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Chapter 1

I used to tell people straight out what I did: I work with the dead, I help put the pieces together. Then I got tired of the effect this had on some of those I told, so then I started saying I was a cleaner for the City, which put a sanitary gloss upon the work I did, like lavender polish or those bursts of floral haze that overlay bad smells. I cleaned up after the dead. I helped to put them away. In truth, I was appointed by the Coroner to connect the solitary urban departed with a diaspora of friends or next-of-kin who could save the public purse the expense of a pauper's funeral, for why should the state pay up when some long-lost brother or lover or child can be dug out to bear the costs? So enter Louise and search the sad and empty homes for any clues. Enter Louise and root out the faded addresses. Pore over the old photos, the bills unpaid, the tickets saved from plays and concerts. One old girl left thirty-four cornflakes boxes stuffed with Green Shield Stamps. Not much to show for a life perhaps, but who am I to say?
      This last case, my epiphany (it being the one that wiped my eye), had all the aspects of a routine solitary passing. The landlord had noticed a diabolical smell in the house when he came to collect the rent, which he referred to as a bloody joke in any case. The deceased had given him a shock, he said, meaning that the sight of her corpse was a peek at his own corruption. All he cared about was that she was dead and not about to come home from the hospital, freshly bathed and fed, before he'd had a chance to change the locks. I would have pulled him in about the lesion on her head, but I knew better than to argue with police officers. The attending GP had taken it upon himself to rule this out as a suspicious death. Stroke, he said, was the most likely cause. The lesion was probably caused by the old lady's fall. Her head had struck the corner of the wardrobe, as was clear from the splashes of blood down the old English oak. This was the working of a ripe old age, the doctor sighed, and thus she was mine to dispose of, mine to bag up and remove. But I resented this. I thought it was too free and easy. Besides, I didn't want her.
      The clock above the main gate of the hospital was striking two as I rang the mortuary bell. I had worked here once. I had walked these halls over a thousand times before, but the whole department and what it stood for (death and the causes of death) always filled me with a sick anticipation. The duty pathologist, Janice Impawala, came out into the corridor to meet me, her expression braced for confrontation. 'Your case was put out there,' she said, directing me towards the annexe. 'No room at the inn.'
      The place she spoke of was fancifully known as the chapel, but the cheap trestle table, on which the technician would sometimes place a cloth and a simple wooden cross out of consideration for relatives who came to view down here, now stood folded up against the wall. Three bodies lay on the floor in the middle of the room, bundled in creased bedsheets. A fly buzzed round my head as I began the work of checking toe-tags: Vera Drace, born 1953. Joseph Tarantas, Notes with Oncology. Edith Mary Woods, Dead on Arrival.
      It was a broad face with reddened cheeks and purple veins that stood out on the nose, a weary face, but not unpleasing. Edith Mary had not yet acquired that stiff and vacant look that corpses get. She still looked asleep. She looked as though she was dreaming. I stood transfixed by the arrangement of her wiry red hair, violently tinted with some scorching chemical mix that would keep its shade long after the flesh of the head had liquefied. But the flesh was already broken. A deep cut, about three centimetres long, was encrusted with blood. Covering her face with the dirty bedsheet, I marched back into the cutting room.
      Impawala was defensive. 'You can see how we're fixed here, Louise. Big problems with refrigeration. Two of the units have broken down and the rest are full. Your case is last in the queue.'
      'There's a lesion on her head, Janice. You might want to take a look at that.'
      'This is a quick in and out for the Coroner, right? If the poor old lady dropped dead, it's entirely reasonable she'd have a scalp wound.'
      'She could have been pushed.'
      'So refer it to forensics. You'd be doing me a favour, with my backlog.'
      I followed her gaze to the row of section tables. A technician was eviscerating some other poor body further up the line. A referral to forensics would do me a favour, too, I considered. I didn't want to poke around Edith Woods any more than Impawala did. Another dead old woman, in another foul flat, in the hottest August since records began, with no prospect of leave on the horizon, was one lonely old woman too many.
      'Why don't you send them over to the medical school?'
      Impawala was pulling off her gloves. 'Believe me, I tried, but we have nothing to interest them here. They've got it made,' she said bitterly. 'Fat research grants, state of the art microscopy. So much for intellectual generosity. Why don't you have a stab at the professor?'
      I considered this in silence. Impawala knew all about my out-of-hours relationship with her predecessor, now lording it over the research project next door, hogging the big cat's chair.
      'The City seems to think I can work miracles,' she went on. 'The sparks-guy is still coming now. Like he was coming now two hours ago. Like I needed this today. I have nowhere else to put them.'
      I jumped back sharply to avoid a moving trolley. The technician was wheeling in another case, his eyes scintillating with resentment.
      'Why don't you give us a break, Louise?' Impawala said slyly. 'Professor Androssoff is always telling us what a competent stitcher you were. You must have made an almighty team around here, you and him.'
      'I've got backlog, too,' I said tartly, and a bully of a supervisor on my back, the Bully Bubba. Too bad she had a name that connoted comfort and cuddles. It was fatuous to think fat women like her in pastels and beads were soft and softhearted, for Bubba was hard as nails and just as sharp. She was a slave-driver, a fury, a nemesis.
      I pushed out into the courtyard via the double doors. It was true that I had once stitched corpses with something dangerously close to zeal, inspired by my duty to the dead. And it was true I had made a good team once with the man now elevated to professor. The fridges had not broken down when Chas Androssoff was ruling the mortuary. There had been other issues to deal with then, issues which I'd still not laid to rest, although Chas had gone over the wall to the medical school and I to my work with the City. We were still friends though, if that was the right term to use. We greeted each other with stagey warmth. He sent me a rude Christmas card. In the past, we'd sniffed around each other like a desperate mating pair, fearful of missing the connection, of finding no other of our kind. No wonder it had not worked out, although I still felt bonded to Chas like an imprinted sparrow. A bird that could not fight or flee. A bird that could not sing.
      I waited for him in his office while the departmental secretary fetched me a glass of chilled water. She avoided my eye as she told me the professor was detained upstairs in a funding meeting. She knew full well what I used to get up to with her boss, on the back of his Harley-Davidson, in the bedroom of his no-frills flat. Did that make me greater or smaller in her opinion? I didn't care to know. Chas's students called him the Angel of Death, and he liked to cultivate an air of something of the night in his work at the medical school. As professor of neuropathology, well-practised at cutting lesser colleagues down to size, he didn't let it bother him, although it bothered me still that he could get so far up the noses of the powers that be without losing his footing. I had never learned to live with Chas, but nor had I quite learned to live without him. I felt like Persephone, lamenting the half of her life she had spent with Pluto, but the exciting half at that, I always thought. Chas was a mass of teeming, healthy cells, right down to the tips of his black hair, which hung down his back like some Orthodox cleric's. And he was devoted to his researches. Impawala had implied he was not generous, but that was untrue. Chas just hated wasting time on useless material like my old woman in the annexe. Chas was interested in extraordinary brains, like the one belonging to a German terrorist that had fetched up at the medical school in recent weeks, which he was studying to see if there was some aberration in the grey matter that had hot-wired the man to planting bombs. And I hoped to persuade a man like Chas that ordinary remains, like those of Edith Mary Woods, might also have wild cards to share.
      'What about funding for the mortuary?' I burst out, as soon as he came back, a black linen jacket tossed over his customary T shirt in deference to the meeting's protocol. 'I've had it up to here with this hospital. You heard about the broken fridges over there?'
      He brushed my hair lightly as he went to sit down. 'Suits you longer like that,' he nodded. 'In fact, you're looking good enough to eat, Louise. How's the counselling coming?'
      'It's coming,' I said, feeling myself go red. It was ironical that Chas himself had been the agent who had pushed me towards the counselling course, to sort out some of my issues. But I knew what he thought of psychotherapy, Sigmund Fraud and all his merry men. Material was Chas's thing, not the shades of grey in the grey matter. Dissection under cold, white lights.
      I pushed the hair behind my ears, determined to keep it professional. 'I've got an urgent case,' I said. 'Another old woman on her own. The police went round with some time-serving GP and did not even query his opinion that she died a natural death.'
      'Why should they? Why subject the poor old bird to an autopsy - not to mention, Janice Impawala.'
      'There has to be an autopsy, Chas. The police surgeon couldn't certify her.'
      'And?'
      'And I was wondering if you would help me out here.'
      Chas reached for the water glass, but found only a centimetre of lees. 'I know that Janice has a backlog,' he said. 'That's par for the course in this job. So it's the fag end of the summer and the fridges break down. That's Sod's Law, Louise. They have to learn to fight their corner over there.'
      'It would take a couple of hours at most to do a post-mortem exam. There's a lesion on her head, caked in blood. Her landlord's of the species Rackman. Remember him? The sixties slum king? He couldn't wait to get her out of there.'
      'These brittle-boned old girls go down like ninepins.' Chas breathed a sigh at me. 'Like birds that fall out of their trees. Just kissing off, sweetheart. Don't let it get to you.'
      'The tip of an iceberg, you said, the human brain.'
      His face darkened. 'What is your point exactly? I seem to have lost the thread.'
      'You said yourself there may be some electrical activity still hanging round after the heart stops. If you believe it's possible to send electrical impulses through the atmosphere - radio waves, internet connections, why can't there be life after death?'
      He snorted. 'I know what radio waves consist of, how they work. What are you saying, Louise? You think the old woman is going to rise up and complain because they made her wait for one of the fridges? They'll get to it. You know what it's like over there. I've championed their cause often enough. They got the funding through for another histopathologist, thanks to me, but now we can't get hold of one for love or money. Well, it's not the most sexy of specialisms.' He smiled ruefully. 'Unless you label it forensic science, like those TV dramas. Pathologists playing the good detective. As though we have the time.'
      I decided to go for the sympathy angle. 'Can't you just go and take a look so I can get her off my hands? I'm up against the wall here, Chas. If this hangs over the Bank Holiday, I may as well kiss off the counselling studies for good.'
      'Why's that then?'
      'Because I'm overloaded, overworked, boxed in.'
      Chas considered the clean expanse of his antique desk, a relic from Victorian times, when the great and good of his profession had placed pathology as the foundation stone of diagnosis at this hospital, thanks to the supplies laid on by body snatchers for all the good doctors to practice on. 'I'm pushed for time as well, Louise. I'm going to Brighton tonight to catch up with a friend of mine, just back from touring the Pacific Rim.'
      'On a Harley-D?'
      'Sure, those guys are totally committed.'
      I thought of riding out along the Sussex coast, the swans on the lagoon at dawn, their heads under their wing. On your own? I wanted to ask, but held myself in check. It was none of my business whom Chas was seeing. I had made it not my business.
      'Can't you put some pressure on Janice?'
      'No need for that, she'll crack of her own accord within twenty-four hours.'
      'While my case rots away on the floor.' I felt my heart sink at the thought of those bundled cadavers, those blackening toes, the fly that had circled my head, Bubba at my heels, just waiting to give me the black spot.
      'Two hours, Chas. How did Janice put it? - A quick in and out for the Coroner.'
      'And a quick in and out for me, perhaps? For Auld Lang Syne.'
      I sucked in air. I felt as though I was treading water here, unable to gauge the depth, not to mention the undertow. 'I didn't mean that exactly …'
      'Of course you didn't.' He held up his hand. 'But joking aside, I don't care too much for the equation here, Louise. I thought you wanted to keep our relationship out of the mortuary. You wouldn't come and work for me over here, but you're still stuck in the same old groove, still chasing round after stiffs. Hasn't the counselling taught you some insight? Old Fraud had a name for it, didn't he?'
      I looked away at his bike leathers hanging up behind the door, an outline of the man Chas was, a thing of too too solid flesh. Man doesn't live by bread alone, I wanted to say, but didn't dare say it. Not because I was frightened of Chas, not that, but because we were always arguing from different premises, like characters from Dr Johnson's joke, old women nattering from their respective doorsteps. But at least Chas left his door open. At length, he reached forward and picked up the phone.
           'Two hours tops,' he told me curtly. 'Then let's say you'll owe me one.'

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