Down Among the Dead Men_ A Year in the Life of a Mortuary Technician - Michelle Williams [97]
Clive said, ‘I’ve stripped the dura. There’s no other sign of a head injury.’
And that was that. Ed had cheered up because he could be fairly sure that death had been due to the collision and not to the fire. He moved on to the front seat passenger and found similar injuries. Because she was slightly less burned, there was even evidence of a large amount of blood in the chest, again in keeping with a ruptured aorta due to trauma. We were breathing more easily by now: it looked as though these poor people had not suffered when they died, because their injuries would have been more or less instantaneous. When it came to the rear seat passenger, though – the one that ought to have been the young girl – he came across a problem. There was no sign of a ruptured aorta, and there were no major boney injuries. Ed became noticeably quieter. When he opened the airways, though, there was at least no soot.
He shook his head and sighed. ‘I don’t know why she died.’
‘But it wasn’t the fire, right?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘Hopefully not. The clean airways are a good sign . . .’ But he sounded unsure.
I remembered how she had been curled up in the car and suddenly became terrified that perhaps she had survived the crash and burned to death . . .
He turned back to her body. ‘Our chances of getting anything for carbon monoxide levels are pretty small . . .’
I knew that carbon monoxide levels in the blood go up in fires. Clive said, ‘There’s no chance of getting blood.’
Ed said, ‘Try to get some bone marrow from the lumbar spine. I think that’s our best bet.’
‘OK, boss,’ said Clive.
While Clive did this, Ed made notes; it didn’t take long. Then he went to the changing room for a shower. Clive said, ‘Well, at least there’s not much reconstruction required.’
In fact, all that was required was to zip up the body bags and put them back in the body store. There wasn’t much cleaning up to do either; mostly it was sweeping up bits of charcoal from the floor and washing down the grease and pieces of clotted blood from the dissection bench. When we’d finished, the PM room was again spotless, but the smell lingered.
While we had coffee in the mortuary office, Ed phoned Neville and told them his conclusions and that he wanted the toxicology lab to attempt carbon monoxide levels on the bone marrow samples. He listened for a moment, then closed his eyes. ‘No, Neville. They’re not viewable.’ Clive laughed out loud in the background: ‘Typical.’
Ed continued. ‘No, no chance at all. You’ll have to go by dental records.’ He paused. ‘Yes, the teeth are intact.’
As he put down the phone, he was shaking his head. ‘Where does that man keep his brains?’
Clive shrugged. We were well used to the Coroner’s officers pressurizing us to let relatives view bodies for the purposes of identification. They never seemed to believe us when we sometimes had to tell them that the bodies were too mutilated or decomposed or burnt to let relatives see them.
That night, I dived into the Merlot as soon as I could. Luke was cooking but didn’t ask what was wrong, knowing I would tell him if I needed to. It was good to have some normality back, although it took me a long time to stop wondering about the girl in the back of the car.
FIFTY-ONE
The days before 26 April – when the results of the certificate examination were due to be published – were far tenser than I ever thought they’d be. I had worked it all out beforehand, how chilled I’d be, how that day would be like every other. I wasn’t bothered about the result and kept telling myself that this wasn’t a particularly important exam; after all, it wasn’t as if my job depended on it. My GCSEs had been a lot worse than this.
Yet, as the middle of April came and went, I couldn’t stop myself wondering again and again how well I’d done. Although it didn’t really matter if I’d cocked things up, because I would still be going