LITMIR.BIZ

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How can I tell?’

      Joe softened his tone. ‘He’s not warm. He’s covered in frost. Okay, that could happen when he’s asleep but there’s no sign of life, no pulse and he looks like he’s been here for some time.’ He waved a gloved finger over the man’s face. ‘He’s long dead.’

      Joe called for the divisional surgeon, who wasn’t a surgeon at all but a GP who was on call for the police and the only one who could officially pronounce life extinct. Each district had on-call doctors who worked on a rota basis and topped up their salary working for the police. Today they’re known as Force Medical Examiners, or the FME. Ordinarily, we would call a deceased’s own doctor, but we didn’t know this man, or who his doctor was.

      Scenes of Crime Officers (SOCO) only attended suspicious deaths or suicides, as would CID, so the rest was up to us, the uniform shift. I had to draw a sketch plan of where we’d found the body. I made a note of his clothing. We had to search the body and seize anything of value. In this case, there was nothing but small change. No wallet. No identification. Nothing.

      Then we had to wait. And wait. And wait. The doctor came and pronounced life extinct, then the undertaker finally came to collect the body to transfer it to the mortuary. There was no point taking him to A&E.

      Back at the station, PC Gardiner gave me the sudden death forms that needed completing for the coroner. My Girl Guide skills came in handy when one of the questions asked which direction the body faced. North-west.

      ‘Fax it to the Coroner’s Office,’ Joe said. ‘And be on standby for the post-mortem.’

      Post-mortem. When I’d woken up that morning the last thing on my mind was a post-mortem. I hadn’t thought about dead bodies. My head was full of chasing suspects, catching burglars, sorting out a lovers’ tiff, my own romantic ideals. I’d never imagined I would be picking up a dead tramp by the side of the road.

      Two o’clock that afternoon when I should have been clocking off duty, I stood by a metal trolley in the mortuary looking at the naked body of our unknown vagrant, the stench of death firmly entrenched in my nose and in my head. Today, I know that smell anywhere and can magic it up on a whim. You never forget.

      The body of a very large man lay on the gurney next to our tramp. He’d been dragged beneath a bus for a hundred yards or more. Most of his skin was missing and the body looked black.

      An old lady lay on the third trolley up. She’d had her post-mortem and her chest was stitched up in a ‘y’ shape. She was waiting to be put into the fridge before being taken to the undertaker.

      If all of this shocked me, I wasn’t prepared for the post-mortem itself. I didn’t faint, I wasn’t sick, but it was unlike anything I’d anticipated. It’s not nice, not pleasant, but it is fascinating. And for the sake of the queasy, I’m not going to detail it.

      Our tramp had frozen to death. Hypothermia. Such a sad way to die, lonely and cold and hungry. His last meal had been some chips about twelve hours before he’d been found.

      I did cry a tear for him when our efforts to find out who he was failed. His fingerprints were not on the system and he wasn’t known to police. He wasn’t a regular vagrant around our area, so we sent a headshot to all the stations in central London. They failed to recognise him too, even though he’d obviously lived on the streets for some time. We checked and re-checked missing persons records to no avail. The local paper published his photograph and wrote an article about how he was found but still nobody came forward to claim him. Six months later, the council informed us he’d be given a pauper’s funeral.

      Who was he and where was his family? What had he done with his life? How and why had he ended up on the streets? When had he given up? Why? All of these questions remain unanswered. My first dead body: John Doe.

      Nobody ever claimed him but I will always remember him.

       Have you told her?

      One of the most difficult and heart-rending jobs of a police officer is to tell someone a loved one has died. Like most jobs nobody wanted, the task of delivering a death message was given to the women or the rookies and for a time I was both. I was given them all. I hated it and often had to fight back tears as I gave the terrible news. I would rather have dealt with the actual death than have to inform the relatives. I’m the sort of person who cries at a stranger’s funeral.

      As soon as I came on duty one night, PC Jim McBean and I were sent to a house to pass on some bad news. We stood outside the door and I knocked twice. There was no answer but someone was at home because the television was flickering through the net curtains.

      Jim rapped on the window.

      A blonde woman pulled back the curtain. She was holding a crying baby and looked frazzled. She waved at us, indicating she would come to the door.

      When she clicked off the latch and pulled the door open, my radio burst alive. ‘Ash, have you told that woman her husband’s dead?’

      Not the way to deliver a death message.

       Do not pass Go

      If someone says don’t look, you automatically get the urge to do just that, especially when it’s a mangled car wreck.

      There was a fatal accident at the bottom of a very busy junction, on the corner where a street market began. Shops and a pub and a betting shop lined the parade. One of those heavy super-armoured vans that are used to convey money had taken out a blue Volvo estate.

      I was instructed to make sure nobody went past the police tape. After six hours, I was weary.

      ‘But I live down there!’ said an old man.

      ‘Sorry. You’ll have to wait,’ I said.

      ‘I only want to go a hundred yards,’ said a man with a dog.

      ‘Sorry. You’ll have to wait.’

      A woman with shopping bags approached. ‘I have to collect something before the supermarket shuts.’

      ‘Sorry. You’ll have to wait.’

      And so it carried on. I deflected all the pleas and fended off those who’d come to gawp. It was tricky as the van was laden with cash and it had to be gathered up and accounted for.

      An irate woman approached and wouldn’t accept that she wasn’t going through. She was insistent, persistent and annoying.

      My legs were aching, I was desperate for the loo, the forensic examination would be another few hours, and the PC assigned to take over from me hadn’t turned up. I was grumpy and I wanted to go home.

      ‘I don’t care if you’re the Queen of England, you ain’t going down that road!’ I rationalised it was human nature to lose it, all things considered. ‘A man has been killed in that car this afternoon.’

      She dropped her handbag and fell to the floor. She screamed and held her head in her hands and howled, oh how she howled.

      I shouldn’t have spoken to her like that. It was no excuse that I hadn’t known it was her husband’s car. I had just delivered the cruellest of death messages.

       Gruesome twosome

      They called us the Gruesome Twosome, my future husband and I. I suppose that’s why we paired up. It put everyone else off. Whenever we were posted together, we ended up with a cartload of bodies, often the arrested kind but frequently the dead.

      Kenny

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