Sam 7, p.34
SAM 7, page 34
‘We’ve been in it since the 1930s,’ said Denman. ‘There’s a lot at stake in an air crash and the identification and repatriation of the dead is quite a specialized business.’ He gestured towards the coffins. ‘Different countries have different regulations. Victims always have to be in zinc-lined caskets under IATA regulations, but the Italians insist on one-and-a-half-inch thick timber with dovetailed joints as well. By knowing the rules we save the families a lot of agony and delay and they never even see a bill. The insurers pay us.’ Denman’s tone became brisker. ‘We mustn’t waste time. These three men who could be Maier were all without their jackets – it must have been warm in the aircraft – so we’ve no wallets, passports or credit cards to help us. Maier’s dental records haven’t landed yet either. However, there was an Israeli banknote in the trouser hip pocket of one. If I can talk to the widow, I can possibly establish identity for certain. I just need a few minutes longer on the characteristics.’
‘I’ll hang on,’ said Sturgess. He was slowly becoming acclimatized to this clinically macabre scene. Fiercely bright lights hung on wires between the tent poles and there was a continual low whirring throb from air conditioning units, supported on makeshift stands against the tent’s window openings. For a moment he watched the embalming process. Two men appeared to be draining the blood from a corpse. Hesitantly he asked one what was going on.
‘Simple, really,’ said the white-coated senior embalmer, who spoke with the clipped assurance of a demonstrator in a laboratory. ‘Takes about an hour and a half. First we remove the corrupt parts. The blood, that’s a corrupt part. Drain it out. Inject the arteries with fluid, like my friend is doing.’ He pointed at a pair of five-gallon plastic containers on an adjacent container. ‘Inject the solution of formalin. Coloured pink, that is, to avoid confusion with other fluids. Now this,’ he went on, picking up a large hypodermic, ‘this fluid is the strong stuff for the body cavities. This we will inject into the thorax and abdomen.’ He jabbed the long thick needle towards the rib cage of the corpse, and Sturgess involuntarily shuddered. ‘These fluids,’ the man continued firmly, ‘solidify the body. Their internal application preserves it for an indefinite duration of time.’
‘Completely different technique from the ancient Egyptians’, if you’re interested,’ cut in Denman’s voice. ‘They practised external embalming.’
‘More effective, this is,’ continued the embalmer stoutly.
Sturgess had a sudden vision of him, off duty, studying Egyptian mummies in the British Museum.
‘Otherwise we’d have to fix up refrigeration until the Coroner releases the bodies, which could be weeks. Even in a city it would be hard to find a cold store.’
‘Wouldn’t want to know, would they, sir?’ responded the embalmer loyally.
‘Come on,’ said Denman abruptly, ‘let’s get Mrs Maier over with. Thank you, Mr Jones.’ As they walked out he added, ‘You might not think it, but coping with the relatives is by far the trickiest part. That’s why Mr Geoffrey has gone to the States. Its not so easy to make rules for the living.’
Sturgess noted that he referred to the managing director by his Christian name, prefaced by ‘Mr’. That was one hallmark of a contented, traditional family firm, even in a union-dominated Britain. Together they went to fetch Connie.
Loath though she was to admit it, Connie felt terrible waiting in the car. No amount of determined hope could eradicate the feeling that she had reached the end of her search. The military trucks, parked in a line near the far tent, the police cars and the ominously familiar plain vans, all contributed to undermining what little confidence she had left. Ben had narrowly escaped death when his jeep ran over a mine in the 1967 war. He was a reserve lieutenant and the war had erupted within weeks of his graduating from New York University and returning home. She remembered a letter he wrote describing the incident, joking about junior lieutenants being the most expendable rank in the army, and that being the obvious reason for his survival. Now, unaccountably, she felt that this alien barracks must have claimed him. For some moments she had a clear vision of Ben during these earlier periods of his life, although she had not witnessed them. She also saw herself going through the tortuous journeying that had brought her to this place, as if observing another person. Then the illusion faded and she sharply told herself to fight off the apprehension and the tiredness for a little longer.
By the time Sturgess came back to the car with Denman she was clear-headed again. But Allom held her arm as they led her to a room in the barrack block that had been allocated for interviewing.
Seeing the strain of worry in her face, Denman made his questions gentle, delicately drawing her out. She described the suits she knew Ben had packed for his trip, his shoes, his ties. All the time Denman avoided being specific, knowing the effects of auto-suggestion could have. If you showed a widow a shattered watch, the implication was that it had belonged to her husband and she would collapse in tears; only later admitting that she had never seen it before and assumed it had been acquired during the trip. When he had built up a picture of Ben’s possessions, Denman turned to his health. Had he been ill recently?
‘He had mild bronchitis last week.’ Connie forced herself to think clinically about her husband, something she had never done before. ‘He had scars on his right knee and elbow. Those were from 1967. His blood group was A positive.’ Desperately she tried to recall such of her husband’s ailments as might have left traces that an autopsy would reveal. ‘He was absurdly fit, despite all the deskwork.’ Then suddenly the depersonalization began again. Ben lay before her, naked, and she was examining him, detached, professional. In a distant voice she continued, ‘He had curly hair on his chest, he was circumcised, of course, the knee scars I mentioned.’ She could see nothing on his feet. Mentally she rolled him over. ‘A lesion on the right shoulder, a mole . . .’ Her head was swimming. What was she doing, what was she talking about? She gazed at the tiny brown mole on his back, so familiar, somehow so personal. The acute visual image dissolved. Her voice faltered and she stopped, near to tears. Allom reached out and held her hand.
‘I think you have told me enough, Mrs Maier,’ said Denman quickly, glancing at his notes. He would have to go back to check, because he had deliberately left the official autopsy report in the mortuary rather than risk her catching sight of it, but he was already certain. Mild bronchitis tallied with the mucus found in the respiratory tract; he recalled the scar on the shoulder; the clothing fitted some she had described. He rose to leave.
‘Wait,’ said Connie urgently. ‘I forgot. There was the gold ring I gave him, inscribed with our initials inside. He wore it on the second finger of his left hand. He never took it off. Never.’
Denman stopped short, embarrassed. When Maier’s possessions were eventually handed over she would want the ring. It would not be among them, and for a good reason. He could save a lot of emotional upset by explaining its absence now.
‘I’m afraid there is no trace of a ring. Unfortunately the valuables were removed from some of the victims by police after the crash. It must have been accidentally lost. There was frightful confusion on the station.’
It sounded a lame excuse. He hoped she would accept it, and he was carefully avoiding any mention of viewing the corpse.
1 suppose you will know it’s Ben anyway,’ she said fighting back tears.
‘Connie,’ said Allom, still holding her hand, leaning forward beside her and turning his head to look her squarely in the eyes. ‘Connie, my dear, there will be no purpose in your seeing Ben. You above all people know that. You, a doctor and a pathologist yourself.’
He felt her hand relax a little, as if in relief.
‘You could be right, Jakov. I think you’re right. Ben wasn’t like other people. I couldn’t treat him as a . . . as an object. You go. If someone will take me back to the car, I’ll just wait.’
‘When I return I myself do wish to see the body.’ said Allom.
Denman and Sturgess exchanged glances.
‘He has the commander’s permission,’ said Sturgess.
‘If you absolutely insist,’ said Denman to Allom, ‘then I will have the body made available.’
‘I do insist,’ said Allom, with quiet forcefulness.
Some ten minutes later the three men stood in a screened-off part of the tent, gazing at the corpse. Its face and legs were seriously disfigured and white bandages had been hastily wrapped over most of the forehead and over the left hand and wrist.
‘Why those,’ asked Allom, ‘when he is dead?’
‘We try to lessen the shock of seeing the worst injuries.’
‘It is Maier. I have no doubt.’ Allom’s tone was hard. There was the same toughness about his manner which Sturgess had observed before. ‘Remove the bandages on the wrist, please.’
There could be no mistaking that this was an order. Sturgess nodded assent and the assistant who had brought the body reluctantly obeyed. Slowly he unwound the fabric, the men watching in silence. As it came free Sturgess saw with horror that much of the hand had been violently torn off, completely wrenching away two fingers. Tendons and scraps of flesh hung from what had been the back of the hand.
‘Now you understand about the ‘ring,’ said Denman coldly. He had tried to shield them from this unpleasantness and he was angry at being overruled.
‘Now I understand about several things,’ said Allom evenly.
10
The sewer foreman prised up a manhole cover in the Victoria Station forecourt and prepared to descend the sixteen-foot shaft that led to the labyrinth of brick lined tunnels beneath the city. He was going to check that the remnants of the aircraft’s kerosene, washed down into the drains by the Fire Brigade, had dispersed. It ought to have run through the local sewers into the main sewer under Wilton Road, a wide river of effluent, pump driven, which flowed at thirty knots to an outfall miles away on the Thames estuary. The river authorities had been warned, although by the time it reached the Thames the fuel would be so thinned out as to constitute no danger. Here, under Westminster, it could possibly catch fire, as it had briefly soon after the crash.
A small crowd of sightseers watched from behind the police barriers as the foreman and his two maintenance men put on overalls and thigh-length waders. The two crew laid down a metal frame bearing two large black oxygen bottles and began unreeling a rubber pipe as the foreman clamped his blue safety helmet on his head, with an electric torch clipped to the front of it over his forehead. Finally he connected a celluloid fronted mask to the oxygen pipe. One of the other men did the same. The third would stay above ground to control the oxygen and summon help if necessary. Although their only communication would be a thin line that could be jerked as a distress signal, he had a direct radio link to the engineer’s department in the City Hall.
‘Ready, Joe?’ asked the foreman of the older, leather-faced veteran accompanying him.
Joe grinned behind his mask and took the emergency line. The foreman lowered himself into the square hole and clambered down, his studded soles grating on the rusty iron rungs set in the brickwork. At the bottom he paused, tightened a length of cotton waste that he wound like a scarf round his neck, and stooped low to enter the tunnel.
There are 230 miles of sewers under the streets of Westminster, mostly constructed in the mid-nineteenth century, all meticulously brick lined. They link with other boroughs’ systems and you can walk through to Hampstead, if you know the way.
With the light from his torch wavering on the brickwork, the foreman left the shaft and entered the sewer. Its ceiling was arched, like a church window, and his hunched shoulders occasionally brushed the sides, which were moist and mildewy. The tunnel stretched away into darkness, distant sounds echoing from it, distorted and mysterious. The floor was concave and he walked along the centre, his boots splashing in the sewage and squelching on soft lumps of muck. The effluent was mostly water – bathwater, washing-up water, rainwater – and it diluted most other things except fat and some chemicals. He knew that when he came below the fish restaurant on the corner of Terminus Place there would be chunks of dirty white cooking fat sticking to the sides, while the fumes from the chemicals that the dry-cleaner’s shop discharged would be acrid and choking.
After a few feet the foreman paused. He could hear the low throbbing of a pump. Suddenly a torrent of clear water pulsed out of a wide pipe in the side of the brickwork ahead of him and cascaded down the sewer in a torrent. It was icy cold water from a subterranean stream, which seeped into the Victoria underground station and was collected by pumps and blown out in a two-minute spasm every ten minutes. The foreman waded on through it, sticking his elbows out sideways to help his balance. He passed slowly around a corner and on to the junction with the bigger five-foot-six-inch-high sewer underneath Wilton Road. It was a relief to be able to stretch up nearly to his full height. He paused, removing the torch from his helmet and flashing it around. Three rats were caught in the beam and scurried away. There were signs of burning high up on the brickwork here, where the kerosene had flared up on Thursday. But the flow carried no signs of the fuel now. Nor could he smell kerosene vapour, or anything more than the usual rank odour of the tunnels.
‘Seems clear enough, Joe,’ he said over his shoulder to his assistant. ‘You check left a few yards and I’ll go right. Remember that investigator asked us to keep an eye open for debris too.’
The foreman nodded and moved into the main sewer to let the older man past. They separated briefly. Five yards further on the foreman almost stumbled as he felt something hard beneath his boot. Investigation revealed a shard of thin metal. The foreman shook the muck off it, shoved it in his pocket and trudged on. A moment later he trod on another object. Steadying himself he explored for whatever it was with one foot, careful lest he overbalanced, then reached down, feeling in the water with his rubber-gloved right hand. His fingers touched another piece of metal. He gripped it and slowly pulled it out. With his free hand he shone the torch on his find and whistled in surprise. Dripping slime was a handcuff with a few inches of broken chain hanging from it.
‘Joe,’ he called, his voice echoing into the darkness. ‘Come and have a look-see here.’
For reasons of safety sewermen never stray beyond shouting distance from each other. Joe turned back, the water swishing against his boots as he walked.
‘Well, I’m jiggered,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen a lot of odd things down here, but never handcuffs. It’ll be Charles I’s head next.’
On the way back the foreman washed their find in the gush of water from the underground station. Finally in the strong daylight at street level they examined it more closely.
‘Anything peculiar strike you about that?’ asked old Joe quizzically, a grin lurking on his lined face.
‘Can’t say it does,’ said the foreman. The handcuff was somehow less bulky than ones he had seen in films, but otherwise. . . . ‘Needed some force to snap that chain,’ he suggested. ‘Whoever broke it must have been a hefty chap.’
Joe’s grin surfaced, wide and mischievous, revealing tobacco-brown teeth.
‘You’ve missed the point, guv.’ He took the handcuff and pulled at it. ‘See. Locked tight. Shut like a clam. The point is where’s your hefty friend’s hand gone? Or was he Houdini?’
The foreman paled.
‘I hadn’t thought of that. Here, we’d better fetch a copper.’
Ten miles south of Victoria the regional officials of British Rail were holding an emergency meeting at their headquarters, Southern House, a modern office block in Croydon. With no secretaries or staff around, the building seemed lifeless and strange. A commissionaire, however, did duty on Saturdays and he had fetched beer and sandwiches for the gathering, which included Chief Superintendent Chisholm. The last time Chisholm had been called on to advise such a conference was after the Hither Green derailment in 1967.
‘To sum up,’ the divisional civil engineer was saying, ‘it’ll be a good six to seven weeks before temporary repairs to the roof and platforms are complete.’
The strong voice of the planning manager cut in.
‘Gentlemen,’ he demanded. The ‘important question is, can we run a full service again on Monday?’
There was a general murmur as people deliberated snags.
‘If the Chatham side concourse and booking halls are clear, yes,’ said the traffic manager.
‘Will they be, Chief Superintendent?’
Chisholm had prepared himself for this question.
‘We can move the lost property to Waterloo. It ought to go there anyway. We can screen off the arch between the two sides and the underground access to the Brighton side.’
‘That’s settled then.’
‘How about the long term?’ demanded the engineer. ‘I can’t see repairs costing less than a million pounds, one and a half million possibly. At that rate we might as well go the whole hog.’
There was a buzz of interest round the table. Everyone knew what he was referring to. It was the major development plan, an ambitious scheme for a new hotel, offices and a conference centre over the platforms. It was a way of turning the immensely valuable land on which Victoria stood into more of a revenue-yielding asset. The plans had been shelved because of the government’s refusal to invest the capital. Instead a ‘facelift’ had been finished in 1975 which improved the station interior without in any way adding to its revenue earning potential. It had been a half-hearted political compromise of the sort that bedevilled the managers of all Britain’s nationalized industries. Now the DC-10 accident had seriously damaged the roof, the key to redevelopment above the tracks.
‘This crash could be a godsend,’ argued the engineer.
‘You’re assuming the airliner’s insurers will pay,’ observed the planning manager, a trifle caustically. British Rail carries no external insurance; it underwrites its own risks.
‘Even if they don’t,’ went on the engineer doggedly, ‘what about the government? We would never have got the facelift if the IRA hadn’t blown up the booking office. Let’s ask them now, before we’ve made too much progress with repairs.’
