Читать книгу Head of State: The Bestselling Brexit Thriller - Andrew Marr, Andrew Marr - Страница 26

Two figures lay in adjoining frosty cubicles, awaiting the folding steel tables on small rubber wheels. One was the headless and handless body of the sixty-ish man recovered from the Thames, now cleaned of mud and slime. The other was the broken but otherwise intact body of the twenty-eight-year-old newspaper reporter Lucien McBryde, by now also naked. That the latter had been given the task of investigating the former was something nobody present could know.

The mortuary was a long, low building with a high brick wall and an electric steel gate, lacking any sign or distinguishing number. Not far from the fashionable Chelsea Harbour, and opposite a bland international hotel, it was the designated holding place for central London’s sufferers of violent death. Here had come the torn victims of the 7/7 bombings, the possibly murdered, the certainly murdered, the suicides, and the children who had killed and then been killed in the gang wars of Brixton and Hammersmith.

Locals knew about the place, and noticed the unmarked vans and ambulances that regularly passed through its gates; but to most Londoners it was a blank, a built-up vacancy in an anonymous triangle of lost real estate. Google Maps gave it no description; on Streetview there was only a blurred strip of brick wall and a metal gate. It was, however prime development land, and developers had had their eyes on the site for years. As one local estate agent put it, ‘Leaving a bit of juicy riverfront like that to cadavers rather than living punters is pure insanity. It isn’t English.’

On the other side of the wall, once a call had opened the gate, there was generous space for parking and then a small office – velour chairs, a dusty rubber plant, two ancient computers, a calendar with pictures of fat naked women – staffed by an unshaven, exhausted-looking man and a tired secretary. Behind it, corridors with photographs of English seaside towns led to heavy doors and thick plastic curtains. Beyond these, the atmosphere under the strip lights was both chilly and stuffy, with the vinegar smell of formaldehyde not quite hiding something sweeter. Porters moved the bodies from cold storage to the cement-floored rooms where the autopsies took place, and then sluiced down the fluids after the coroners, the police and the pathologists had done their jobs and left.

What kind of people sought such work? Not bad people, necessarily. Rather, those who combined a yearning for quiet financial security with flickers of a gothic sensibility. Graveyard humour didn’t stop with Shakespeare. Famous corpses sometimes found themselves decorated with lipstick or stick-on noses before the mortuary closed for the night. At Christmas, a certain amount of inappropriate tinsel was not unknown. There had been one near-scandal, when relatives from the Indian subcontinent turned up unexpectedly to find a steel tycoon dressed in women’s stockings. Lucien McBryde’s slender and remarkably long penis had been the source of much comment today; but he had not been tampered with.

Had the Thames body and the investigative journalist been able to, they would surely have turned and gaped at one another, surprised by their clammy propinquity – wondering who would show up next, disturbed by the thought of what the white-trousered menials might leave as a goodnight gift. But as one of them had a broken neck and the other was missing his head, they could exchange no such look.