Free Down Among the Dead Men by Michelle Williams Page B

technician’s stomach. Clive picked up the helmet with his gloved hands and said in a voice of perfect seriousness, ‘He had
it gift-wrapped.’ Hanging from the bottom of it were ragged tatters of flesh and what appeared to be cervical vertebrae . . . I looked into the visor and found myself fixated by the face
behind it. Hardly a mark could be seen on the features, and his eyes were closed so that he actually looked quite peaceful.
    Just then, the phone in the office began to ring. It was Bill Baxford from the Coroner’s office. ‘That road traffic you had in overnight. Are we able to do an identification on him
after the post-mortem?’
    I knew enough to appreciate that this is important. All victims of unnatural death have to be identified by law and, obviously, this is usually done through visual identification by the next of
kin, but clearly in some cases this is not possible; no relative would want to see the head of their nearest and dearest a few feet away from the rest of the body, after all. In such cases,
it’s usually done by dental records; as a last resort, DNA is used. Both of these are expensive and time-consuming, and any sensible Coroner’s officer wants to do what’s easiest
and cheapest. Clive and Graham were in the body store, dealing with the body, so I said, ‘Can I ring you back?’
    We would have to think seriously about this. From what I had seen of his face, he was certainly viewable, but the small fact remained that his head was at this moment resting between his legs on
a body tray in the fridge. I wasn’t experienced enough to be sure that we could reconstruct him well enough to allow the next of kin to see him. But I wanted so much to do it – and knew
that Clive and Graham would want to do it as well – not so much for our satisfaction, but for his family.
    I went back to the body store and told Clive what Bill had asked. I had expected him to be hesitant but he said at once, ‘No problem, Michelle. We’ll have this poor chap looking as
good as new. No one will ever guess what’s happened to him, not from looking at him.’
    Bill Baxford was duly promised that we would be able to do an identification of the motorcyclist for his family that day. It was booked for two thirty in the afternoon, which meant that we had
approximately four hours to try to create the effect that his head had not left his body. We did not know whether his family had even been told of the horrific injuries. All we knew was that this
man had been travelling at perhaps seventy miles an hour down a narrow country lane in the west of the county when he had lost control. His front wheel had then clipped a fallen tree by the side of
the road; he had been catapulted over the handlebars into a field. Unfortunately, and with the cruelly perfect aim of fate, he had landed with his outstretched neck on the large circular blade of
an old farrow abandoned among some stinging nettles, thus severing his head.
    The pathologist on for today, Dr Peter Gillard, arrived. Between them, he and Ed do most of our post-mortems. A strange little man but, honestly, I say ‘strange’ with affection. He
was quite short, quiet, but deep down there lurked a wicked sense of humour. Graham and Clive had told me, and I had seen for myself, that he was also a complete pain in the behind because, they
said, he lacked confidence and would often ask the technicians for advice. That said, he was not really any trouble – by which I mean in the sense that he was undemanding, to a degree
unconcerned, and was happy to be directed. This may seem an unfair thing to say about a consultant pathologist but, believe me, I had very quickly discovered that some could be completely
unreasonable and unmanageable with no respect for the mortuary technicians, whom they just saw as androids that can stand and eviscerate bodies all day long. At least Peter Gillard wasn’t
like that.
    He looked at the headless corpse on the dissecting table.