Down Among the Dead Men_ A Year in the Life of a Mortuary Technician - Michelle Williams [27]
So, after the formalities, Mr Jenner was met by his family at long last. I must have been able to hide my frustration, as I don’t think they noticed it. I explained to them, in a manner that I hoped was acceptable, that we really needed direct contact with them as we are not manned 24/7, and they apologized again. I showed them into the viewing room and left them to it, pointing out how to contact me if they needed me. There were four of them and they were there for each other, so my presence, I felt, would only get in the way.
I had told them how long I had waited for them, and thought this would mean they would take into consideration my time. How dare I be so selfish? Three hours later they were still with me. Five o’clock came and I had spent all day Saturday in the mortuary.
I have to admit I was annoyed. Not physically annoyed, but inside annoyed. That helpless feeling you have when you know you should not be angry because you have to consider how other people are feeling or accept them for what they are, and that it is not your place to say anything. But annoyed because you have not been considered in the whole picture, you are there and that is that. Apologies begin to mean nothing at that point and frustration takes over.
I finally left the mortuary at seven that evening. I never knew how much I enjoyed my weekends until they had been taken away from me.
Once again, Luke collected me from the hospital and I got home and collapsed on the sofa. My mobile, I wanted to throw in the bin. Being on call meant that when I relaxed a bit at home, I had to limit how much I drank. OK, I don’t drive, but I still have to be presentable and, if the evening needed it, attend for a forensic post-mortem should someone be so unlucky as to be murdered or fall foul of an ugly death.
The phone remained silent for the rest of the evening, but that did not diminish my anxiety.
FIFTEEN
As I entered the mortuary through the double red doors, I heard a voice say in an astounded manner, ‘Bloody hell.’ Being a nosy person, I could not resist going at once to see what had provoked such a reaction, but in the back of my mind I was thinking, ‘What now?’ after the weekend I had just had. As I entered the body store, Clive and Graham were standing on either side of a trolley, looking at each other. Without a word more being spoken, I looked down and saw the usual white body bag, partially opened, and without even realizing it spoke the same words.
What lay in front of us was a headless body; fully clothed, but headless. Curiosity got the better of me and I just had to pull back the top of the body bag to see what other injuries this poor individual had sustained. Resting between his knees lay his motorbike helmet, so it was a road traffic accident, which gave me a little clue as to what had occurred to him.
‘Where’s his head?’ I asked, because it wasn’t with the rest of him.
What happened next, though, was enough to turn the hardest technician’s stomach. Clive picked up the helmet with his gloved hands and said in a voice of perfect seriousness, ‘He had it gift-wrapped.’ Hanging from the bottom of it were ragged tatters of flesh and what appeared to be cervical vertebrae . . . I looked into the visor and found myself fixated by the face behind it. Hardly a mark could be seen on the features, and his eyes were closed so that he actually looked quite peaceful.
Just then, the phone in the office began to ring. It was Bill Baxford from the Coroner’s office. ‘That road traffic you had in overnight. Are we able to do an identification on him after the post-mortem?’
I knew enough to appreciate that this is important. All victims of unnatural death have to be identified by law and, obviously, this is usually done through visual identification by the next of kin, but clearly in some cases this is not possible; no relative would want to see the head of their nearest and dearest a few feet away from the rest of the body, after all. In such cases, it’s usually done by dental records; as a last resort, DNA is used. Both of these are expensive