Corrupt Bodies E-Book

Kris Hollington

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 346

Beschreibung

** SHORTLISTED FOR THE CWA'S ALCS GOLD DAGGER FOR NON-FICTION ** In 1985, Peter Everett landed the job as Superintendent of Southwark Mortuary. In just six years he'd gone from lowly assistant to running the UK's busiest murder morgue. He couldn't believe his luck. What he didn't know was that Southwark, operating in near-Victorian conditions, was a hotbed of corruption. Attendants stole from the dead, funeral homes paid bribes, and there was a lively trade in stolen body parts and recycled coffins. Set in the fascinating pre-DNA and psychological profiling years of 1985-87, this memoir tells a gripping and gruesome tale, with a unique insight into a world of death most of us don't ever see. Peter managed pathologists, oversaw post mortems and worked alongside Scotland Yard's Murder Squad - including on the case of the serial killer, the Stockwell Strangler. This is a thrilling tale of murder and corruption in the mid-1980s, told with insight and compassion.

Leseprobe

CORRUPT BODIES

DEATH AND DIRTY DEALING IN A LONDON MORGUE

Peter Everett and Kris Hollington

To my wife Wendy and son Alistair, who shared the nightmare and saw it through

Contents

Title PageDedicationAbout the authorAuthor’s disclaimerPrologue1An appointment with death, 7 June 19822The road to death3A life in death, January 19804Murder most senseless, 7 June 19825The corrupt body, July 19826The tragedy of terror, July 19827Going undercover, August 19828The trial, January 19839Questions remain, July 198410Disaster in the sky, June 198511Life goes on, September 198512Little Legs, September 198513The Stockwell Strangler, June 198614Cleaning up, July–September 198615What lies beneath, October 1986 16The accidental pathologist, November 198617The problem with Peckham, December 198618Uncomfortably numb, January–July 198719Losing it, July 1987Epilogue: The end that awaits us allAcknowledgementsPlatesCopyright

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Everett is the former mortuary superintendent of Southwark Mortuary; he has dealt with over 12,000 deaths, 400 of which were cases of murder. Everett has since become a journalist, working on ITV’s The Cook Report to investigate, among other things, the illegal trade in human body parts. He now runs a TV production company, and lives with his wife Wendy in south-east London. This is his first book.

Author’s disclaimer

It is important to ensure that the secrets and histories of some of the individuals encountered through my work (witnesses, police officers engaged in sensitive work and relatives of some victims, particularly children) are not set out in a manner that would enable people to recognise them. The author has, with the exception of names that are in the public domain, protected the identities of these people by changing names and altering some background details. However, the reader should be left in no doubt that every case is real. Those cases which are a matter of public record are reported in their original detail.

The Appointment in Samarra

(As retold by W. Somerset Maugham)

‘There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture, Now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning? That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.’

1

An appointment with death

7 June 1982

I was awoken by the phone’s sharp ring. Barely conscious, reaching for the receiver, I knocked my pipe off the bedside table and swore, waking Wendy.

‘Yes?’ I demanded, rubbing my eyes. The luminous hands of the bedside clock read 5.50am.

It was a coroner’s officer. A body had been found in Streatham. A police car was on its way to pick me up.

‘Right, thanks,’ was all I could manage as I forced myself into a sitting position, regretting my late night curry with Dr Iain West and Detective Inspector (DI) Douglas ‘Dougie’ Campbell, along with a couple more detectives from the murder squad. Iain, an inveterate chain smoker, had a warm, compassionate nature and a strong sense of joie de vivre. He was popular with detectives because he could outdrink every last one of them apart, it seemed, from Dougie. He was also an incredible pathologist. In 1984 Dr West would carry out the post-mortem (PM) of PC Yvonne Fletcher, shot outside the Libyan embassy, proving that the bullet had come from an embassy window.

I was, comparatively, a lightweight and rarely overindulged, but last night I had definitely had one too many. Five minutes later, I opened the front door to my apartment complex and was slapped full in the face by a gust of wind and several sheets of rain, simultaneously extinguishing both my freshly-lit pipe and my hangover. In my right hand was my murder bag (a doctor’s bag containing chalk, string, rulers, compass, magnifying glass, camera, sketchbook and latex gloves).

Ever since I’d accepted the post of Southwark Mortuary’s Superintendent, my time was no longer my own. If the on-call pathologist needed help at a murder scene, I was expected to attend. Most murders, it seemed, took place between 10pm and 6am, especially during gales, blizzards and storms. I’d only been in the job a few weeks but I’d attended so many murders I was already on first-name terms with most of the murder squad and felt like one of the team.

We’d been in the middle of an insufferable June heatwave, which seemed to have been broken, temporarily at least, by a thunderstorm that had struck sometime in the small hours. The police car dropped me off in a cul-de-sac of terraced houses beside a busy railway intersection. The local woodentops (police constables) had sensibly created a narrow corridor to the scene in an effort to try to prevent contamination. Many police officers and even some detectives were still largely unaware of forensic procedure (or simply didn’t believe in it), so this was an unexpected bonus. Holding up my ID card, I grunted hello and stepped through the inner cordon and onto the verge, tracing my way along a narrow path between some unruly brambles.

Emerging beside the railway tracks I was pleased to notice that it had stopped raining and the clouds were already starting to break. Even better, Professor Keith Mant, the head of Guy’s Hospital’s pathology department, was already there. A tall, distinguished man with a neatly clipped moustache, Professor Mant was always happy to share the secrets of his phenomenal pathology skills. He came from an establishment family but had refused to join his father’s legal practice (the first son in seven generations to do so), opting for medicine instead. During the Second World War, as an army brigadier, he worked for the War Crimes Commission, exhuming Holocaust victims and questioning SS officers, publicly exposing the unbelievably cruel ‘medical experiments’ the Nazis had performed on their doomed prisoners in the concentration camps. He’d also worked in America for a few years as Virginia’s chief medical examiner, and still travelled there to give lectures, something he particularly enjoyed because, he claimed, he was allowed to do so while puffing on one of his large cigars. It was while working in Virginia that Professor Mant would meet and provide advice to a struggling wannabe-crime author by the name of Patricia Cornwell. Nearing retirement, Professor Mant was looking forward to spending more time with his orchids as well as fly fishing, but for now, he wasn’t quite ready to give up his first love, pathology, despite suffering from back pain that had become excruciating in recent years. For this reason, Professor Mant tended to require more assistance than most pathologists.

‘A train guard spotted the body,’ he said as we shook hands. ‘A group of railway workers checked it out and dialled 999 a couple of hours ago.’

A pair of constables had managed to requisition a huge tarpaulin from a nearby industrial estate, and were busy rigging it to the trees closest to the body so at least the victim was now out of view of any passing trains.

I opened my murder bag, put on my gloves, removed my camera and took a closer look at the body.

It was a little boy.

‘About eight years old, I’d estimate,’ Professor Mant said.

He was lying on his back, eyes closed. A large quantity of blood had frothed from his mouth and nostrils, breathed out through punctured lungs. He had several stab wounds to his torso. Two concrete blocks, each about half the size of a football, lay close to his head. Both were marked with bloodstains, and had hair stuck to them. One of the boy’s shoes was missing and his trouser flies were undone.

I finished taking photos just as DI Jon Canning joined us. He was in his mid-thirties which was young for a DI in those days, the result of his being selected for the Metropolitan Police’s new fast-track graduate programme. He was tall, broad, and his light brown hair was always cropped remarkably short. A lit cigarette was constantly held between the fingers of his left hand, leaving his right hand free for detective work.

‘Alright if we move him?’ Professor Mant asked.

DI Canning nodded.

As gently as possible, I took hold of the dead child’s left shoulder while DI Canning, also wearing rubber gloves, took his hip. His skin was still warm to the touch. On the count of three, we rolled him slowly on to his side.

Professor Mant, wincing slightly, leaned in for a closer look, examining the head wounds.

‘Yes, I’d say the skull’s been crushed,’ he said. ‘You can lower him back down now.’

‘Anyone in custody?’ I asked.

DI Canning shook his head.

‘Anyone reported a missing child?’

‘Yes,’ he said, looking at a photograph of the boy given to him by the boy’s mother for the missing poster. ‘It’s definitely him.’ The photo showed a traditional portrait shot of a happy-go-lucky child unable to control a cheeky grin. ‘Matthew Carter. Eight years old. Parents live over there,’ DI Canning added, nodding behind us, ‘in the terrace behind the sidings. As soon as we’re done here, I’m going to pay them a call.’

A cry from a constable alerted us to the fact that the child’s missing shoe had been found. It was about 30 metres from the body, lying close to a gap in a fence. On the other side of the fence, on a small patch of waste ground, close to a line of terraced houses, was a BMX bike.

‘Looks like he was running away,’ Professor Mant said, turning back to examine the stab wounds. They were each about two and a half centimetres across. He leaned in closer and pressed one of them. ‘A blade seven- to ten-centimetres long. The frothy blood is the result of blood in the lungs, so judging by the amount, he was breathing for some time after he was stabbed.’

‘So the concrete block was dropped on his head to finish him off?’ DI Canning asked.

Professor Mant nodded. ‘Possibly. We’ll be able to give you a more definitive picture after we’ve done the PM.’ He took out a small kit bag from his coat pocket and took a swab from the boy’s mouth and cheek. He winced as he tried to stand. ‘Peter, could you give me a hand?’ I helped him to his feet and after brushing debris from his hands he said: ‘No blood or skin under his nails, so either he didn’t have a chance, or didn’t try to fend off his attacker.’

I quickly sketched the scene, making sure to include the cul-de-sac, the railway line and the route to the lost shoe and bike, adding some measurements. Then, with the help of a constable, we placed Matthew’s body in a bag. Once it had been loaded into the Doom Buggy (the funeral director’s van), I travelled to the mortuary with Professor Mant in the back of a police car. I lit my pipe and mulled over this terrible crime. DI Canning had a difficult day ahead of him. He was about to deliver the heartbreaking news to Matthew’s mother. And then I started to think about my own problems, in particular what was waiting for me once I reached Southwark Mortuary.

MY RECENT APPOINTMENT as mortuary superintendent of Southwark just two months earlier, in April 1982, had come as a complete surprise. I was relatively young and inexperienced, having a hospital (non-forensic) background, and Southwark was the UK’s busiest forensic mortuary (with about 2,000 bodies arriving each year). I was honoured to be working under the supervision of the Royal Coroner, Dr Gordon Davies. Davies was an extraordinary man who, as well as being the country’s top coroner, had been a successful doctor, army officer, lawyer, psychiatrist and inventor. He was an excellent and intuitive coroner who once advised a colleague, in relation to the case of an old lady found gassed in her kitchen: ‘If the budgie has been taken out into another room, it’s suicide.’

My future looked bright. I was in my early-thirties, on a high salary, had luxury penthouse accommodation five minutes’ walk from London Bridge and would receive forensic training from the top echelon of Home Office pathologists. Unfortunately, what I hadn’t known when I arrived for my first day of work one sunny spring day was that no one else had wanted the job. Southwark was seen by those in the know (and as I’d come from a hospital background as opposed to forensics, I hadn’t known) as a poisoned chalice.

Southwark Mortuary was atmospheric to say the least. The building stood on the site of Marshalsea Prison, made famous by Charles Dickens in Little Dorrit. Both Dickens and William Shakespeare had worshipped at St George’s Church next door. The mortuary’s outer wall had once been part of the prison, and I would later discover, during renovations when builders unearthed a skeleton, that a large section of the mortuary had been built over the prison cemetery.

My first day had been a shock. Entering the post-mortem room I walked into a scene straight from Hogarth’s Pandemonium. The three metal PM tables each held a body, all in various states of disarray. Two more lay on porter’s trolleys. A senior pathologist’s first words of welcome to me were: ‘Thank God the cavalry has arrived!’ This was Professor Hugh Johnson and, although he held the distinction as being one of London’s finest pathologists, he was also an ogre who seemed to hail from the Edwardian age and who’d become increasingly bitter ever since he lost the battle to become the Senior Chair of Forensic Medicine at the London Hospital. He flew into a rage at the drop of a hat and, if sufficiently exacerbated, tossed scalpels like throwing knives around the PM room.

Apart from the three metal PM tables at the centre of the room, there was a wall lined with cupboards half-consumed by woodworm, and at the far end were two dirty aluminium sinks filled with bloody implements. A mortuary assistant, cigarette dangling from his lips, was hosing blood from the floor while a nervous trainee pathologist tried to dissect a brain under Professor Johnson’s fierce gaze. ‘These morons haven’t a bloody clue!’ Professor Johnson yelled as he turned back to the trainee and, gesticulating at the brain now cradled in the man’s shaking hands, demanded, ‘What on earth are you waiting for? Put the damn thing in the bucket!’

Beyond the PM room was a passage, fifteen metres long with nine fridges lining one wall. The end fridge, I later learned, had never been used because the door had been put on the wrong way. The foul room (for dealing with decomposed bodies, aka ‘stinkers’ to us professionals) was next to the door to the Coroner’s Court and Jury Room. Juries, overcome by the odour, often had to be evacuated to close-by Tabard Gardens while coroner’s officers sprayed the court with air freshener. Finally, the electronic doors to the body-admitting area from the mortuary’s courtyard didn’t work (and hadn’t for six years), and this meant that newly-arrived bodies had to come in via the front, and could be seen from the street.

As I continued my self-guided tour around the mortuary I found the coroner’s officers’ unit. Coroner’s officers were police constables who, on behalf of the coroner, led inquiries into suspicious deaths. They were the main point of contact for the coroner, bereaved relatives, doctors, the police and funeral directors. I stepped into their office and bade them a hearty good morning, only to be met by eight pairs of hostile eyes. They grumbled something back at me, regarding me with contempt before returning to their typewriters.

That morning, as I’d stepped through Southwark’s doors, I’d been ebullient. By lunchtime I was exhausted and glad to flee to my office, clutching my head in despair while wondering how on earth I was going to get out of this. My job as mortuary superintendent seemed to include just about every role in the mortuary itself and, apart from the usual requirements such as assisting pathologists with PMs; liaising with Scotland Yard; dealing with body admissions and collections; checking pathology reports; writing reports and organising rotas, I’d already spent a great deal of time mopping up after incompetent technicians as well as trying to clean, tidy away and organise equipment so it could be found again.

The pace was relentless. Quantity rather than quality appeared to be the norm. I was told it was not unusual for one pathologist to conduct more than twenty PMs in one day. I’d just arrived from St Mary’s Hospital, where I’d been the Senior Mortuary Scientific Officer and where the average was about four per day. Here, the mortuary staff would dissect the bodies and place organs in a plastic bucket prior to the pathologist’s arrival. Unfortunately, they were often in such a hurry that they would miss essential post-mortem signs such as pneumo thorax or haematomas. At St Mary’s, PMs had taken up to three hours to complete; the average for Southwark was ten minutes.

As a clear example, a few days later I saw a well-known pathologist pulling up in the car park. I finished off a telephone conversation and proceeded to make the pathologist some coffee. By the time I entered the PM room with a steaming mug, the pathologist had already completed his examination.

The main reason behind this expedient approach was money. Pathologists received a large fee for every case they examined; this was in addition to their salary and private consultation work. Little wonder they all lived in detached houses and drove expensive cars.

BACK TO MY first day at Southwark. It took a few shoves to force open the door to my office. It was a dusty room, bare save for a bookcase full of files, a metal filing cabinet and a desk with an ancient edition of Gray’s Anatomy propping up one snapped leg. One wall was bare brick, the old Marshalsea Prison. A dirty, draughty window, painted shut, provided me with a view of St George’s cemetery.

I slung my briefcase onto the table, which wobbled and creaked. I took out my sandwich and pipe. I’d been surprised to find we were low in stock of just about every chemical fluid and medical appliance going. This would never have happened at St Mary’s, and I wondered whether this was one of the differences between hospital and coroners’ mortuaries. I lit my pipe and started to go through my predecessor’s ring binders, looking to order fresh supplies. According to the files, we should have had plenty of chemicals, tools and appliances in stock, enough in fact for a small army. So where was it all? I decided to have a closer look through all of the files, starting with a pair of binders stuffed to bursting marked ‘personnel’.

Thirty minutes later, both pipe and sandwich lay forgotten on my wonky table, that morning’s joie de vivre as dead as the cadavers lying in the fridges outside. Turning the pages I learned with increasing dismay that not one, not two, but several mortuary personnel had recently been under criminal investigation, and not just at Southwark but at coroners’ courts all over London. The first case that caught my eye was that of the mortuary technician charged with cannibalism. He’d been caught with a human liver, and a search of his home revealed a veritable butcher’s counter of human organs in his fridge. Another technician had been arrested for plunging a knife repeatedly into a body, for God knows what reason, perhaps inspired by Sherlock Holmes’ beating of a dead body to see if it bruises in A Study in Scarlet.

In Southwark, theft seemed to be the order of the day. I could see that someone had altered official records, clumsily deleting item lists to try to cover up the losses. I also came across a letter from a funeral director complaining about how bodies had been sent from the mortuary in coffins awash with blood. This had been the responsibility of George, my deputy. A disciplinary hearing carried out by Southwark Council’s Department of Environmental Health (our lords and masters) had led to nothing more than a written warning.

Among the many letters of complaint regarding mortuary errors and misdemeanours from irate pathologists was that of a blunder that concerned the incorrect labelling of two bodies. Both bodies had undergone PMs with the wrong medical histories. Another report detailed a complaint from the murder squad, explaining how George had dissected a suspicious death before detectives had arrived. Yet again, the incident was recorded but no action was taken. A few weeks after this, another case of incorrect labelling resulted in two bodies having the wrong PMs followed by yet another case in which two bodies had been mixed up and given to the wrong families. This was the second time this had happened. On the first occasion one of the families ended up cremating the wrong body before the second family reported the mistake; they had opted for an open casket. Despite this, George had only ever received written warnings.

The mortuary – an extremely secure building – had recently been broken into and an expensive watch belonging to one of the bodies had been stolen. This, on the one night that George had ‘forgotten’ to place any personal effects into the safe. I should point out here that George lived, as I did, in a flat that came with the job, which was situated directly above the mortuary. The council’s response to the break-in had been to install a new safe and fit the mortuary with an infrared alarm system.

It was clear to me that at the first signs of trouble, mortuary staff closed ranks and, for the most part, had been able to keep these incidents covered up. At the same time, no one had felt obliged to try to change anything. No wonder I hadn’t been offered the chance of the grand tour of the mortuary prior to my appointment. I’d simply had no idea what was going on.

There was a knock at my door.

‘Come!’ I bellowed, furious now at having been thrown into the lion’s den.

A thick-set, red-faced balding man in his mid-twenties entered, regarding me with contempt. He introduced himself as George, my deputy. Behind him was a stick insect of a man who looked on anxiously. This was Eric, one of the mortuary assistants, a young man from Peckham.

‘Ah, George,’ I said, trying to inject my voice with a tone of friendly no-nonsense supervision. ‘I want to talk to you. I understand you’ve been filling in for the previous superintendent and have the keys and codes for the doors and safe. Hand them over please.’

‘No.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘No. As far as I’m concerned,’ he said in a thick East End accent, ‘I’m the real superintendent. I run things around here.’

I was agog, speechless.

‘All you have to do,’ George continued as Eric stood by, looking increasingly nervous, ‘is keep your mouth shut.’

I obliged by remaining dumbfounded.

‘As long as you keep quiet, you can bump your salary up by 50 per cent.’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ I finally spluttered.

‘Fiddles,’ George said, coming closer, until he was right by my desk.

‘Fiddles?’

‘Lots of deaths arrive here without relatives. Sometimes they’ve got money or jewellery on them. We take ’em, sell the jewellery to someone in Peckham and share out the proceeds later. It’s quite safe,’ George said, pointing at the files on my desk. ‘All we have to do is doctor the books. And it’s been going on for a while. We make about five grand a year this way.’

At the time this was a small fortune. George would have been on about £4,000 a year. My annual salary was £10,000.

‘We’ve got the support of the coroner’s officers.’

Coroner’s officers were serving police officers. I couldn’t believe that the police would be in on this and I told George as much, but he rattled off a few names so casually that I couldn’t help but believe him.

George also alleged that some coroner’s officers were making good money via a number of scams. They would recommend certain funeral directors for a fee. Funeral directors sold flowers back to florists, and charged the next of kin for inside sets (pillows and linings that go into coffins with the body) and then didn’t provide them. Employees even stocked their homes with domestic supplies taken from the mortuary.

As per union rules, the deputy, i.e. George, had automatically been given the post of superintendent after my predecessor had left, until a qualified replacement could be found but, thanks to cutbacks, the council hadn’t been able afford to hire someone new for several months. This had given George plenty of time to consolidate his position.

Recovering somewhat and by now feeling the anger rising within, I stood up and walked towards George and Eric. I had never seen another man cower before but Eric, I believe, could have been a world champion cowerer as his knees bent and he turned his head away from me; he was visibly shaking. George, however, remained unmoved.

‘George,’ I said, barely controlling my voice. ‘Today I have had the misfortune of learning that this mortuary is in a state worse than in Dickens’ times and I would, as my job demands, like to drag it kicking and screaming into the 20th century. If you don’t give me those keys and codes I will kick up such a stink that you’ll wish you’d never even heard of Southwark Mortuary.’

George regarded me coldly. ‘Fair enough,’ he said finally, taking out a bunch of keys from his jacket pocket. ‘Just don’t get in my way and I won’t get in yours.’

By the time they’d left I was in a daze. Pulling myself together, I immediately telephoned a senior manager at the council. He was more than a little disconcerted when, instead of a friendly first day report, I let him have both barrels about the state of the mortuary and George and the thefts from the dead. After a long pause he stuttered that there as there was no proof, I should do nothing and tell no one. The files themselves weren’t enough. According to the papers contained within them, everything had been ‘resolved’ and the relevant persons disciplined, even though I could see that this was clearly not the case. Everything I’d seen and heard, including George’s ‘confession’, could easily be contested in court.

I hung up. Doing nothing wasn’t an option for me. These criminals were desecrating the dead, cheating their families of treasured heirlooms and making a mockery of funerals. As to what I was going to do exactly, I wasn’t certain, but if it was going to take evidence to force my bosses into action, then that was exactly what I was going to get.

EVER SINCE THAT first day, I’d been trying to think of ways to end George’s criminal reign, but with so much work of crucial importance needing to be done, weeks had passed and still I’d been unable to take any action. As Professor Mant and I passed through the mortuary gates on our return from the crime scene, I saw that George was already there, cigarette clamped firmly between his narrow lips, along with Eric, who’d yet to say two words to me. They were engaged in an intense discussion with Ted, a coroner’s officer: a posh gentleman who pronounced ‘house’ as ‘hice’ and ‘telephone’ as ‘tiliphone’ but was, I was convinced, as bent as a five-bob note. They vanished into the shadows as soon as they saw me arrive. As we wheeled the body into the mortuary’s reception I spotted Professor Johnson, red-faced, looking as though he was on the edge of fury as always. ‘Hello, Professor Johnson,’ I said, ‘are you taking over this case?’

‘No Peter,’ the prof replied, ‘I’m here for a domestic argument that turned into murder and what looks like a shotgun suicide.’

It wasn’t even 9am yet. This was turning out to be quite the day.

2

The road to death

I saw my first dead body when I was nine years old. It was 1955 and I was on holiday with my parents in Saltburn-by-the-Sea, a traditional Yorkshire fishing town that sits on the edge of golden sands, between rows of cliffs in a sheltered inlet. I’d spent a profitable day playing on the sands, but now a storm was approaching from the sea. We were about to head back to our hotel when I spotted a small and animated crowd beside some rocks at the water’s edge. Curious, I ran over to see and, with everyone so focussed on what was before them, I was able to slip to the front. Before me, just a couple of metres away, was a man’s swollen and decomposing body. Despite the decomposition (and the fact that marine life had consumed large chunks of his flesh), I could see he was about the same age as my father. His right arm, separated from his body, bobbed in the water just a few metres further. Seconds later, a woman pulled me away, covering my eyes with one of her hands, muttering something about ‘children shouldn’t have to see such things.’ My mother, having just caught up with me, thanked the woman and started to offer me comfort.

The strange thing was that I didn’t need comforting. In fact, I wanted to return to the water’s edge and have a closer look. For some reason, my parents didn’t resist when I stayed firmly where I was and, although I was a little further away than I would have liked, I was able to watch as a stretcher arrived and local fishermen started to carry the body away. I asked where they were taking him.

‘To the mortuary,’ my mother replied.

‘What’s that?’

‘A house for the dead,’ she said, finally pulling me away towards the Ship Inn. ‘And that’s enough of that topic,’ she added. ‘Don’t let’s talk about it anymore.’ As she made promises of chips and ice cream, I looked at the smoke rising from the blast furnaces of the South Bank steelworks, keeping my thoughts to myself.

I WAS ADOPTED. My origins were a mystery to me. My new parents (Mother was a police officer, while Father was an auctioneer’s manager) collected me from the children’s home when I was a toddler. Great Grandfather was a millionaire, having made his fortune in shipping, and lived in the Great Hall, a giant country home not far from Middlesbrough that required 28 people to run it. My mother and father lived secure in the knowledge that one day it would all be theirs.

My fascination for death only intensified as I grew. Apart from drawing what other people might describe as ‘disturbing’, or at the very least ‘unusual’, pictures of dead bodies in various states of decay, by the time I’d reached my teenage years, I’d lost interest in academia and instead devoted important revision time to reading up on the lives of infamous murderers. When my parents took me to hospital to visit a sick relative, I slipped away as soon as I could to find the mortuary. While most children my age might have preferred to skip through fields of poppies in summer, I delighted in days spent playing among gravestones.

My parents grew sufficiently concerned to take me to see an eminent child psychiatrist called Dr Renwick. Grey haired and ancient, she tried to scare me by telling me exactly what happened during post-mortems. I listened, open mouthed with delight, utterly fascinated as I thought of cranial saws, screw-powered retractors and organs dropping into their appointed buckets. My parents realised the sessions weren’t having the desired effect when I started counting down the days to my next one. Rummaging around dusty second-hand bookshops run by doddery old folk but a cough away from the Grim Reaper themselves, I managed to find books about hangmen, murders and, on one delightful November afternoon, a beautiful illustrated book on human anatomy.

My despairing parents had one last go at curing me of my death obsession by sending me to boarding school. There was no time for death here. In fact there was far too much life as far as I was concerned. The day usually started at 6.30am, when I staggered out onto the quadrangle to join my fellows for a five-kilometre cross-country run. The school had a great sporting tradition, and regardless of capability we were forced onto the rugby field in all weathers. When I wasn’t trying to run out of the way of boys much bigger than I who, heaven knows why, actually enjoyed these activities, I was forced to learn Latin, physics and ancient history. I refused and failed just about every one of my exams. When my last day at this miserable institution finally came, my parents took tea with the house master. Suspicious, I eavesdropped, and the moment I realised they were planning to enrol me for the upper sixth for re-sits, I packed my trunk, collected my tuck box, loaded them in the car and refused to come out.

‘So what are you going to do?’ my mother demanded, not unreasonably. Given there were zero opportunities for sixteen-year-old boys in the death industry, I had to think of something else, and the only thing that came to mind was acting. This was the only subject I had even vaguely enjoyed while at school and so, during the strained drive home, I made promises about drama schools and a career in theatre.

We arrived home to find that Great Grandfather’s heart had given out. Trying desperately to resist the urge to ask my mother if I could see the body, for I could see she was terribly upset, we assembled at the Great Hall to hear the reading of the will. Not one farthing came to my parents. Two years before his death, Great Grandfather had divorced his wife and moved his mistress into the Great Hall. She got everything. The will was, alas, watertight.

So money was suddenly tight. Great Grandfather had been generous enough in life to make financial worries non-existent for his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, but all of us were suddenly out in the cold. I needed to earn my keep so, after a quick run through drama school, I started work as a deputy stage manager at the Flora Robson Playhouse in Newcastle upon Tyne. My short tenure there during the run of Macbeth was perhaps most memorable for its many mishaps. For example, a flushing loo could be regularly heard during soliloquies, and one day, instead of wind sound effects, the Rolling Stones’ ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ was blasted into the stalls during the three witches’ scene. We also made a reckless decision to use real swords and, when our lead actor was hit on the hand during a duel, he yowled in pain and accidentally tossed his own weapon into the audience. I ran down to check that no one had been hurt and was met by the broad smiles of a party of schoolchildren, who denied ever seeing the now missing item.

For the next few years, I worked as a jobbing actor on the repertory circuit before ending up in London, where there seemed to be plenty of work. Unfortunately, after performing in several productions in minor roles, the work started to dry up just as I turned 30, in the long hot summer of 1976.

I spent my dwindling savings drinking wine at The French House in Dean Street. There were usually quite a few famous faces present, and one regular I’d come to know quite well was the true-crime author Edgar Lustgarten, who also presented two crime television shows, Scotland Yard and The Scales of Justice. Whether it was his reminiscences of famous murder cases, or the fact that my own craft was drying up, I know not, but I was suddenly overtaken by the urge to work in a mortuary.

‘Oh goodness!’ Edgar exclaimed when I told him. ‘You don’t want to do that. Mortuaries are dreadful places in which to work – filthy, dark and depressing!’

The following day I set about my quest. I visited fifteen public mortuaries where I was told each time that there were no positions, especially for someone so young. The last mortuary on my list was Southwark, which lay in the shadow of Guy’s Hospital. The superintendent was a sepulchral, hairless and aggressive man called Frank who looked like a cross between Dracula and Igor. He was terrifying but at least he took my details.

‘If you’re that keen, you could try the hospital mortuaries,’ he told me as he closed the door, ‘they always need people.’

My feet were aching but, as determined as ever, I travelled across town to University College Hospital’s mortuary, part of a huge Victorian complex of buildings in Gower Street, a stone’s throw from where my idea started in Soho. To get to the mortuary I had to walk through a garage piled high with vegetables, and then, via a small staircase I passed through a door into a large room with a frosted skylight. Two porcelain slabs stood in the centre of the room; next to the head of both was a small table containing medical implements. Beyond the slabs a series of tiered benches reached up to the high ceiling, their symmetry broken by a sign bearing the legend: ‘From the dead we learn about the living.’

I froze in complete absorption, forgetting all about my aching feet, as if I’d just arrived at the end of a difficult pilgrimage. I was in a mortuary, at last, and it was everything I’d dreamed it would be, even if there were no bodies on display.

‘Good afternoon, young man. May I help you?’

I almost yelled in surprise at the sound of this gruff voice which came from right behind my left ear. I’d been so carried away by finally having found my way into a mortuary that I hadn’t noticed that someone else was in the room. Spinning around, I found myself facing a tall, distinguished-looking man in his sixties, with long grey hair swept over his shoulders, peering down at me through gold spectacles perched right on the end of his nose. He introduced himself as Professor Anthony Smith, who held UCH’s Chair of Pathology.

Hearing the purpose of my visit, Professor Smith smiled. ‘We might have an opening,’ he said. ‘Just head over the road to the Wellington where the technicians are lunching. They’re the ones to talk to.’

Heart racing, I strode to the pub, an old building of dark wood, frosted glass and countless shadowy alcoves.

There were only two customers, both sitting at the bar, both dressed in jacket and jeans, pints of beer before them. I explained I was looking for work in the mortuary and was immediately met with broad smiles. A drink was thrust into my hand and we adjourned to a table where we got properly introduced. The older man, who was tall and was in his late thirties, introduced himself as David, identifying his younger partner as Mark, a chap nearer my own age.

They were friendly and, as I was soon to learn, very popular characters (they were on first name terms with the heads of every department in the hospital). Plus, they weren’t just senior mortuary technicians. David was the chairman of the Guild of Mortuary Administration and Technology while Mark was its national secretary. These were two of the most important men in the mortuary service.

THE BODY, STILL covered with a white sheet, was lying on the porcelain slab. David, wearing a green rubber apron over his shirt and tie, was arranging implements and checking a clipboard. A plastic bucket stood by his booted feet.

My dreams of taking curtain calls at the Royal Court had been replaced with the silent reality of University College Hospital’s mortuary, and I couldn’t have been more excited.

David, intent on his prep, hadn’t yet seen me and, having finished, gently drew back the sheet. I gasped in surprise. I’d been expecting to see the body of an old person but, instead, lying on the white slab was the pale body of a beautiful teenage Japanese girl with long black hair.

David looked up, saw me and waved me in. ‘The best way to approach this job,’ he said quietly, with a reassuring smile, ‘is with an analytical mind. The body is a vessel, nothing more, the person who occupied it has long gone.’