1
May 1995
‘Let me get this straight. You’ve been cutting up a corpse, only now you’ve found out it wasn’t who you thought it was.’
The duty sergeant drummed with his pencil on the desk and looked sceptical. I wondered how much time he spent practising his single eyebrow raise.
‘That’s right,’ Teddy said.
‘And we are talking about a real, dead, human body, here?’
‘Of course - we told you already.’ She was getting exasperated, which was not likely to help. ‘It’s not who it was supposed to be: we think it’s someone completely different.’
‘You think?’ His eyebrow arched up again.
‘We know.’
She folded her arms and stared at him. I’d been on the end of that look several times and it wasn’t comfortable. He transferred his attention to me. We must have seemed an oddly mismatched pair, the truculent Irish girl and the posh boy.
‘And you agree with that, sir?’ The sir was ironic and both he and I knew it.
‘She’s right.’ I could feel myself getting flustered. ‘I mean, we couldn’t be absolutely sure until we’d got to his lungs, of course, but then it was pretty obvious.’ Seeing the expression on his face, I tailed off before I said anything more damning.
The sergeant put his pencil behind his ear and leaned forward onto the desk. Like everything in this windowless room, it was old and tired and scarred by years of use.
‘But if you’ve been dismembering the wrong body, doesn’t that mean there has to be another deceased person somewhere, also filed under the wrong name – which is to say, under the real name of your man?’
He spoke slowly, which made him sound dull witted, but there was a gleam in his eye. I realised he was enjoying this.
‘Correct,’ Teddy said quickly, before I could stop her. ‘There must have been two bodies that got swapped: it’s the only possible explanation. How could that have happened? It doesn’t make sense. That’s exactly why we’ve come to report it.’
The sergeant retrieved his pencil and made a great show of writing on the interview form in front of him. ‘Doesn’t… make… sense,’ he repeated. ‘I can see how that might be a worry. Now, I don’t know much about the university works – never had a chance to get that sort of education, me – but I’m guessing there’s someone supposed to be in charge of you two?’
I could see where this was heading, but Teddy was too quick for me again. ‘Professor Patten,’ she said. ‘He’s head of the department.’
‘Professor… Patten,’ he repeated as he noted it down. ‘And can I assume that you reported this very concerning matter to him, before you came to trouble the Thames Valley police about it? I know we’ve not really got that much to occupy us right now, only the occasional assault and theft and murder and mugging and kidnapping and fraud, but still.’ He plastered the sarcasm on thick and ponderous. ‘Have you actually told this professor about your little problem?’
I looked at Teddy. She shrugged and shook her head. There was no way we could answer.
He slapped both his palms down on the table-top. ‘Come on, you two. Nice try, but I wasn’t born yesterday. This is one of those pranks you read about in the papers, isn’t it? A “jolly jape”, as you students might call it.’
‘It’s not - really it’s not,’ I said. ‘I know it sounds bizarre, but…’
He cut me off. ‘Bizarre, you reckon? That’s a good word for trying to make us police officers look stupid. A word to the wise: when you’re playing the fool, know when to pack it in before you start to annoy people.’ He stood up from his desk, walked to the door and held it open for us. ‘We’re all done here. Turn right for the exit and just be grateful I’m not going to waste any more of my time reporting you to this professor of yours.’
Teddy started to protest, but I took her arm and pulled her out of the room. She could only make it worse. When I looked back, I saw the sergeant tear the top sheet off his notepad, screw it up and lob it into the waste bin. He was smiling to himself.
Outside on the pavement, I turned to her. ‘That’s that, then. If the police aren’t interested, we’ve got to stop now, before we get into more trouble. What else can we do?’
‘Nothing’s changed, Louis. We still don’t know why he died, or how he ended up with us.’ She sounded distracted as she gazed down the street towards the river, as if she wasn’t seeing the buses passing on the bridge but picturing something completely different in her mind.
‘There’s only one choice left.’
2
October 1994
I first became aware of her during Professor Patten’s introductory speech, right at the start of the university year.
‘Dissecting a human cadaver is a rite of passage,’ he declaimed. ‘It is part education, part examination of the temperament you will need to flourish later in your careers. It will affect all of you in different ways, but the one thing I can promise, is that after the experience of this next twelve months, none of you will ever be the same again.’
The professor had doubtless designed his address to sound meaningful and portentous, but the effect was undermined by the man himself. He was short and bearded, with a round face, a belly that strained at the buttons of his tired tweed jacket and a high-pitched voice that barely carried to the back of the lecture theatre.
‘Before you start in the dissection room, however, I need to spell out some simple rules of behaviour: breaking these rules will lead to disciplinary measures, up to and including ejection from the course.’
He did his best to look intimidating as he stared at us.
‘Rule number one: nothing is ever removed from a dissection session. All tissue must remain in the room.’
Why on earth would anyone want to take bits away? I couldn’t grasp that.
‘Rule number two: nothing is ever brought into the room other than your dissection manuals and the instruments you will find in your lockers. In particular, items of food or drink are not allowed.’
And that is just frankly weird. Eating your sandwiches surrounded by corpses and body parts? I don’t think so.
‘Lastly, rule number three: your cadavers must always be treated with dignity. You should think of them as organ donors, if on a larger scale, and it’s only right to respect the individuals who have donated themselves to further your education. Are those rules clear?’
He swept a perfunctory glance across us, his audience, sitting in our pristine white lab coats, enthusiastically attentive. All apart from me, naturally: nobody could have accused me of enthusiasm.
‘Good. In that case…’
‘Excuse me,’ someone said. ‘But do we ever get to know anything about our bodies?’
The voice was clear and female, with the edge of a regional accent.
‘I’m sorry.’ The professor stood, blinking his surprise. ‘What was that?’
‘I said, do we get to know anything about our bodies?’
Naturally, I’d chosen to sit at the back of the lecture theatre and so I had to crane forward to see who’d had the audacity to speak up. It seemed to have been a girl down in the front row. The tiers of old wooden benches were so steeply raked that I could only make out the back of her head and a mane of peroxide white hair, tied up in a multi-coloured scarf.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Oxford University assures both donors and their relatives that they will remain anonymous. Now…’
‘I didn’t mean their names, necessarily,’ she interrupted. ‘I only thought it would be useful to know some details about them.’
The professor lifted his chin and his eyes to the ceiling for a moment, before offering her the sort of smile that was only an upward twitch of his lips.
‘And you are?’ he enquired.
‘Teddy. Teddy Deed,’ the girl announced. Whether she intended it or not, the way she said her name sounded like a challenge.
‘Well, Miss Deed –the initial experience of dissection can be difficult enough for the more sensitive among you, without being encumbered by any knowledge of the previous life of your subject. Your predecessors have managed to get by without the personal details of their cadavers and I’m sure you will also.’
He obviously expected that would be the end of the matter. So did I. We didn’t know her yet.
‘On the other hand,’ she persisted: ‘surgeons obviously know a fair bit about the patient they’re about to operate on, and they’ve got to have learned how to deal with that at some point in their training.’
I couldn’t decide whether to be impressed by her doggedness or alarmed by her refusal to back down. In her defence, it didn’t sound as if she was trying to be rude, or clever, only like she wanted to debate the subject, one adult with another.
‘May I suggest that you will not become a surgeon for many years yet, my dear – if ever. Let’s not try to run before we can walk.’
Ouch. Double condescension. Surely she’ll have the sense to stop now?
It seemed not.
‘Don’t you think it might be important for us to know the cause of death, at least. We could get confused, otherwise.’
My neighbour on the back row – a stocky American called Brandon, who I’d met earlier that morning - rubbed his hands together with glee. ‘This is great,’ he whispered. ‘Go, girl, go. You’ve got him on the ropes now.’
He was right: the professor was definitely looking flustered. I almost felt sorry for him as he flipped his woollen tie free from his jacket and used it to polish his spectacles, nodding his head as if he was working out what to say next. He replaced his glasses and held up his hand in a limp gesture that was halfway between placation and surrender.
‘Very well. We can look into the question and discuss it at the next faculty meeting.’ He cleared his throat, obviously keen to get back to the comfort of his prepared speech. ‘Right. Tomorrow morning, we will start in the dissection suite, which is situated in the basement of this building. You have been divided up into twenty groups of six, each group assigned to a specific body, and you will remain in that group for the year. Swapping to a different body is not allowed. You should take a few minutes now to get to know your other group members outside, so that we can make a prompt start in the morning without un-necessary delay. Any further questions?’ He made a point of looking at the girl in the front row. ‘Anything else, Miss Deed?’
Looks like he’s got her cards marked. I hope she can deal with that. This time, she had the sense to stay quiet.
‘Good. We will meet tomorrow for your first dissection. You should all read up on the muscles of the back this evening in preparation. Remember this: it is a long and arduous road to becoming a doctor and some of you will not survive this first year. Take care to ensure it is not because of a failure to apply yourselves.’
It was an empty threat for me but everyone else was deeply committed to being here and a palpable shudder ran through the room at the mention of failure.
Pompous arse, I thought. What a tosser.
That assessment would be justified more than once over the coming months and yet the professor was absolutely correct in two of his predictions.
None of us would be the same by the end of the year.
Not all of us would make it.
3
Back in college that evening, I did my best to settle to work, but the anatomy book that was our recommended text was dauntingly thick and the introduction was dull. Who could get worked up about mundane things like muscle origins and insertions and primary action and secondary actions and innervation and arterial supply and lymphatic drainage? After an hour of tedium, I put it to one side. Maybe it would get more interesting when I could actually see these things in the flesh, even when that flesh was long dead; part of me hoped so. If I was stuck doing this - for now - that might help.
Someone knocked on my door. I opened it to find Henry, my neighbour on the stair. He was holding two wineglasses in one hand, and a full bottle in the other.
‘Good evening, Louis. At this hour, I generally feel the need for alcoholic refreshment, but I prefer not to imbibe alone. I am reliably informed that is the start of the slippery path to dissolution.’
Henry was another first year, studying English. He affected a three-piece tweed suit and loosely knotted old school tie, and within minutes of our meeting two days before, he had informed me that he was styling himself on Oscar Wilde - I didn’t have the confidence to say that he was the first Nigerian Oscar I’d ever encountered. He plonked down the bottle and glasses, flopped languidly into a chair and sat sideways across it, suede wingtip shoes dangling.
‘So how was your day, oh Best Beloved? Cut off any limbs yet? Did any sensitive soul pass out? I want all the gruesome details. Give.’
‘Sorry to be a disappointment,’ I said, ‘but there aren’t any details to give. We don’t start actually cutting things up until tomorrow. Don’t worry - I’ll tell you all about it as soon as there’s anything to tell.’
He pouted theatrically, then got up to fill both our glasses. ‘I suppose I shall simply have to wait. Cheers, then.’ He handed me a drink. ‘Here’s to Oxford; may it meet all our Great Expectations.’
Hardly great, in my case.
It would have been miserable to say that, however, so I simply raised my glass to him, took a swig, and discovered that it was port, rather than wine. That shouldn’t have been a surprise: I could already see that for Henry, wine would have been far too mundane.
‘Ah – work. It’s good to see a man settling to his labours.’ He wandered over to my desk and peered at the pile of medical texts, flicking through the titles as if they were written in a foreign language, something he found vaguely familiar but couldn’t actually understand. ‘These all look terribly fascinating and paradoxically also totally tedious. What is the difference between physiology and anatomy, anyway?’
‘Physiology is the way that bodies function normally – the control systems, if you like – whereas anatomy is the way that they’re structured. Supposedly the two go hand in hand.’
‘Like software and hardware?’ It was an unexpected insight given his image as a nineteenth century man of letters.
‘I guess that’s a fair comparison,’ I said, ‘except that human hardware seems an awful lot more complex than anything inside a computer.’
‘I’ll take your word for it - I haven’t spent any time contemplating the innards of either people or machines. You know, I truly don’t comprehend how you can face the thought, a civilised fellow like you.’ He sauntered over to my shelves and ran a finger along the spines of the books I’d brought from home. ‘I mean, look at these. These are genuine works of art, not to be confused with your technical manuals over there. Austen, Dickens, Gaskell, Elliot, Trollope, Bennett, right up to Maugham. Some sort of medical student you are: this is a better collection of classic English novels than I have.’
‘You do know that Somerset Maugham originally trained as a doctor in London?’
‘True - but then he saw the light and started to write. Liza of Lambeth was published when he was still a student, I seem to recall.’
‘Must have been easier to do in the 1890s.’ I didn’t feel I knew Henry well enough yet to tell him that I was planning on something similar, if possible. ‘More drama to write about than nowadays.’
‘Perhaps. Still, rather you than me, when it comes to dealing with physical disease.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t suppose an aspiring doctor would happen to have a cigarette, by any chance?’
‘Top drawer of the desk, with a lighter. Help yourself.’
He rummaged around and found my packet of Sobranies - a pretentious habit I’d picked up from my older sister and one I’ve never managed to shake off.
‘Black Russians; very elegant, my dear. I do approve.’ He took one out and held it up to the light, examining the gold filter, before lighting it. ‘I hope you don’t mind my quizzing you. I have an absolute fascination with the gothic, which means that I shall insist on graphically gory descriptions when you do start cutting people up.’
I sipped at my port. ‘I hate to disappoint you, there won’t be any gore. No blood at all, in fact.’
‘Really? How is that?’
‘Because the bodies have been chemically preserved. They all died a long time ago - months or maybe even years back.’
‘You mean to say they’re pickled, like Nelson’s body when he was shipped back from Trafalgar in a barrel of rum?’ He rubbed his hands together with glee.
‘Similar to that, I suppose, although a bit more scientific. Probably closer to Egyptian mummification, if you like.’
‘How ghoulishly fascinating. When is it done, and by whom?’
For the next hour, we smoked until the air turned blue and drank two thirds of the bottle of port.
