And then, during the seven weeks I had to wait for the results of my ordeal in the exam hall, it went really quiet; it's like that in the mortuary people dropping dead like it's going out of fashion for a few weeks, then suddenly they decide that they want to hang on for a bit, so we have nothing to do. I used to long for days like this in my previous job, any down time from the stresses of dealing with special needs people was a plus but in the mortuary, there is only so much cleaning, tidying, ordering and paperwork you can do. After that, it tends to be sitting in the office, drinking coffee, gossiping and seeing to undertakers and relatives coming for viewings.

On days like this, Clive amused himself and us with stories and observations about what was going on around us. The mortuary office has a window that not only looks across to the A&E department but also allows us to see who is coming into the back entrance of the pathology department. Clive had nicknames for a lot of them but his favourite was Ray, the man who came in every morning to sweep and clean the floors and put out the rubbish. Ray was about seventy years old and possibly the most miserable man in the country. He had only two topics of conversation the weather and the football and on both of these he could bore for England. He was a rabid Everton supporter and his life was therefore full of woe, which he spread around with great relish; a rainy weekend on which Everton got hammered four nil by Liverpool, and we knew that if he caught you in the corridor you'd feel like slashing your wrists after ten minutes. Being a rugby girl with no interest in football, I would avoid him like the plague. But there was no real malice in Clive. He liked to enjoy life, even if much of it was spent doing things that would turn most people's stomachs.

We knew that the quiet period wouldn't last and, sure enough, it ended quite suddenly with a multiple pile-up on the M5. It happened during the morning rush hour, and just before I left the house, I saw the first news flashes on the morning TV. There was carnage with at least six cars and an HGV involved; it looked from the pictures as if there had been a bad fire, so I figured we'd be getting some work from it. The traffic in the town centre was heavy because they'd closed both lanes of the motorway and a lot of the northbound traffic was being diverted that way.

When I got in (fifteen minutes late), Clive was already on the phone to the Coroner's office, looking serious. Maddie and I made coffee and listened in on his side of the conversation, from which we gathered that there were three dead, all from one car. It had gone under the HGV and then caught fire, with all three of them trapped inside. I felt sick when I heard this and I could see that Maddie felt none too good either. Neither of us had seen a fire death before and we weren't looking forward to our first experience.

The undertakers brought the bodies in just before noon and, instead of the normal banter, no one said anything much. The dead were in body bags made of thick black plastic so you couldn't see any of what was inside, or even judge the shape, but the ash and charcoal on the outside of the bags gave me all sorts of nightmares about what I would see when we opened them. And there was a smell, too; it was one I'd never encountered before in the mortuary, but it was very familiar. It brought back memories of summer meals, when you've eaten everything you want and the meat left on the barbecue is too far gone to be rescued. When we transferred the bodies from the undertakers' trolleys to ours, two of them were light perhaps only half the weight of a normal adult and the feel through the body bag was all wrong, as if these bodies weren't made of flesh but of something harder.

Later that afternoon, Neville Stubbs sent through the E60 forms from which we could see that the dead were a mother, father and seventeen-year-old daughter, by the name of Franklin. They had been returning from a short break in Devon where they had been visiting friends. Ed, who was going to do the autopsies the next day, came down and read what Neville had sent. Then he got on the phone and rang the Coroner's office, telling Neville that before he started the PMs he wanted to see the police reports on the accident, as well as any photographs of the scene that SOCOs had taken. Then he turned to us with a sad smile on his face. 'It's not going to be nice in there tomorrow, but it's got to be done. I'm sure you'll cope.'

When I got into the mortuary the next morning, I felt exhausted, having hardly slept. Clive was sitting at his desk looking through a book with a light blue cover and spiral binding. Maddie was already there and she said, 'It's the photos of the accident.'

'What are they like?'

'I've not seen them yet.'

Clive looked up. 'They're not nice. Not nice at all.'

I thought for a moment he wasn't going to let us see, but then he held the book out, saying, 'You have been warned.'

The sh.e.l.l of the car, half wedged under the body of an HGV, was just about recognizable, although it was badly crushed and completely burned. There were three bodies inside, but they could just have been shop mannequins roasted by flame-throwers. The driver was slumped over the steering wheel, his hands burned down to bone clenching it. The front seat pa.s.senger was sitting bolt upright, as if asleep. The rear pa.s.senger was smaller but she was the worst. She was curled into a foetal ball, fists clenched, arms and leg flexed. You looked at her and you couldn't help wondering if she had been alive when the fire took hold.

I couldn't reach the end of the book and neither could Maddie. We handed it back to Clive who took it and shut it in the top drawer of his desk.

An hour later, Ed came down and perused the photographs and read the police reports that Neville had supplied. We had taken the body bags out of the fridge but not opened them and they now lay waiting, one on each PM table. Ed declined coffee and went to get changed. Maddie and I followed Clive into the dissection room, then waited for Ed to come in and put on the PPE. Only then did we open the body bags.

That smell again, only a lot, lot worse and now it was combined with the terrible sight of those three poor people. The driver a.s.sumed to be Mr Franklin, but no definite identification had been done yet on any of the bodies had had to have his hands broken off in order to remove him from the car and these were beside him. His feet had burned away completely, as had much of his torso and chest. The front seat pa.s.senger was as badly burned but the smaller, back seat pa.s.senger seemed to be the worst; her feet and hands were burned away and most of her back had gone, leaving only a spinal column and a few blackened rib stumps.

Ed and Clive examined the bodies for jewellery, finding a wedding ring on the front seat pa.s.senger and a matching one on the detached hand of the driver, although there was nothing on the rear pa.s.senger. There was no clothing on the bodies, and so no pockets to search. As Ed was making a few notes on the external appearance of the bodies, Maddie said to him, 'There doesn't seem much point, really, does there? I mean there's not a lot left to look at.'

Ed looked up. 'Oh, you'd be surprised. You'd be surprised.'

He then said to Clive, 'I'll do the evisceration.'

Clive said with a sly smile, 'Sure you can cope?' Not often a pathologist does his own evisceration. Ed said nothing, just picking up the PM40 knife while Maddie and I looked on. He went first to the driver's body. The abdominal cavity was practically empty except for a charred lump of liver, but the ribcage was still intact; he opened this by a combination of some cutting but mostly just pulling apart. The heart and lungs, although partly cooked, were relatively unburned. He pulled them gently then put them together with the liver in a bowl. He then cut down on the ribs and tested each one, finding that nearly all of them were broken. There was also a fracture through the lumbar spine, but the pelvis was intact. 'Will you take out the brain?' he asked Clive.

'You've seen the fracture?' There was a jagged hole in the head.

Ed nodded. 'I think the fire did that,' he explained to Maddie and me. 'Intense heat will fracture bones.'

While Clive was working with the bone saw on the skull, Ed dissected the organs with Maddie and me looking on. As he did this, he showed us what he was finding. 'The aorta's been transected. That's good.'

Maddie frowned. 'Is it?'

'It's a cla.s.sic deceleration injury; one you don't survive.'

'You mean that's what killed him?'

'I hope so,' he said quietly but fervently. 'I b.l.o.o.d.y well hope so.'

When he opened the major airways and saw that they were clean, we could see that he was smiling underneath his mask. 'No soot. That's good because it's another indication that he was dead before the fire took hold.'

Clive came over with the brain. It didn't look like a freshly removed brain normally did; it was smaller for a start, and paler, and firmer. Ed explained, 'It's been cooked a bit like brain en croute, I suppose and that's fixed the tissues, much as chemical fixatives do.'

Clive said, 'I've stripped the dura. There's no other sign of a head injury.'

And that was that. Ed had cheered up because he could be fairly sure that death had been due to the collision and not to the fire. He moved on to the front seat pa.s.senger and found similar injuries. Because she was slightly less burned, there was even evidence of a large amount of blood in the chest, again in keeping with a ruptured aorta due to trauma. We were breathing more easily by now: it looked as though these poor people had not suffered when they died, because their injuries would have been more or less instantaneous. When it came to the rear seat pa.s.senger, though the one that ought to have been the young girl he came across a problem. There was no sign of a ruptured aorta, and there were no major boney injuries. Ed became noticeably quieter. When he opened the airways, though, there was at least no soot.

He shook his head and sighed. 'I don't know why she died.'

'But it wasn't the fire, right?' I asked.

He shrugged. 'Hopefully not. The clean airways are a good sign . . .' But he sounded unsure.

I remembered how she had been curled up in the car and suddenly became terrified that perhaps she had survived the crash and burned to death . . .

He turned back to her body. 'Our chances of getting anything for carbon monoxide levels are pretty small . . .'

I knew that carbon monoxide levels in the blood go up in fires. Clive said, 'There's no chance of getting blood.'

Ed said, 'Try to get some bone marrow from the lumbar spine. I think that's our best bet.'

'OK, boss,' said Clive.

While Clive did this, Ed made notes; it didn't take long. Then he went to the changing room for a shower. Clive said, 'Well, at least there's not much reconstruction required.'

In fact, all that was required was to zip up the body bags and put them back in the body store. There wasn't much cleaning up to do either; mostly it was sweeping up bits of charcoal from the floor and washing down the grease and pieces of clotted blood from the dissection bench. When we'd finished, the PM room was again spotless, but the smell lingered.

While we had coffee in the mortuary office, Ed phoned Neville and told them his conclusions and that he wanted the toxicology lab to attempt carbon monoxide levels on the bone marrow samples. He listened for a moment, then closed his eyes. 'No, Neville. They're not viewable.' Clive laughed out loud in the background: 'Typical.'

Ed continued. 'No, no chance at all. You'll have to go by dental records.' He paused. 'Yes, the teeth are intact.'

As he put down the phone, he was shaking his head. 'Where does that man keep his brains?'

Clive shrugged. We were well used to the Coroner's officers pressurizing us to let relatives view bodies for the purposes of identification. They never seemed to believe us when we sometimes had to tell them that the bodies were too mutilated or decomposed or burnt to let relatives see them.

That night, I dived into the Merlot as soon as I could. Luke was cooking but didn't ask what was wrong, knowing I would tell him if I needed to. It was good to have some normality back, although it took me a long time to stop wondering about the girl in the back of the car.

FIFTY-ONE.

The days before 26 April when the results of the certificate examination were due to be published were far tenser than I ever thought they'd be. I had worked it all out beforehand, how chilled I'd be, how that day would be like every other. I wasn't bothered about the result and kept telling myself that this wasn't a particularly important exam; after all, it wasn't as if my job depended on it. My GCSEs had been a lot worse than this.

Yet, as the middle of April came and went, I couldn't stop myself wondering again and again how well I'd done. Although it didn't really matter if I'd c.o.c.ked things up, because I would still be going into work every day, I still had enough pride to want to succeed, even if it was only just sc.r.a.ping through. Ed didn't help, either. I know he meant well, but he would insist on trying to keep my spirits up by telling me he was sure that I had done really well and that there would be no problem. Me, however, I had different ideas. He hadn't been in that room and sat there with a feeling of inadequacy, a feeling that had grown as soon as I'd left the building and that had continued to grow as the countdown to results day progressed. I knew how much better I could have done, something that Ed's reaction when I told him that I had left the exam hall early he had winced only reinforced.

On the day that the results were due out, the post still hadn't arrived by the time I left for the mortuary. I never even thought about hanging around, happy to spend the day in blissful ignorance, but about halfway through the morning Ed came down to the mortuary demanding to know what my results were. I told him that I didn't know and he was astonished that I was willing to wait until the evening to find out.

'I'll give you a lift home at lunchtime.'

'Why?'

'So you can get your result.' Ed didn't seem to appreciate that I didn't particularly want want to know my result. to know my result.

'It doesn't matter. It can wait. I don't want to trouble you.'

'Rubbish! It's no trouble. I'm as keen to have the good news as you are.'

'It might not be convenient for Clive.'

But Clive, bless him, said at once, 'I haven't got a problem with that. We're quiet and the place is pretty clean. I can spare you for three-quarters of an hour.'

So Ed drove me home while I sat in his car and realized that I was very, very bothered indeed about the result. I was so bothered that I was feeling like I had when I had sat the b.l.o.o.d.y thing wobbly-legged, sick and almost out of my body with stress. He behaved as if this was a normal day; he had Radio 2 on, while chatting about nothing at all. As we pulled up outside my house he turned to me, smiled and said, 'Don't worry, Mich.e.l.le. In the long run, it doesn't really matter.'

I wasn't sure how to take that but smiled back and nodded and said, 'No.'

It's not a long walk up to my front door from the pavement but it seemed like it at that moment. The boys heard me coming of course and there was a gigantic explosion of barking as I approached. I put the key into the lock, turned it and pushed the door open, my head already turned down to look at the floor of the front porch where the post lay.

There were three pieces of junk mail, a bill for the telephone and an A4 brown envelope that I knew at once was the result I had been dreading. I knew from talking to the other candidates that if the envelope was flimsy then it was a fail but if it was quite stiff then I had pa.s.sed. With the boys barking for England behind the frosted gla.s.s of the inner door and my stomach so full of sickness I thought I was going to vomit, I bent down and picked it up, flexing it slightly.

And you know what? I couldn't tell. I didn't know which of those it was, flimsy or stiff. Inside might have been a letter telling me I was a loser, or it might have been a certificate proclaiming me a brain-box. Without ceremony, I ripped the top off and dived in.

I had pa.s.sed.

Not a great pa.s.s, I have to admit now. Something of a sc.r.a.pe, as Ed cheerfully observed when he looked at my marks, but I wasn't bothered. A pa.s.s is a pa.s.s is a pa.s.s; end of. I was happy.

Clive and Maddie were pleased as punch, of course, and I spent the rest of the day in a happy glow, similar to the way I'd felt when I'd got the job in the first place. I had phoned Luke at once and he was over the moon too, promising that we would go out that night to celebrate. When I phoned Mum to tell her she almost burst into tears and I could hear Dad in the background shouting, 'I knew she'd do it. I knew our Mich.e.l.le would do it.'

We all arranged to meet at the pub at eight that evening and by half past, as we sat in the fading daylight of the beer garden, the lager-fuelled banter was at its height. I was toasted by Dad at least three times and he told everyone how proud he was of his daughter and how she was a credit to the family, which made me go red and hot and wish I was anywhere but there.

But it was a good feeling, no doubt about it. I felt that I had really achieved something, perhaps for the first time in my life. I had a job that I liked and that was important. Before I'd started out a year ago, I'd never thought much about what went on in a mortuary, and I suppose most of my ideas were based on what I'd seen in films. I didn't know how much care and pride there is in a mortuary quite as much as there is on the wards and how necessary it all is. I thought also that I was a better person because I saw almost on a daily basis the best and the worst of what human beings can do and can be like. People like Clive, Graham, Ed, Peter and me work away doing things that most people don't know about and don't want to know about but, if we weren't there, the rest of society would soon notice.

Yes, I thought. It's not altogether a bad life down with the dead men.