Remains of the Dead Read online

  The barmaid set the egg and bacon baguette before the derelict. He prodded it suspiciously, as though he expected a slug to crawl out from under the slimy fronds of lettuce. ‘Bill, please,’ Maggie ordered.

  ‘Separate, wasn’t it?’ the barmaid asked. ‘Just the one white wine and a mozzarella and tomato salad?’

  Maggie scribbled her name on the credit card slip. ‘You’ve a meeting at two o’clock, doctor,’ she said to Chas. ‘Don’t stand me up.’

  The derelict watched her go, then put down his grease-filled baguette. ‘Do you work at Charity’s?’ he asked Chas, before I could ask him why he had spent his lunch hour with Maggie.

  ‘For my sins, yes.’

  ‘I heard her call you doctor.’ The derelict smiled at the pink lamb on Chas’s t-shirt. ‘For my sins, eh?’ He reached into his old tweed jacket and produced a card which identified him as an accredited reporter for the scantiest clad of the tabloids.

  ‘I’m impressed,’ Chas said.

  ‘Slippery souls some of you doctors, aren’t you? Hard to pin you down.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘We had a woman ring the paper yesterday. Distraught, she was. It seems you lot wouldn’t talk to her either. She wanted to know where you’d buried her baby. Don’t you think your patients have a right to information?’

  ‘My patients are beyond reading your paper,’ Chas said. ‘You should talk to my colleague who just left.’

  ‘Miss Nicolli? Better men than me have tried her,’ the reporter said. ‘She just doesn’t like journalists. So, this dead baby that went missing. Just went walkabout, did it? Or was it a stick-up?’

  The purple haze was coming down on me again, punctuated by two dead coal eyes. I must have made a noise because the man turned to me.

  ‘You work at Charity’s too, do you, love?’ He produced a note-book and pen from his inner pocket. ‘What are you then? Chief Cook and Bottle Washer?’ He appraised my leather jacket, still damp from last night’s rain, my laddered tights, my feet in their wrecked shoes. ‘I think we’d better have some names, don’t you?’

  Chas too was watching me closely. ‘We’ve got a PR section, you know,’ he told the man. ‘No chairs in the waiting room on the Maternity Wing. No drivers for Chemotherapy patients. But we’ve got PR.’

  ‘Got a clear waiting list for sex change operations as well, haven’t you?’ The reporter brushed his fingers against Chas’s chest. ‘Pink Sheep, eh? You’re telling me.’

  He took a greasy postcard from between the pages of his note-book. It was a black and white photograph of Margaret Thatcher which August had doctored to depict the Iron Lady stealing a purse from a poor-looking woman’s shopping bag. ‘Ever heard of August Stockyard?’ the reporter said. ‘He drinks in here sometimes. Calls himself a Performance Artist. Piss artist and con artist, if you ask me, but he has his moments. He’s gone to prison for being an animal lover. Now he’s got some bee in his bonnet about your place. Now when August gets in touch with some plan or something, we’ve learnt to take it seriously. See, he can be counted on to do his dash, which is why I’m giving you a chance to get your facts straight first.’

  Chas swallowed the rest of his beer. I felt sick.

  The man leaned forward. ‘We’ve got another reporter onto it, an ambitious little tart. If you think I’m tricky, you should see her. She’s spending some time with the victim’s family.’

  ‘Victim?’ Chas queried.

  ‘What would you call it? You can’t go nicking babies from people without their consent. And it seems that wasn’t the only one. Stockyard’s hinting at some big lottery number.’

  Chas got up, pulling me with him. ‘Lovely to chat,’ he said. ‘But we’ve got work to do.’

  ‘Surely, Doctor. Keep my card. You might need it.’

  We went outside. ‘This isn’t fair on you, Chas,’ I said. ‘August is such a sick prat.’

  ‘My grandfather survived the Stalin purges. If you think I’m going to get buried by this, you’re mistaken.’

  ‘What’s this meeting about?’

  ‘It’s about the store. You know, the usual spiel. Like our hands are clean because this happened twenty years ago under the last regime and we just inherited the problem … But I can produce a list of dates. I can point exactly to when it all started, and to the names that started it. I came to Charity’s with platinum-coated references and a state of the art research record. My clinical record is unblemished. They won’t find any skeletons in my cupboard, which is why Maggie knows she had better not mess me around. That’s why Simon Fell will be asking Last Rites to hold their horses.’ He glanced at the reporter’s card which he still had in his hand.

  We came out of the alleyway which constituted the short cut back to the hospital. An ambulance was parked outside the mortuary entrance. ‘Here we go,’ Chas said. ‘That’ll be the suicide on the underground. They rang up just as I was going out. I told them it will have to wait. I’ve got my hands full as it is.’ He looked at me. ‘If you want a job,’ he said, ‘go over to Medical Records and ask Elias what the fuck he’s doing with those files I asked for. Failing that, go home.’

  ‘I’m not running over to medical records like some stupid temp,’ I said.

  ‘Fine, then go home.’ He was blocking the way to the mortuary. ‘You’re not coming in here today,’ he said. ‘I’ll come round to your place later.’

  He jumped aside as the collection men rammed open the double doors with the empty trolley. One of them goosed me on his way through. ‘Look lively, Louise,’ he said, then whispered as Chas went inside. ‘There’s one in there with a hard-on. I like the black tights. What are they? Poor tart’s fishnets?’

  ‘Fuck you,’ I said. ‘Just fuck you.’

  But he was not the first to show irreverence towards the dead, and I knew he wouldn’t be the last. At our place, on any day of the week, you encountered smirking corpse-collection men who made gross jokes about stiffs taking leaks, then you brushed the crumbs from your sandwich or samosa, or whatever other junk food you brought in, underneath the section table with the corpse still on it, and you chewed the fat with bored coroner’s officers or bug-eyed students trying to get a rise out of the shocking spectacle of a cadaver. There were very few people, excepting a dope-head like me, or a bone-head like Yorkie, who could be serious in this line of work. Laughter is the last defence for mortuary technicians, the thin red line that divides the stiffs from the stitchers. But the dead always have the last laugh.

  ***

  Chapter Eleven

  There were no public transport problems on the way home, though I dawdled some of the way, trying to kill the time till Chas came round to see me. The afternoons were getting darker, as they do in that grey period before the Christmas decorations come out to play. Outside the exit to the Tube, a boy stood with a home-made effigy of Guy Fawkes, dressed in an old boiler suit. A placard round the Gunpowder Plotter’s turnip head demanded Trick-or-Treat in transatlantic bricolage. With a thump in my chest, I remembered that today was Hallowe’en.

  As I came down my basement steps, I could see that someone had been there already that morning. There was a faint smell of soap flakes. A few freezing suds snaked around the bogey hole door from the leaking washing machine. Eddie’s jar, thank God, was still there. Shaken, I thought, but not stirred. I peeled the carrier from it and looked at the contents. The aorta was sticking up like the hand of a drowning man raised in supplication. It was grotesque.

  The answering machine was winking at me through my kitchen window. Mr Byrne had recorded three messages. The first congratulated me, in the warmest of tones, for my part in yesterday’s urgent business. Mrs Kronenberg had telephoned him first thing to say how delighted she had been with my services. The second, logged at half past ten, asked if I would like to go and have lunch with a representative from the firm’s American partners who was currently in town. The third supposed I must be busy at the hospital, but assured me of very interesting proposal if I got back to the undertakers on
my return. Open all hours, I remembered, for a sympathetic service. I could call Mr Byrne any time. There was someone with whom I was actually in favour.

  I made myself a cup of coffee and considered my burgeoning career as a mortician. Thanks to his Last Rites franchise, Mr Byrne could offer me good prospects and an increased salary. On the economic face of it, the funeral homes conglomerate would be a real step up for me. And when it came down to basics, economics was the only thing that distinguished Last Rites from the hospital morgue. But it was that line which had separated me from Eddie too, and from all the policies which Mafalda, even now, was plotting to rehash as something good, as something in the public interest, when it was my belief that the only people making money from a market are the marketeers. The thought that death could be profitable to big business, like menstruation, disgusted me; that death needed tarting up for a queasy public like other sanitary products. I wanted August to show it how it really was. I applauded that. I just hoped he wasn’t using Eddie in his demonstration.

  The more I thought about August’s performance, the more I understood he had in common with Last Rites. August, certainly, could put on a more imaginative show than the conglomerate with their packaged corporate standards – like the size and hue of pickles in Big Macs – could ever fashion. But they were all showmen, pandering to a paying public. I knew that August wasn’t really motivated by righteous indignation, although he worked himself up into a state resembling that. It wasn’t righteous indignation that had caused him to plant a bomb outside the vivisectionist’s house: it was publicity. August was motivated by the simple need to be famous, and since he couldn’t achieve fame by virtue of any artistic talent, he had to settle for making himself notorious. August was a greedy show-off, hitting back at his dad, who at least had got where he was on his own merits. Would Sir Anton’s news-station televise August’s show, I wondered? He had the derelict’s paper in the bag, for sure, and I wondered how much they were paying him. No, there were only three stooges in this farce and they were Yorkie, Chas and me: Yorkie because he had let a show-off use his grief about little Emerys in a vaudeville sketch; Chas, who, in spite of his subversive posturing, his ponytail and his flag-waving T-shirts, had closed his eyes to the rotten apples in his profession and had left it to a show-off and his dupe to upset the apple-cart at his expense; and me because I’d let the show-off mock me for my failure to bury my stupid affair, in front of Eddie’s girlfriend and his wife.

  With thoughts like these on my mind and an anxious eye on the clock, I waited for Chas to come and find me. He usually downed tools at five thirty, and I was in a state approaching desperation when I finally heard the bike pull to a stop above my basement steps at thirteen minutes to eight. Chas came down to the kitchen, looking like he’d had a belly-full of Maggie and the boys, not to mention the little dead girl and the suicide. He told me he was taking the rest of the week off. I raised my eyebrows at this, but he held up his hand.

  ‘New systems in force as of today,’ he said grimly. ‘I told them straight. They’re on their own with this. I’m not taking the fall. As for the store, I’ve spent the last three hours with Elias shifting specimens. We each get our own shelf from now on. Like some student fridge. Mine, you will notice, is empty.’

  ‘What about the foetus we took from August’s place?’ I asked.

  ‘That was Rudyard’s. He gets a whole cupboard to himself. In absentia. Sarah Fell doesn’t do so badly, either, believe it or not. She gets all the ones the shits upstairs are refusing to own up to, like that creep in Neonatal. Let her sort it out with them.’

  ‘There’s your slide library,’ I said.

  ‘Slides are a different kettle of fish, Louise, and you know it.’ He looked at me steadily. ‘I’m going to Devon. Want to come?’

  ‘What, now?’

  ‘I’ve just told you, I’m taking the rest of the week off. Let the Fell Monsters shovel this shit. The press rang up while we were in the so-called PR meeting. Professor Inch prevailed upon Maggie to go and spin them something along the lines that they really couldn’t comment while an internal investigation was under way. Investigation of what? Like they didn’t already know about Rudyard’s collection? Like they’ve not been entertaining the Last Rites European director at The Langham Hotel for the last three weeks, at the Trust’s expense? Those creeps in Neonatal still swear blind they knew nothing about it. As if,’ he snarled. ‘Inch has just secured a fat research grant from the medical school. Guess what he’s researching?’

  ‘Cot deaths?’

  ‘And the rest.’

  ‘Why don’t they just let Yorkie take the fall for them?’

  ‘I showed them Stockyard’s press release. Maggie nearly peed herself when she read it. At least they’ve got twenty four hours to come up with a story.’

  ‘You’ll miss it all if you go to Devon,’ I said.

  ‘That’s the idea.’ He stood up. ‘Look, if you want to come, get your things together. I’ve got another set of leathers for the bike.’

  ‘And what about Eddie?’

  Chas frowned, remembering. ‘What about him?’

  I swallowed hard, my hands clutching automatically at my dry throat. ‘I can’t leave it here,’ I whispered. ‘The jar. It’s in the bogey hole out there, right behind the washing machine.’

  Chas snorted. ‘Not my problem,’ he said simply.

  ‘But what am I to do with it?’ I asked wildly. ‘Can’t you put it back in the store for me?’

  ‘No I can’t. I already told you, Louise. My shelf is empty and my slate is clean. No skeletons in my cupboard. I don’t want anything more to do with the fucking thing.’

  ‘But what …?’

  ‘Just chuck it.’

  ‘Chas!’

  ‘What do you think Byrne would have done with it?’

  ‘He’d have chucked it too, I guess,’ I said. ‘It’s ridiculous, isn’t it, when you think of the fuss they’re making about the other ones. Would they make the same fuss if they knew what went on at the undertakers?’

  ‘Those others are specimens.’ He frowned. ‘When we section those organs, we owe them a duty of care, like we owe any patient, dead or alive. We’re a public service. But as things stand, we can’t fucking win. We’re not supposed to keep them. We can’t use them for research without dancing through all kinds of hoops. And we’re definitely not supposed to sell them. But we can sell the fucking bodies,’ he fumed. ‘Because that’s what the commission would amount to on every stiff we check out to Last Rites. In fact, if Last Rites take us over, the stiffs will belong to the funeral home until the relatives cough up for their release.’

  ‘I thought you said they weren’t taking over now.’

  ‘Who knows?’ he said. ‘It’s market forces, Louise. It’s the way of the world.’

  ‘Where are you staying in Devon?’ I asked.

  ‘At my sister’s place.’ He smiled. ‘She runs a big old guest house for arty-farty gays and other types who come down to visit some craft centre near Totnes. It’s really alternative. You’d like it.’

  ‘You think I’m an arty-farty gay type?’

  Chas laughed. ‘Maybe drop the gay,’ he said, ‘in both its applications.’

  ‘Having an arts degree doesn’t make me arty-farty.’

  ‘No, I take that back. You’ve the makings of a scientist. I mean, there’s method in your madness. So where is it?’ he asked suddenly. ‘Where’s Kronenberg’s heart?’

  ‘Outside,’ I said. ‘You mean you’ll take it after all? Thanks, Chas, you don’t know what …’

  ‘I’ll take it on the bike,’ he said shortly. ‘Then I want to watch you dispose of it. And that will be the end of it, won’t it?’

  ‘You’re not suggesting we take it to Devon?’

  ‘You want to leave it here then, with your other rubbish?’

  ‘No,’ I croaked. ‘I think we should give it a decent burial.’

  I pointed him in the direction of the bogey hole
while I went to throw a few clothes in a bag. The answering machine picked up again on Mr Byrne. I decided to take the call.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Byrne,’ I said. ‘There’s been a lot of trouble at the hospital.’

  ‘They work you too hard there, Louise. Why don’t you come and work for me?’

  Through my dirty nets, I saw Chas climb up to the bike, holding Eddie’s jar inside his leathers. It was cards on the table time.

  ‘Excuse me, Mr Byrne,’ I said, and cupped my hand over the receiver. ‘You’re sure I have a job to go back to?’ I asked Chas as he came back into the kitchen. ‘United we stand? Empty shelves?’

  ‘Don’t try and do any more deals with me,’ he began.

  ‘It’s Mr Byrne,’ I whispered. ‘I need to earn my living.’

  Chas reached for the phone. ‘Mr Byrne?’ he said. ‘Chas Androssoff. Louise can’t work for you while she’s working for me. It’s not ethical, right? You know what I mean. Yes, I know she’s a good worker. I taught her to sew.’ He put down the receiver. ‘It’s all packed up in the back,’ he said. ‘First opportunity I get I’m going to watch you sling it, just so long as you are clear about that.’

  ‘Quite clear,’ I said. ‘It’s time to lay Eddie to rest.’

  ***

  Chapter Twelve

  We headed westward on Chiswick High Road, zigzagging through traffic that was nearly at a standstill, even at eight thirty in the evening. The in-out motion of the bike was already making me feel queasy, and I wasn’t looking forward to racing down the M4, although the padded helmet I wore cut out some of the engine noise. The tinted visor gave an eerie green hue to the faces in restaurant windows, the odd pumpkin and witch’s mask prominent in some of the shop fronts. But the American Halloween Dream wasn’t really conscious here, from what I could see. This part of the city looked as though it leaned towards the Euro.

  At last we reached the motorway and roared off into the night. Like bats out of hell, I thought, as my mind wandered again to Eddie’s heart sloshing about in the locker beneath my backside. I had three hours or more of this ride to look forward to, with no chance of falling asleep. The leathers were effective at keeping out the worst of the wind, but I felt myself growing stiff as a board and was glad when Chas’s voice cracked through the intercom inside my helmet to say he was making a pit stop. We pulled into an all night services somewhere near Taunton, and while I struggled with my leathers in the lavatory, Chas went into the café and bought a tray of tea and doughnuts. It was a capaciously empty space. We were the only two people there, apart from a red-eyed operative stacking dirty dishes on a trolley.