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By Root 191 0

us to see who is coming into the back entrance of the pathology department. Clive had nicknames for a lot of them – but his favourite was Ray, the man who came in every morning to sweep and clean the floors and put out the rubbish. Ray was about seventy years old and possibly the most miserable man in the country. He had only two topics of conversation – the weather and the football – and on both of these he could bore for England. He was a rabid Everton supporter and his life was therefore full of woe, which he spread around with great relish; a rainy weekend on which Everton got hammered four nil by Liverpool, and we knew that if he caught you in the corridor you’d feel like slashing your wrists after ten minutes. Being a rugby girl with no interest in football, I would avoid him like the plague. But there was no real malice in Clive. He liked to enjoy life, even if much of it was spent doing things that would turn most people’s stomachs.

We knew that the quiet period wouldn’t last and, sure enough, it ended quite suddenly with a multiple pile-up on the M5. It happened during the morning rush hour, and just before I left the house, I saw the first news flashes on the morning TV. There was carnage with at least six cars and an HGV involved; it looked from the pictures as if there had been a bad fire, so I figured we’d be getting some work from it. The traffic in the town centre was heavy because they’d closed both lanes of the motorway and a lot of the northbound traffic was being diverted that way.

When I got in (fifteen minutes late), Clive was already on the phone to the Coroner’s office, looking serious. Maddie and I made coffee and listened in on his side of the conversation, from which we gathered that there were three dead, all from one car. It had gone under the HGV and then caught fire, with all three of them trapped inside. I felt sick when I heard this and I could see that Maddie felt none too good either. Neither of us had seen a fire death before and we weren’t looking forward to our first experience.

The undertakers brought the bodies in just before noon and, instead of the normal banter, no one said anything much. The dead were in body bags made of thick black plastic so you couldn’t see any of what was inside, or even judge the shape, but the ash and charcoal on the outside of the bags gave me all sorts of nightmares about what I would see when we opened them. And there was a smell, too; it was one I’d never encountered before in the mortuary, but it was very familiar. It brought back memories of summer meals, when you’ve eaten everything you want and the meat left on the barbecue is too far gone to be rescued. When we transferred the bodies from the undertakers’ trolleys to ours, two of them were light – perhaps only half the weight of a normal adult – and the feel through the body bag was all wrong, as if these bodies weren’t made of flesh but of something harder.

Later that afternoon, Neville Stubbs sent through the E60 forms from which we could see that the dead were a mother, father and seventeen-year-old daughter, by the name of Franklin. They had been returning from a short break in Devon where they had been visiting friends. Ed, who was going to do the autopsies the next day, came down and read what Neville had sent. Then he got on the phone and rang the Coroner’s office, telling Neville that before he started the PMs he wanted to see the police reports on the accident, as well as any photographs of the scene that SOCOs had taken. Then he turned to us with a sad smile on his face. ‘It’s not going to be nice in there tomorrow, but it’s got to be done. I’m sure you’ll cope.’

When I got into the mortuary the next morning, I felt exhausted, having hardly slept. Clive was sitting at his desk looking through a book with a light blue cover and spiral binding. Maddie was already there and she said, ‘It’s the photos of the accident.’

‘What are they like?’

‘I’ve not seen them yet.’

Clive looked up. ‘They’re not nice. Not nice at all.’

I thought for a moment he wasn’t going to let us see, but then