LITMIR.BIZ

       10

       Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, Washington, DC, Tuesday, 10.21am

      Maggie had thought of heading first to the Park Police who were handling the investigation into the death of Dr Jeffrey Frankel, but instinct told her that could wait. She hailed a cab instead for E Street, South West: the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

      En route, she noticed a huge mural on the side of a building. It depicted the President with fangs and devil’s horns and, in huge letters alongside it, the words, Not In Our Name.

      Once she’d arrived, she flashed her White House credential and asked to see the most senior person present. She was swiftly introduced to a woman, Dr Amy Fong, who led Maggie into an office, closed the door and asked if she was there to identify the body.

      Maggie had to think quickly. She had assumed a family member would already have done that. If they hadn’t, they certainly should. Surely it wasn’t right for her, who barely knew Frankel, to perform such a final, even intimate act.

      But she also intuited what giving the wrong answer might mean. If she said no, then why was she there? Why would this office give her any information or access? If, on the other hand, she said yes then, crucially, they would surely have to show her the body. ‘That’s right,’ she said.

      They walked down one corridor, through a set of double doors, then another and finally into an examination suite. As they walked, Dr Fong explained that the identification would have to be done very quickly. ‘I’m afraid we’re under extreme time pressure. The family are hoping to have the funeral today. Jewish thing, I think.’

      And there, on a thick counter, lay the white, inert body of a man in his sixties. She only allowed herself a glance above the neck: enough to see that while much of the face was left, the back of the head seemed to have been reduced to a bloody pulp.

      Not for the first time, she reflected on the strange unreality of a dead body. It seemed to her like a waxwork or a movie prop, a fake. It was as if, once the breath of life was gone, a human body belonged to another realm altogether. Or perhaps that’s just what she needed to tell herself.

      Now the woman and the doctor doing the examination, who had, Maggie noticed, blood on his overalls and on his latex gloves, conferred briefly. The man then picked up a clipboard and pen, turned to Maggie, asked her to confirm her name, date of birth and address – which she gave as the White House – before asking her ‘to identify the deceased’.

      Now there was no hiding. Maggie had to come round to the doctor’s side of the counter and look properly at the face of the dead man.

      She had seen corpses before. A lifetime ago, during that mediation effort in Congo, she had been led to the site of a massacre: the leader of one of the parties to the talks refused to continue unless Maggie, as chair of the negotiations, had seen with her own eyes ‘what our enemies are doing to us’.

      On that occasion, though, she had not had to focus as intently – or closely – on one person, as she did now.

      As she had already glimpsed, the face was still mostly intact. But the skull was a mess, a congealed tangle of blood, brain and bone. The contrast between the front and back – between a face that still promised a person, capable of a smile or a glance, and a mess of gore that would make you wince if you saw it in a butcher’s shop – stopped Maggie short. It filled her with a queasy thought: that the distance between the human and the animal is much shorter than we like to think.

      And then she noticed something else. Two little indentations on the bridge of the dead man’s nose, the traces left by a lifetime of wearing glasses. And in a second she was back in Ireland: a child, sitting on her grandfather’s lap, fascinated by those same marks on his face, grooves indented by time that suggested the old man belonged with the rocks and cliffs, as ancient as geology.

      What had this doctor on the slab, perhaps the same age her grandfather had been when she was little, gone through that had led him to put a gun to his throat and pull the trigger? What had made him that desperate?

      And then, unbidden, came a different image. She saw the seventeen-year-old girl Liz had told her about last night. Mia. She imagined her hanging in her room, and all because she could not see a way out of a pregnancy that had been inflicted on her. A child herself with a child in her belly, she had been found by another child, her twelve-year-old sister.

      Involuntarily, Maggie closed her eyes. So much pain in the world. It seemed to be brimming over. As if the world had more sorrow than it could contain. And, there was no denying

Скачать книгу