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By Root 159 0

lady – Mrs Ethel Humbler – that took him no time at all, but it turned out to be fascinating. Ed was on PM duty again, and what he found made everyone stop the banter and friendly insults that were being fired around and led Clive to turn down the volume on the radio. In Mrs Humbler’s throat, wedged right down in the trachea, was a paper napkin. It was almost spooky when Ed flattened it out, because written in the corner was Mrs Humbler’s own name. It was immediately obvious what had happened; in their uneducated wisdom, her so-called ‘carers’ had left her, despite the fact that she had full-blown dementia, to help herself to her own lunch. In her own confused world, Mrs H had obviously felt compelled to consume everything that was laid out in front of her and, with no one around to stop her, she had stuffed the napkin into her mouth. It had become lodged in her throat leading to what I can only imagine to be a lonely and scary death.

So, Ed had a cause of death for the Coroner but, as Clive said afterwards, that would not be the end of it. For the time being, this would be an accidental death, but there are accidents and there are ‘accidents’; some are more avoidable than others and it’s the Coroner’s job to sort out the two types. I vowed secretly that I would never allow any of my family to go into care; I would rather struggle to look after them, no matter how hard that was, than allow this to happen to one of mine. How were Mrs Humbler’s family going to react?

After the PM, Mrs H was reconstructed by Clive to nearly her former glory and ended up actually looking more peaceful than before, then placed in the body store alongside the rest of the poor souls who reside with us while they await collection by the undertakers.

FIVE

Like most people, I had always assumed that mortuaries dealt only in dead people, but it had become apparent very quickly that there was a large stream of other kinds of thing coming through. The first time this was brought home to me was quite early on when I answered the bell of the main red doors to find a porter with a large yellow bin that was about a foot deep and two feet square. He thrust it at me and said, ‘From the delivery suite.’

I took it and asked, ‘What is it?’

He looked at me pityingly. ‘Well, I’m not the bloody stork, and this ain’t no bonny baby.’

With that he was gone.

At this point Clive came into the vestibule and found me looking down at the box. He made a face. ‘Oh dear.’

‘What’s this?’ I asked.

He took the box from me. ‘Products.’

‘Products?’ I echoed. What sort of products did he mean?

‘Products of conception.’ I still did not catch on. He took the box into the body store and put it on a trolley, then turned to face me. ‘Abortions, miscarriages, that kind of thing,’ he said gently.

The truth hit me and left me feeling sick. ‘They come here?’ I asked incredulously.

‘Where else would they go?’

I’d never really thought about it and, now I did, it made sense. Nervously, I asked, ‘Are there babies in there?’

He smiled. ‘Bless you, Michelle, no. If a baby is stillborn, or dies shortly after birth, then of course it comes down here exactly as an adult does. But with the early miscarriages and abortions and suchlike, there’s nothing much to see other than tissues.’

I wasn’t sure I liked to think about what he meant by ‘tissues’. ‘What happens to them?’

‘We treat them exactly as we do everyone else. If the parents want them buried, then an undertaker buries them. If they want an undertaker to handle the cremation, then that’s what happens. Most of the time, though, the parents are happy for us to handle things. We get the chaplain to bless them, and they go directly to a crematorium from here. We make absolutely certain that they are treated respectfully at all times.’

About a month later, I answered the door exactly as before and once again a porter stood there. This one held a white plastic bucket, sealed with a lid; it was about eighteen inches in diameter and about three feet tall. He smiled at me and held it out for me to take, as if it was a bunch