? Is he in good health?

  Give me a sign, Roy, I whisper. For God’s sake, give me a sign.

  I give it a further ten minutes then tell him I will come back later. I will continue to try him, I say, till he gives me what I want. I will never stop staking him out till he tips me a wink of peace.

  The sun shears painfully across my eyes as I leave the shadows of the arbour. I cross the Inner Circle, just missing a car that is driving too fast, that has erred inside this wide green hole in the city, a carrion crow estranged from the flock. I shake my fist at the driver, but he has turned the corner already. I don’t want to go back to my work at the undertakers. I’d prefer to stand my ground here, where the seedlings are stirring in the rumpled clay, where the sun is going about its business, making new shoots grow. But I cannot walk upon this grass for Roy is wishing he were dead and buried under it. And, worse than that, that I was buried with him.

  ***

  Chapter 1

  I used to tell people straight out what I did: I work with the dead, I help put the pieces together. Then I got tired of the effect this had on some of those I told, so then I started saying I was a cleaner for the City, which put a sanitary gloss upon the work I did, like lavender polish or those bursts of floral haze that overlay bad smells. I cleaned up after the dead. I helped to put them away. In truth, I was appointed by the Coroner to connect the solitary urban departed with a diaspora of friends or next-of-kin who could save the public purse the expense of a pauper’s funeral, for why should the state pay up when some long-lost brother or lover or child can be dug out to bear the costs? So enter Louise and search the sad and empty homes for any clues. Enter Louise and root out the faded addresses. Pore over the old photos, the bills unpaid, the tickets saved from plays and concerts. One old girl left thirty-four cornflakes boxes stuffed with Green Shield Stamps. Not much to show for a life perhaps, but who am I to say?

  This last case, my epiphany (it being the one that wiped my eye), had all the aspects of a routine solitary passing. The landlord had noticed a diabolical smell in the house when he came to collect the rent, which he referred to as a bloody joke in any case. The deceased had given him a shock, he said, meaning that the sight of her corpse was a peek at his own corruption. All he cared about was that she was dead and not about to come home from the hospital, freshly bathed and fed, before he’d had a chance to change the locks. I would have pulled him in about the lesion on her head, but I knew better than to argue with police officers. The attending GP had taken it upon himself to rule this out as a suspicious death. Stroke, he said, was the most likely cause. The lesion was probably caused by the old lady’s fall. Her head had struck the corner of the wardrobe, as was clear from the splashes of blood down the old English oak. This was the working of a ripe old age, the doctor sighed, and thus she was mine to dispose of, mine to bag up and remove. But I resented this. I thought it was too free and easy. Besides, I didn’t want her.

  The clock above the main gate
of the hospital was striking two as I rang the mortuary bell. I had worked here once. I had walked these halls over a thousand times before, but the whole department and what it stood for (death and the causes of death) always filled me with a sick anticipation. The duty pathologist, Janice Impawala, came out into the corridor to meet me, her expression braced for confrontation. ‘Your case was put out there,’ she said, directing me towards the annexe. ‘No room at the inn.’

  The place she spoke of was fancifully known as the chapel, but the cheap trestle table, on which the technician would sometimes place a cloth and a simple wooden cross out of consideration for relatives who came to view down here, now stood folded up against the wall. Three bodies lay on the floor in the middle of the room, bundled in creased bedsheets. A fly buzzed round my head as I began the work of checking toe-tags: Vera Drace, born 1953. Joseph Tarantas, Notes with Oncology. Edith Mary Woods, Dead on Arrival.

  It was a broad face with reddened cheeks and purple veins that stood out on the nose, a weary face, but not unpleasing. Edith Mary had not yet acquired that stiff and vacant look that corpses get. She still looked asleep. She looked as though she was dreaming. I stood transfixed by the arrangement of her wiry red hair, violently tinted with some scorching chemical mix that would keep its shade long after the flesh of the head had liquefied. But the flesh was already broken. A deep cut, about three centimetres long, was encrusted with blood. Covering her face with the dirty bedsheet, I marched back into the cutting room.

  Impawala was defensive. ‘You can see how we’re fixed here, Louise. Big problems with refrigeration. Two of the units have broken down and the rest are full. Your case is last in the queue.’

  ‘There’s a lesion on her head, Janice. You might want to take a look at that.’

  ‘This is a quick in and out for the Coroner, right? If the poor old lady dropped dead, it’s entirely reasonable she’d have a scalp wound.’

  ‘She could have been pushed.’

  ‘So refer it to forensics. You’d be doing me a favour, with my backlog.’

  I followed her gaze to the row of section tables. A technician was eviscerating some other poor body further up the line. A referral to forensics would do me a favour, too, I considered. I didn’t want to poke around Edith Woods any more than Impawala did. Another dead old woman, in another foul flat, in the hottest August since records began, with no prospect of leave on the horizon, was one lonely old woman too many.

  ‘Why don’t you send them over to the medical school?’

  Impawala was pulling off her gloves. ‘Believe me, I tried, but we have nothing to interest them here. They’ve got it made,’ she said bitterly. ‘Fat research grants, state of the art microscopy. So much for intellectual generosity. Why don’t you have a stab at the professor?’

  I considered this in silence. Impawala knew all about my out-of-hours relationship with her predecessor, now lording it over the research project next door, hogging the big cat’s chair.

  ‘The City seems to think I can work miracles,’ she went on. ‘The sparks-guy is still coming now. Like he was coming now two hours ago. Like I needed this today. I have nowhere else to put them.’

  I jumped back sharply to avoid a moving trolley. The technician was wheeling in another case, his eyes scintillating with resentment.

  ‘Why don’t you give us a break, Louise?’ Impawala said slyly. ‘Professor Androssoff is always telling us what a competent stitcher you were. You must have made an almighty team around here, you and him.’

  ‘I’ve got backlog, too,’ I said tartly, and a bully of a supervisor on my back, the Bully Bubba. Too bad she had a name that connoted comfort and cuddles. It was fatuous to think fat women like her in pastels and beads were soft and softhearted, for Bubba was hard as nails and just as sharp. She was a slave-driver, a fury, a nemesis.

  I pushed out into the courtyard via the double doors. It was true that I had once stitched corpses with something dangerously close to zeal, inspired by my duty to the dead. And it was true I had made a good team once with the man now elevated to professor. The fridges had not broken down when Chas Androssoff was ruling the mortuary. There had been other issues to deal with then, issues which I’d still not laid to rest, although Chas had gone over the wall to the medical school and I to my work with the City. We were still friends though, if that was the right term to use. We greeted each other with stagey warmth. He sent me a rude Christmas card. In the past, we’d sniffed around each other like a desperate mating pair, fearful of missing the connection, of finding no other of our kind. No wonder it had not worked out, although I still felt bonded to Chas like an imprinted sparrow. A bird that could not fight or flee. A bird that could not sing.

  I waited for him in his office while the departmental secretary fetched me a glass of chilled water. She avoided my eye as she told me the professor was detained upstairs in a funding meeting. She knew full well what I used to get up to with her boss, on the back of his Harley-Davidson, in the bedroom of his no-frills flat. Did that make me greater or smaller in her opinion? I didn’t care to know. Chas’s students called him the Angel of Death, and he liked to cultivate an air of something of the night in his work at the medical school. As professor of neuropathology, well-practised at cutting lesser colleagues down to size, he didn’t let it bother him, although it bothered me still that he could get so far up the noses of the powers that be without losing his footing. I had never learned to live with Chas, but nor had I quite learned to live without him. I felt like Persephone, lamenting the half of her life she had spent with Pluto, but the exciting half at that, I always thought. Chas was a mass of teeming, healthy cells, right down to the tips of his black hair, which hung down his back like some Orthodox cleric’s. And he was devoted to his researches. Impawala had implied he was not generous, but that was untrue. Chas just hated wasting time on useless material like my old woman in the annexe. Chas was interested in extraordinary brains, like the one belonging to a German terrorist that had fetched up at the medical school in recent weeks, which he was studying to see if there was some aberration in the grey matter that had hot-wired the man to planting bombs. And I hoped to persuade a man like Chas that ordinary remains, like those of Edith Mary Woods, might also have wild cards to share.

  ‘What about funding for the mortuary?’ I burst out, as soon as he came back, a black linen jacket tossed over his customary T shirt in deference to the meeting’s protocol. ‘I’ve had it up to here with this hospital. You heard about the broken fridges over there?’

  He brushed my hair lightly as he went to sit down. ‘Suits you longer like that,’ he nodded. ‘In fact, you’re looking good enough to eat, Louise. How’s the counselling coming?’

  ‘It’s coming,’ I said, feeling myself go red. It was ironical that Chas himself had been the agent who had pushed me towards the counselling course, to sort out some of my issues. But I knew what he thought of psychotherapy, Sigmund Fraud and all his merry men. Material was Chas’s thing, not the shades of grey in the grey matter. Dissection under cold, white lights.

  I pushed the hair behind my ears, determined to keep it professional. ‘I’ve got an urgent case,’ I said. ‘Another old woman on her own. The police went round with some time-serving GP and did not even query his opinion that she died a natural death.’

  ‘Why should they? Why subject the poor old bird to an autopsy – not to mention, Janice Impawala.’

  ‘There has to be an autopsy, Chas. The police surgeon couldn’t certify her.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And I was wondering if you would help me out here.’

  Chas reached for the water glass, but found only a centimetre of lees. ‘I know that Janice has a backlog,’ he said. ‘That’s par for the course in this job. So it’s the fag end of the summer and the fridges break down. That’s Sod’s Law, Louise. They have to learn to fight their corner over there.’

  ‘It would take a couple of hours at most to do a post-mortem exam. There’s a lesion on h
er head, caked in blood. Her landlord’s of the species Rackman. Remember him? The sixties slum king? He couldn’t wait to get her out of there.’

  ‘These brittle-boned old girls go down like ninepins.’ Chas breathed a sigh at me. ‘Like birds that fall out of their trees. Just kissing off, sweetheart. Don’t let it get to you.’

  ‘The tip of an iceberg, you said, the human brain.’

  His face darkened. ‘What is your point exactly? I seem to have lost the thread.’

  ‘You said yourself there may be some electrical activity still hanging round after the heart stops. If you believe it’s possible to send electrical impulses through the atmosphere – radio waves, internet connections, why can’t there be life after death?’

  He snorted. ‘I know what radio waves consist of, how they work. What are you saying, Louise? You think the old woman is going to rise up and complain because they made her wait for one of the fridges? They’ll get to it. You know what it’s like over there. I’ve championed their cause often enough. They got the funding through for another histopathologist, thanks to me, but now we can’t get hold of one for love or money. Well, it’s not the most sexy of specialisms.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘Unless you label it forensic science, like those TV dramas. Pathologists playing the good detective. As though we have the time.’

  I decided to go for the sympathy angle. ‘Can’t you just go and take a look so I can get her off my hands? I’m up against the wall here, Chas. If this hangs over the Bank Holiday, I may as well kiss off the counselling studies for good.’

  ‘Why’s that then?’

  ‘Because I’m overloaded, overworked, boxed in.’

  Chas considered the clean expanse of his antique desk, a relic from Victorian times, when the great and good of his profession had placed pathology as the foundation stone of diagnosis at this hospital, thanks to the supplies laid on by body snatchers for all the good doctors to practice on. ‘I’m pushed for time as well, Louise. I’m going to Brighton tonight to catch up with a friend of mine, just back from touring the Pacific Rim.’