morgue
By josiedog
- 740 reads
And so at nine o’clock the next morning a tall gentleman with odd sticky-up black hair dragged a scruffy looking undernourished young lad up to the steps of the Whitechapel morgue, where there were already the usual gatherings: weeping relatives, bored legal reps, and coppers, both uniformed and plainclothes, detached from proceedings and watching the clock.
There was also a largish flock of other so-called interested parties who’s intentions one could never quite suss, the shadowy types who had a need to know: were the dead really dead, and was it who they all said it was.
There was usually a sum of money involved.
“This is no place to hover” said Jarrick, eying this moody collective, and he seized Daniel by the arm and shoved him up the four wide grey stone steps and pushed him through the large double doors.
Daniel expected darkness and cobwebs, the dust of the dead clogging the corners, at least a couple of rats for starters.
Instead he found himself standing in a gleaming, white-tiled corridor, a bit like the hospital where his mum ended up after the machine-loom had snapped her back and legs. That place had been filthy – you could write your name on the walls if you knew how to spell it. And it had smelled. Sickly sweet. Rotten.
By rights, reckoned Daniel, this place should be stinkier, what with all the dead bodies.
And this place did smell. But not the London usual, it was something pernicious, intrusively clean and chemical.
Jarrick straightened his wig, then reapplied his grip and marched Daniel down the corridor, past wide metal cell-like doors to the start of a wide stone staircase leading down under.
“Know your way around, then?” said Daniel, out the side of his mouth, wary of shiny-tile acoustics.
“No,” said Jarrick, also out the corner of his mouth, “but don’t tell anyone.”
And down they went, to where the bodies lay.
Daniel was on the lookout for some ghoulish pale-skinned mortician-creature, greasy black hair hanging over his collar, a stoop and a piggy eye.
But waiting round the first corner was a ruddy-faced barrel of a man, his flyaway white hair yellowing as it crept round his chops and flared out in an impressive walrus moustache.
He smiled at the pair of them, “I heard your approach.”
Jarrick flashed the brass stick, a little too keen in Daniel’s opinion.
The mortician’s smiled weakened.
“How can I help you officer?” he said, a touch wearily, it seemed, to Daniel’s ears.
Jarrick breezed in: “We’ve come to view the personage who was murdered up Commercial Street, in the early hours of.”
The large, moustachioed mortician looked down at Daniel, who was still gripped firmly by Jarrick, and raised a quizzical eyebrow
“Here’s here for the possible recognising and thereby placing of the deceased, at a certain time and certain place, as it were,” Jarrick informed the mortician.
“A witness, then?”
“That’ll be it.”
But the mortician didn’t move. He didn’t look too impressed, it seemed, to Daniel.
“You gonna show us then?” asked Jarrick.
The mortician finally turned and pushed through the doors, and the pair followed him in.
Lined out in front of them was a row of six solid concrete slabs mushrooming out of the tiled floor, all clean and bare except for the end one. A body lay across it. Daniel clocked its hobnails.
“That’s not him,” said the mortician, “we’ve got him in a drawer.”
He led them past the slabs and the fresh-looking corpse to the three iron doors, as high as the ceiling, which made up the back wall.
These are the fresh ones,” said the mortician, and he grabbed one of the thick metal bars that served as handles, and pulled open the middle door.
It groaned, swung slowly but smoothly open, revealing a stack of three racks, two bodies on each, all covered with a white sheet.
“They look like loaves in an oven,” remarked Daniel.
“Shut up,” snapped Jarrick, and cuffed him round the back of the head for effect. Daniel swallowed his curse and hung his head.
The mortician, uninterested in this charade, yanked out a middle corpse. It slid out just past Daniel’s chin. The cloth smelled of the same offensive cleanliness that pervaded the rest of the awful gaff.
“Here he is; he’s been in and out like a docker’s cock,” said the mortician.
“Uniform?” enquired Inspector Jarrick.
“And the rest. We’ve had some right well-to do chappies come to have a look. Some nasty looking types, and some bloody odd ones too. Popular chap it seems. Who was he, then?”
“Can’t tell you that,” said Jarrick, “police business. Be good a man. Pull his sheet off.”
The mortician whipped it away.
And there he lay with his ginger whiskers and expensive clobber: the man that Daniel had watched get rolled out of the carpet at Irish’s. The man the bastards had poisoned.
He looked a bit pale.
And there on his forehead was the Star of David, carved into the flesh. The crust of blood had been swabbed away, so it looked raw and raised up, dark pink and angry against the surrounding bluey-white flesh.
It only took a second for Daniel to have seen enough, but Jarrick, warming to his role with more enthusiasm than professionalism, grabbed him by the arm again and pushed him up close to the corpse, held him there for a moment, then tugged him away.
Even the mortician looked bemused.
“Cheers,” chirped Jarrick, in an unpolicemanlike way, sensing it was time to cut and run, and he turned to head back out, dragging Daniel with him.
Daniel had done well to keep his mouth shut throughout all the pushing and pulling, but now, as Jarrick yanked him away, he turned awkwardly, tripped, and slid over the tiles, letting slip a “Fuck’s sake!” as his head nearly connected with them.
The mortician showed an interest: he looked to Jarrick, to see how this strange-looking detective would react to such insolence from his detainee.
Jarrick, realising it was on him to perform, yanked Daniel back up and snarled: “Any more lip and I’ll split it for ya,”
Daniel just looked straight at the mortician and said: “Who the fuck is that?”
The mortician gawped.
Jarrick searched for something official-sounding to say, but Daniel tugged him over and pointed behind the last slab.
Jarrick leaned over to peer behind it. The mortician trundled over to see for himself.
And they saw what Daniel had seen as his head had swished an inch above the tiles. He’d found himself staring straight into the face of just what a mortician should look like; pale as a corpse, lank black hair, sunken eyes. All present and correct, and all on a lad about Jarrick’s age, all folded up in a hideaway heap behind the slab.
“He’s one of mine,” sighed the large mortician,
“Get up Smethwick.”
The cadaverous Smethwick pulled himself upright – he went up quite a way, a good six foot – and scowled through his black hair at the dodgy detective and his captive.
“What are you doing down there, Smethwick?”
Smethwick’s scowl was so hateful that Daniel wondered if he might have met him before, in unfortunate circumstances.
If it was Jarrick he recognised, the game was up.
But the ghoul named Smethwick kept his tongue. It was clearly an unprecedented insubordination: the mortician’s features reddened, his moustache twitched feverishly, but before he could find his words, Smethwick turned and dashed out the doors, leaving Jarrick, Daniel and the mortician exchanging glances.
Jarrick and Daniel, as one, decided at that moment it would be prudent to also fuck off out of it, and they left the mortician gawping at their receding backs as they too dashed through the swinging doors and headed for the steps.
But standing on the first couple was a finely turned-out entourage, all pressed velvet and high-cut mudless boots. A morgue-like pallor clung to every one of them; they wouldn’t go amiss stretched out on one of the slabs.
Jarrick and Daniel pulled up short at the sight. Daniel expected one to be Rathbone, they had his look , but he wasn’t present. The boy counted five of them, six if you included the oddball Smethwick, who was standing, in mid conspire as it were, in the midst of this gathering.
Smethwick was glaring at them, and pointing, and two of his ill-looking posh acquaintances joined him in staring at Jarrick and Daniel.
The others’ attention, however, was drawn upwards: behind them on the steps was another group; they matched their apparent adversaries in the expense of their clothes, but there was colour in their garb, and in their faces, and they were glaring down fiercely upon this nearer entourage
“Heads down boy,” said Jarrick, once again employing the side of his mouth, “lets get out, it don’t look good.”
Daniel didn’t need persuading; there was something creepy about this bunch – they weren’t the law, and he’d put a shilling on them not being the grieving family.
They marched up through the crossfire of needle stares, keeping their own eyes fixed on the top step and beyond. And Smethwick was making sure their passing was well noted: the five mystery visitors followed his stare, and watched the pair gallop up the stairs.
As they passed this second group, Daniel found his way barred by a tip of a cane, held at his chest by a brown suited gentleman. Daniel turned to face him.
The gentleman said nothing but looked upon him with close scrutiny. Not cold as Rathbone had been, more a natural curiosity as to whom this boy was.
At the sound of the pale looking fellows clambering back up the stairs, the man removed his cane, and Daniel was up and away.
They legged it down the white-tiled corridor and out through the last doors on to the outside steps.
Two great lumps in bowler hats were waiting on either side.
That was enough for Daniel; he didn’t look twice, but went from half-disguised trot to full-on pelt and fled down the Commercial Road.
He was overtaken a little way down by the longer-legged Jarrick, who found the time to turn and shout “It’s alright Danny boy, they ain’t coming after ya,” as he kept on going down the Commercial Road
- Log in to post comments