Down Among the Dead Men_ A Year in the Life of a Mortuary Technician - Michelle Williams [55]
Up until then, he had pretty much ignored me, but even that made me feel unworthy. He seemed to look down on people even while he was smiling and apparently being friendly. You just knew that if he didn’t have to work alongside you, he would never give you the time of day. I would have to step up to the mark tonight, though, and try really hard to be confident around him,
At least, I consoled myself, he was a very experienced pathologist.
A full-blown forensic post-mortem is a bit like a circus with lots of people doing their bit at different times and the pathologist acting as the ringmaster. A scenes of crime officer will be taking photographs as directed by the pathologist, other police officers will be looking on and answering any background questions that the pathologist has, the mortuary technician will be moving around as directed, getting instruments, pots, syringes and swabs, then labelling samples. If it’s a high risk post-mortem – because of possible AIDS or hepatitis – there’ll be a second mortuary technician staying clean and just ‘circulating’, acting as general dogsbody.
Mrs Taylor-Wells, though, wasn’t anything exciting like a murder; she was just a little old lady who had died in a nursing home where too many old people had died, and who looked as if she had been in a concentration camp. The question here was neglect and standards of care, which was not necessarily the business of the police. Professor Twigworth was on his own, taking his own photographs and with just me and Bill Baxford for company.
In one way, a forensic post-mortem is easier for us, the lowly technicians, than a normal Coroner’s. The pathologist will always do the evisceration himself, requiring us only to saw through the skull. The downside is that they make a lot more incisions, which means a lot more reconstruction. In some cases, they take off most of the skin – including the face – and putting it all back without showing too much stitching can take hours. Professor Twigworth, being the man he is, cut down on all the bruises and marks, without any thought as to how I was going to reconstruct poor Mrs Taylor-Wells; after he’d finished with that and was at the dissection bench looking at the organs, I surveyed the mess he had made and I admit that my heart was in my clogs. I wondered about calling Graham – he had said that he would happily come and help if I thought I couldn’t cope – but decided at once that wasn’t going to happen. I was aware that Clive especially thought of me as a pretty good technician, but still just a girl. I felt that he would look on any plea for help as weakness.
During all this Professor Twigworth kept up a constant stream of patronizing remarks, unfunny jokes and sexual innuendo aimed at me. I think he half-thought that I – a piece of pond life – would jump at the chance of a cuddle from a distinguished pathologist, and part of me wanted him to try something on so that I could put him straight about the facts of life. Bill Baxford chortled at much of this, but I couldn’t blame him for that.
Professor Twigworth finished after three hours. He had taken small samples of most of the organs, as well swabs from the sores, and swabs from the nose and throat. I had already taken urine and asked him now, ‘Do you want to take some blood?’
‘Of course, my dear. Of course.’
I went to the side