Down Among the Dead Men_ A Year in the Life of a Mortuary Technician - Michelle Williams [70]
Ed said, ‘The thing is, Michelle, both of them basically died of drinking too much.’
‘I thought you’d told the Coroner that you couldn’t be sure why either of them had died,’ I replied.
‘I can’t prove it yet, but I think both of them died of overdoing the bottle, only in different ways.’
He finished his shandy and looked around him. ‘No good for you, this, ethanol.’
Mr Alfred Norris was well known about the town; as soon as he saw the name, Clive had said, ‘I bet that’s Fred. Did you ever see him? Bet your dad knows him, Michelle, he used to hang about the park, muttering and moaning to himself. Usually had a bottle of sherry or, if he was really lucky, Special Brew in his hand. If he caught anyone looking at him, he’d quite likely turn on them, but he would always be too wasted to get up off the bench to do anything; there was no real harm in him.’
When Clive opened up the body bag and we saw the grubby, unkempt little man, I certainly did remember him. Dad had often had to turn him away from the pub because he was bothering the other customers and one time he actually lost control of his bowels in the back bar. The smell had been vile and hung about for days, so Dad was not pleased, as you can imagine. I saw from the information supplied by Bill Baxford that he had recently been living at a hostel for the homeless not far from the hospital, but had just been thrown out for stealing from the other residents. I wondered what had happened in his life to lead him to such a state. He had been found in the park in the early morning, lying on a bench. I was actually surprised that he had lived so long after the incident in the back bar. That was ten years ago, and he had certainly smelt very unwell, so I had been sure he was on his way out even then.
The other post-mortem that day was on Mrs Jennifer Bartram, who had lived in a much nicer part of the town, in a small town house. She had been a prominent member of the local community, a school governor at one of the better local schools in the area. She had not been seen for over a day when her neighbours became concerned because she had missed a dinner party with them. The police had attended, found the house secure and then broken in. They had found her in bed, but fully clothed. On the bedside cabinet was an empty bottle of gin and another was found in the kitchen. There were a few empty bottles of sherry around the place, too.
Maddie said, ‘So she liked a tipple, too.’
Clive said, ‘Looks like it. You can never tell.’ Then he added, ‘Bloody awful stuff, sherry, though – it should only be used for cooking, girls – but gin’s something else. I don’t mind a good G&T now and again; got to be a decent one, mind.’ Clive and Ed nodded in agreement while Maddie and I made faces and muttered about how both our mothers had warned us individually about ‘mother’s ruin’.
I was fairly certain that I would find a very ugly liver when I came to do the evisceration on Fred Norris, so it was something of a surprise when I exposed the abdominal organs and the liver did not have the look that I had come to know was cirrhosis. Ed and Peter had taught me about cirrhosis – that it is basically scarring of the whole liver with the formation of thousands of tiny nodules where the liver tries to renew itself and I have to say, it is one of the things that turns my stomach in the PM room, because it does look so abnormal it is horrible. But this liver was huge and pale yellow, and very, very smooth. As soon as Clive saw it, he said, ‘An expensive liver, that.’
By this he meant, as I have subsequently learnt, that you had to spend a lot of money on alcohol to achieve it but, not knowing this at the time,