stay while she recuperated.
“Hold on to your school uniform.”
“Why?”
“It might come in handy.”
Shirley was a mother figure to half a dozen teenage girls and they all loved her. She made them feel safe.
“Her son was a real dickhead,” said Elisa. “He slept with a shotgun under his bed and he thought he could have sex with any of us. Wanker! The first time Shirley took me out to work, she was saying, ‘Go on, you can do it.’ I was standing on Bayswater Road wearing my school uniform. ‘It’s OK, just ask them if they want a girl,’ she said. I didn’t want to disappoint Shirley. I knew she’d be angry.
“Next time she took me out, I did some hand jobs, but I couldn’t do the sex. I don’t know why. It took me three months. I was getting too tall for my school uniform, but Shirley said I had the legs to get away with it. I was her Little Pot of Gold.”
Elisa didn’t call the men she slept with “punters.” She didn’t like any suggestion that they were gambling with their money. She was a sure thing. And she didn’t treat them with contempt, even if many were cheating on their wives, fiancees and girlfriends. This was purely business— a simple commercial transaction— she had something to sell and they wanted to buy it.
As the months went by she became desensitized. She had a new family now. Then one day a rival pimp snatched her off the street. He wanted her for a one-off engagement, he said. He locked her in the basement of a house and collected money at the door from the men who queued up. A river of skin, of all different colors, flowed across her body and leaked inside her. “I was their Little White Fucktoy,” she said, as she stubbed out another cigarette.
“And now you’re here.”
“Where nobody knows what to do with me.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I want to be left alone.”
4
The first law of the National Health Service is that dead wood floats. It is part of the culture. If somebody is incompetent or hard to get along with, promotion is an easier option than sacking.
The duty supervisor at Westminster Mortuary is bald and thickset with pouchy jowls. He takes an instant dislike to me.
“Who told you to come here?”
“I’m meeting Detective Inspector Ruiz.”
“I haven’t been told. Nobody made an appointment.”
“Can I wait for him?”
“No. Only family of the deceased are allowed in the waiting room.”
“Where can I wait?”
“Outside.”
I catch his sour smell and notice the sweat stains under his arms. He has probably worked all night and is doing overtime. He’s tired and he’s cranky. I normally have sympathy for shift workers— in the same way that I feel sorry for loners and fat girls who never get asked to dance. It must be a lousy job looking after dead people but that’s no reason to be rude to the living.
I’m just about to say something when Ruiz arrives. The supervisor begins his spiel again, but Ruiz isn’t in the mood to be lectured by a low-ranking mortuary manager with delusions of power. He leans across the desk.
“Listen you jumped up little shit! I see a dozen cars parked on expired meters outside. You’re going to be real popular with your workmates when we put a boot on them.”
A few minutes later I’m following Ruiz along narrow corridors with strip lights on the ceiling and painted cement floors. Occasionally we pass doors with frosted glass windows. One of them is open. I glance inside and see a stainless steel table in the center of the room with a central channel leading to a drain. Halogen lights are suspended from the ceiling, alongside microphone leads.
Farther along the corridor, we come across three lab technicians in green medical scrubs standing around a coffee machine. None of them looks up.
Ruiz walks fast and talks slowly. “The body was found at eleven on Sunday morning, buried in a shallow ditch. Fifteen minutes earlier an anonymous call was made from a pay phone a quarter of a mile away. The caller claimed his dog had dug up a hand.”
We push through double Plexiglas doors and dodge a trolley being pushed by an orderly. A white calico sheet covers what I imagine to be a body. A box of test tubes full of blood and urine is balanced on top of the torso.
We reach an anteroom with a large glass door. Ruiz taps on the window and is buzzed in by an operator sitting at a desk. She has blond hair, dark roots and eyebrows plucked to the thinness of dental floss. Around the walls are filing cabinets and white boards. On the far side is a large stainless steel door marked STAFF ONLY.
I suddenly get a flashback to my medical training when I fainted during our first practical lesson working with a cadaver. I came around with smelling salts waved under my nose. The lecturer then chose me to demonstrate to the class how to direct a 150mm needle through the abdomen to the liver to take a biopsy sample. Afterward he congratulated me on a new university record for the most organs hit with one needle in a single procedure.
Ruiz hands the operator a letter.
“Do you want me to set up a proper viewing?” she asks.
“The fridge will be fine,” he replies, “but I’ll need an SB.” She hands him a large brown paper bag.
The heavy door unlocks with a hiss like a pressure seal and Ruiz steps aside to let me go first. I expect to smell formaldehyde— something I came to associate with every body I saw in medical school. Instead there’s the faint odor of antiseptic and industrial soap.
The walls are polished steel. A dozen trolleys are parked in neat rows. Metal crypts take up three walls and look like oversized filing cabinets, with large square handles that can accommodate two hands.
I realize Ruiz is still talking. “According to the pathologist she’d been in the ground for ten days. She was naked except for a shoe and a gold chain around her neck with a St. Christopher’s medallion. We haven’t found the rest of her clothes. There is no evidence of a sexual assault…” He checks the label on a drawer and grips the handle. “I think you’ll see why we’ve narrowed down the cause of death.”
The drawer slides open smoothly on rollers. My head snaps back and I lurch away. Ruiz hands me the brown paper bag as I double over and heave. It’s difficult to throw up and gasp for breath at the same time.
Ruiz hasn’t moved. “As you can see the left side of her face is badly bruised and the eye is completely closed. Someone gave her a real working over. That’s why we released the drawing instead of a photograph. There are more than twenty stab wounds— not one of them more than an inch deep. But here’s the real kicker— every last one was self-inflicted. The pathologist found hesitation marks. She had to work up the nerve to force the blade through.”
Raising my head, I glimpse his face reflected in the polished steel. That’s when I see it: fear. He must have investigated dozens of crimes, but this one is different because he can’t understand it.
My stomach is empty. Perspiring and shivering in the cold, I straighten up and look at the body. Nothing has been done to restore the poor woman’s dignity. She is naked, stretched out with her arms against her sides and her legs together.
The dull whiteness of her skin makes her look almost like a marble statue, only this “statue” has been vandalized. Her chest, arms and thighs are covered in slashes of crimson and pink. Where the skin is pulled taut the wounds gape like empty eye sockets. At other places they naturally close and weep slightly.
I have seen postmortems in medical school. I know the process. She has been photographed, scraped, swabbed and cut open from her neck to her crotch. Her organs have been weighed and her stomach contents analyzed. Bodily fluids, flakes of dead skin and dirt from beneath her fingernails have been sealed within plastic or beneath glass slides. A once bright energetic vibrant human being has become exhibit A.
