Down Among the Dead Men_ A Year in the Life of a Mortuary Technician - Michelle Williams [40]
‘OK,’ I said cautiously.
‘There’s only two,’ he said, and Graham began to laugh again. ‘Both women.’
I looked at the book where the porters write down the details of the bodies that they have admitted to the mortuary. As Clive had said, there were only two, but Graham had been wrong because although one was called Ethel Smithson, the other was called David Harcourt. Oh well, I thought, we all make mistakes.
I went to the fridge bay where Mrs Smithson had been put to check her over. In order to do this properly, I had to pull the tray out of the fridge onto the hydraulic trolley so that I could get a good look at her, making sure that she wasn’t leaking, that if necessary she was viewable and that any valuables were properly accounted for. Having done this, I turned my attention to David Harcourt who was residing in the top space of the fridge next door. I pulled the door open, positioned the trolley and pumped it up to the right height, then pulled the laden tray onto the trolley before lowering it again to waist height. I unzipped the body bag and was surprised at what was inside. It wasn’t Mr Harcourt at all; it was a buxom blonde with long hair and an ample chest, dressed in a long flowing nightie. Obviously, the porters had made a mistake, I thought, except that when I checked the name on the wristband and the Coroner’s label, they both said that it was Mr David Harcourt.
I looked again at the face and saw that underneath the heavy make-up there was a faint trace of stubble, and the hairline was slightly crooked. When I pulled at his hair, it came away to reveal the close-cropped black hair of a man. I looked up and saw that Clive and Graham were standing in the doorway to the body store, both grinning like lunatics. Graham asked, ‘Isn’t she lovely?’ Clive said, ‘Meet Davina Harcourt, Michelle.’
I looked back down at the body. The ample chest was in fact made out of rubber.
Clive explained. ‘According to Neville, by day David Harcourt was a respectable inhabitant of the town of Cirencester, a member of the Round Table, hard-working chartered surveyor, father of three and keen amateur golfer. By night – or at least on those nights when his wife went off to the Trefoil Guild or Women’s Institute or whatever – he became Davina by rummaging through his wife’s drawers and by the appropriate application of make-up and other accessories.’
Graham added, ‘He did the job properly. He’s got some nice frilly knickers on.’
Everyone’s heard of people like this, but I never thought I’d get to meet one, so to speak. ‘Why?’ It seemed a pointless question, but I couldn’t help asking it.
Clive said knowingly, ‘Ah, well, the story doesn’t end there, Michelle, because Davina didn’t just get his rocks off by getting into high-heels and squeezing into Mrs Harcourt’s Ann Summers crotchless panties. He’d gone to the trouble of buying a cylinder of helium from the local party and joke shop, as well.’
He lost me completely with this. ‘Helium?’
Clive explained patiently. ‘You get a plastic dustbin bag, and a dressing-gown cord or something to tie around your neck so that no air can get in, then you pop the end of a hose from the cylinder up inside it. You switch the cylinder on and lie back.’
This seemed so bizarre as to be insane. I briefly wondered if he’d done it to make his voice go squeaky ... At my bafflement, Clive said, ‘Auto-asphyxiation, Michelle. Eventually, you begin to lose consciousness and have trouble breathing; apparently, for some poor bastards, it brings about a massive hard-on as good as the real thing.’
I must have looked like a codfish because both Clive and Graham collapsed back in fits of giggles. When they had calmed down again, Clive went on to say that although this kind of thing wasn’t common, they got to see them on a fairly regular basis. ‘Especially because of GCHQ,’ he said.
GCHQ – the country’s top intelligence analysis centre – was