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By Root 193 0

’s comment, looking at me with a pinched face and puckered mouth that formed a pained expression while he sucked in some air. I could not argue. Poor Mr Walker had been caught up by the harvester and dealt with in no uncertain way. He had been pierced, then sliced, then crushed. His left arm had been almost severed, while his legs were so deeply cut across his thighs that I could see his femurs, which had both been fractured; his chest had been crushed and his abdomen split open, his intestines spilling out. That wasn’t nice, but what really made me want to dry heave was his head; I say ‘head’, but it wasn’t something I’d have wanted on my shoulders. For a start, Mr Walker’s brain was no longer inside it; what had subsequently been found now resided in a Tesco’s carrier bag between his legs. It had been forced to leave home because of lack of space, what with the fact that the head had been crushed and completely flattened; I tried not to, but I kept thinking that with both eyes on the same side, he looked like a bit like a flat fish.

Clive saw my pale face and asked, ‘You all right, Michelle?’

I nodded, took a deep breath, figuring I couldn’t keep on being a girl about it all. Clive, being Clive, just nodded back. He was forever saying, ‘We don’t do burning martyr here,’ and if I said that I was OK, then, as far as he was concerned, I was OK; end of.

Peter Gillard arrived. When he asked what he had on for the day, Clive kept a straight face and led him into the dissection room where Mr Walker waited, laid out on a dissection table. I followed to see his reaction, which was priceless. He almost physically jumped in the air, then squeaked. After that he was silent for a moment while he walked around the body before asking Clive in such a voice that I couldn’t tell if he was being serious, ‘Got any idea what he died of?’

In actual fact, autopsies like that one are fairly straightforward, because there is little question concerning the cause of death, and it’s just a matter of cataloguing the injuries and making sure there is no possibility that natural disease played a part; not surprisingly, since Mr Walker was only forty-two, Peter Gillard was able to show fairly easily that this wasn’t the case and that the cause of death was ‘multiple injuries’. The only other thing that needed to be done was to get samples, if we could, to be sent to the toxicology laboratory. It’s standard protocol to do this in all cases of accidental death, to determine just how much drink or drugs might have contributed to the deceased’s end.

Clive, who had been doing the autopsy with Peter Gillard, had previously got some urine using a needle and syringe on the bladder before he took it out; now that the body cavity was empty, he could get some blood. To do this, while I held an empty, sterile pot in the pelvis below the iliac vessels as they passed into the legs, he massaged first the left thigh and then the right, pushing blood out so that it squirted into the pot. I labelled the blood and urine specimens, then stored them at the bottom of one of the fridges.

Which meant that Peter Gillard was finished, but our job was just starting. While he made notes on what he had found, I poured the dissected organs back into a plastic bag inside the body cavity. Then, while I cleaned down the bench where Peter Gillard had done his work (he wasn’t too messy, by which I mean no blood on the ceiling, which sometimes happens with pathologists), Clive sewed up the body cavity.

The pathologist just walks away – some have a shower, some just get changed, perhaps before having a coffee in the office with us – and wanders upstairs to the laboratory to get on with other things, but there is still a lot of care to be lavished on the deceased, and it’s us who have to do it. Now alone, Clive and I stood either side of Mr Walker and discussed what could be done. Most of the damage would be hidden by a shroud, but obviously, should the relations want to come and pay their last respects, we would have to let them see his head and I couldn’t imagine they’d be too chuffed