The first thing I saw when I got to the hospital the following morning was the undertaker's van (navy, unmarked) driving off with Mr Byrne himself waving at me from the offside window. Getting to know, and getting on with, all the undertakers is part of the job, and a pleasant bunch they are too, in the main. But surely Byrne & Co weren't undertaking Eddie? Eddie's Post Mortem examination wasn't finished yet, so what was Dr Fell up to?
      She was in the path lab, squinting at a slide. There were no bodies on any of the section tables, which confirmed that Byrne had been collecting, not delivering. Ignoring Dr Fell, I made straight for Chas's office where Yorkie sat eating a sandwich. The store keys were thrown on top of the desk.
      'You shouldn't be working today,' he said by way of greeting.
      'Who did you check out just now?' I said.
      Yorkie swallowed. 'Straightforward coronary. One of them straining-at-stools.'
      'Did Dr Fell check him out?'
      'She was only helping Rasputin.' Yorkie always referred to Chas as Rasputin, or, in ironic deference to Chas's politics, the big red boss. Eddie would have had Yorkie's vote every time: Castrate the raping bastards. Throw them to the crows.
      'What about his tests?' I asked.
      'What tests? He was an open and shut case. I've seen the notes.'
      'Dr Androssoff removed his heart for analysis. Did Dr Fell replace it, or what?' I knew she would not have done so. Dr Fell was strictly a microscope person, what Chas called a bench worker. 'Did you replace it?' I asked Yorkie wildly. At least Yorkie was a competent stitcher.
      Yorkie looked at me blankly. 'What's the big deal?' he said. 'It happens all the time.'
      My mind was racing. Byrne and Co took him. I considered how odd it would be for Eddie's family to choose an undertaker as lumpen as Mr Byrne. But then I thought of Eddie's wife, betrayed and bitter. There were others, too, who would want to bury Eddie quietly and turn the page. I thought of his lonely death and his ravaged heart and felt quite sick for him.
      I told Yorkie I'd check it out, and shut the door behind me. Still ignoring Dr Fell, who at any rate didn't see me, I went into the store. Someone had been in there already that morning. Yorkie, I guessed, to sneak a cigarette, because there was a fresh dog-end on the floor. Eddie's jar was still on the last shelf, an icon without any candles. I considered it reverently for a moment before depositing it in my bag. I get like that sometimes: a feeling as though I'm not really all there. It was as though a gap had opened up in my head through which I floated off.
      The rest of that day I kept vigil in my basement home, listening out for people coming down the steps with loads of washing. I was concerned that the vibration of the spinner would prise the jar from its hiding place and break my cover. But then so what? Were Rob and Ally, A-class fornicators from the flat above me, likely to know it was a human heart I had put there? Would Cury-Holmes, the shifty-eyed lawyer, who rented the drawing room floor? Would deaf old Mabel from the top flat who lived only for her television? We often found bottles of foul-smelling liquids dumped by the washing machine. People were always leaving the bogey hole door open even though the landlord warned us all that this would only invite the unwanted. I had had plenty of unwanted around the place when I was going through my wild abandoned stage, post-Eddie. The shit we smoked down there. The crates of dead men we left out by the bins till Cury-Holmes complained about the smashed glass. Then I was busted for possession, and my probation officer introduced me to the job with Chas, in possession himself more often than not. Can I really be doing this? I wondered, the first time I assisted at a PM. Can I be hosing blood off a section table and not be sick? But I was never sick until I saw Eddie ready for cutting. In fact, the mortuary cured some of my anxiety. I stopped having bad dreams. I stopped thinking everyone was down on me. In fact I thought of little but my work amongst the dead.
      But now I had acted against my own best interests at the mortuary by taking Eddie's jar. Because of Eddie, I had committed an act of theft, another felony to add to the list of dishonest dealings in which he had implicated others. But clearly something had to be done about his heart. I couldn't simply leave it in the store for Chas to pick at, then lock away again in embarrassment because he didn't know what else to do with it. It was really Dr Fell's oversight, of course, and Chas himself was more than ready to blow the whistle on that old ghoul. I would make it all right with Chas. He would understand. He had said himself it was a clot that had struck Eddie down, which Yorkie confirmed from the notes. In fact, once I had straightened out my plans for the heart, I considered them wholly ethical. It was the execution of the plans, not the plans themselves, that was bothering me. I was putting it off, trying to lose the idea of what had to be done in pointless displacement activities like smoking some of the shit I keep stashed amongst my CDs, and washing my two wine glasses until one of them cracked. Then I switched on my computer. I am not a chat room person, nor a surfer: games are my thing. I started the old Mac (one of Chas's discards) and set off from the gate at Level Four, determined to kick seven bells out of the virtual spiders. Only every time my little Alias slammed open a nut, it wasn't a shield or a sword or a health-giving raspberry she was finding, but Eddie's heart chilling out in my bogey hole. She hit a real snag here, of course: zero health points and completely at the mercy of a giant bat. So I switched applications and logged on to Byrne and Co's website.
      Enter, it said,
      We are Open Day and Night for A Sympathetic Service at All Times.
      E-mail us now or call toll free.
      The site was not secure, nor did I feel like discussing a matter of such delicacy on the phone with Mr Byrne's telesales staff. I would have to go round there. I would have to take it to the top. Checking that everyone upstairs was out, excepting Mabel, of course, now safely ensconced in front of her boom-bang set, I removed the jar from its hiding place and toted it round to the undertakers, asking the taxi driver to drop me at the end of Parkway to save a few pence on the fare. A discreet mauve light signified that Byrne & Co were in commission. Keeping my eye on the cab till it turned around and drove off, I approached the deep blue gates of the funeral directors' yard, much as my failure of an Alias had gingered the boundaries of the bat kingdom. Mr Byrne himself answered the bell dressed in a plain black suit, his silver hair combed flat, his chin smelling faintly of lemons. He had waved at and chatted to me on undertaking business for more than three years, but when I appeared after dark at the door of his premises his expression told me he was wondering how to play it: professional attention (the Deepest Sympathy treatment) or Are you behaving yourself, Ms Moon? which was his usual greeting to me.
      You are crazy, I told myself. Think carefully before proceeding.
      I slid into the chair he placed for me, carefully standing the carrier against the leg of the desk so that its contents would settle.
      'Mr Byrne,' I said, 'I realise this puts you on the spot, but I thought I'd approach you now, you know, while it's quiet.'
      His face switched at once to Full Sympathy mode. 'You're not tired of Dr Androssoff?' he said. 'He thinks the world of you, Louise.'
      Spit it out, I thought. For Christ's sake, just tell him we checked out a corpse without its heart. Like Yorkie said, it happened all the time.
      The undertaker nodded. 'Your boss would not believe the facilities we've got back there.' He indicated a door in the panelling. 'Would you like to be having a look now?'
      It seemed as though I had reached a checkpoint here: fast forward or wind back to Level One. Picking up the carrier, I accompanied Mr Byrne into a room of sparkling white and chrome with the same lemony smell as Mr Byrne himself, only stronger. Eddie now lay under a green surgical cloth on which someone had carelessly thrown a coiled rubber tube. Mr Byrne removed it, tutting, and placed it on the counter by the sink.
      'Mrs Jury?' he called. In the distance, I heard a lavatory flush. 'Mrs Jury's come in tonight especially,' he said. 'She's a specialist embalmer, trained by Last Rites in America. The wife doesn't just want a simple plumping up for an open coffin, you know, to straighten out his laughter lines a bit. She wants the work to last a lifetime, like they did for Eva Peron. Unbelievable, Evita's corpse. Grown men wanted to kiss her. Here's another political figure, Eddie Kronenberg, MP.'
      A woman came in, wearing a fitted black dress, discreet gold cross and panstick make-up. She looked like Edith Piaf after a very bad night on the tiles. Ignoring Mr Byrne and me, she drew back the surgical cloth, exposing the wound on Eddie's chest. 'I see they've made a start with clearing the chest cavity,' she said. 'An elephant could have made a better job than that. What a fright.' It was true that Chas's stitching would have seen poor Eddie through a screen test for Frankenstein.
      'Hmm,' said Mr Byrne, as we all considered the subject. He was both Eddie and not Eddie: he was Eddie Dead, and he looked dead now, not asleep. I felt sick, knowing he was about to be invaded all over again, and not just by big needles through neck and chest, draining all his fluids and replacing them with formaldehyde, tinted pink to give his skin a rosy flush, but the whole works. Yet even had Mrs Jury not been required, and I had told Mr Byrne what I had in the bag and he had given me a chance to prove myself, I could not have opened that flap of breast tissue and shoved back Eddie's heart as though I was stuffing a dead chicken with its plastic-wrapped lights. The flesh of his torso was white and bloodless, the blood around the stitches, what we call degraded blood, crawling with greedy bacteria. I closed my eyes against the purple haze. Unlike those layers-out of yesteryear, who washed and combed and put silver pennies over closed eyes, the bereaved of the twenty first century are spoilt by the titivating niceties of Mr Byrne and Co who plump up the dead so that they won't look dead at all. But I work with the dead. I know what a car accident does to them, or a cancer, say, or a lonely passing away in a basement where they can lie alone for weeks before anyone finds them. I knew what they looked like after Chas's knife had been at them. Even if they had been spared all that and died peacefully in their sleep, with their wife or somebody cheerfully making breakfast, they still looked dead.
      Mrs Jury took a gown from a cupboard in the wall and pulled it over her sweetheart neckline. I wondered what would happen if I just left the carrier under the table here beneath Eddie's feet, like those separately potted organs entombed with Egyptian mummies. Maybe the cleaners would throw it out with all the other entrails which Mrs Jury would have to remove in order to perform the full works. Seeing her fetch the rubber drainage tube, I clutched the bag tight in my hand and said I had better be going.
      'All right then, Louise,' said Mr Byrne. Then, remembering what he thought I had come for, he shifted into business gear and offered me part-time hours at £60 per shift, which was twice what the hospital paid me. Mrs Jury looked up contemptuously as I said I would think it over. Her expression reminded me of my mother's when she told me I was not a lady.
      What was a lady? Eddie had often theorised about this, and about what it meant in terms of essential subject positioning, of gradually positioning me where he wanted, which was under his thumb, socially, sexually and, naturally, politically. Because, I mean, there is always a moment, even with a man like Eddie, when you hold the keys to the kingdom, when the balance of power is tipped ever so slightly in your favour. There was a moment when he was genuinely fond of me, and I of him. I saw it in his eyes in Kettners. I saw it in Mani's, when Mani himself sliced off the champagne cork with his scimitar and Eddie gallantly offered me the flute of something pink as though he was holding out the pretty glass slipper for me to try to gain admission to the fairytale ending, before I felt the iron growing in my soul, and filled my boots with what I had on him.
      I walked up from the Tube, my eyes fixed wide upon the carrier, as though his heart could sprout a mouth to answer for what he had done to me. But it was obviously suffering from seasickness with all the promenading I had made it do. When I got down my steps, I shoved it back in the bogey hole, even though the shadows on the blind upstairs told me that Ally and Rob were limbering up for a late night session. My probation officer, who fancies herself as a psychotherapist, had given me a relaxation tape which I now tried to play; but this only had the effect of making me more agitated. Automatic thoughts of Eddie's busted chest and Mrs Jury's torch-singer's smirk kept me wriggling and squirming in a way I could not will myself to stop. And then I started crying. Not proper crying, not the good, cathartic, system-cleansing stuff, just a helpless greeting noise. I could not label the feeling which came over me. It was like nothing I had ever experienced, black and pointless. I had got into a stupid mess with the jar, but it wasn't even that: it was the uselessness, the sense that something was over, but would never really be over for me because it would never now be put right. It felt too much like unfinished business.

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