Freddie had obviously made an effort to scrub up after his labours, but had missed a couple of spots of blood on his cheek. Max tried his best to ignore them.
‘I don’t know how you do it.’
‘It’s what I trained for,’ shrugged Freddie.
‘Really? This?’
Freddie smiled weakly. ‘Well, not quite this.’ He fished a lighter and a packet of Craven A’s from his pocket. ‘Sometimes I wish they’d just invade, then it would all stop.’
‘If it stops here, it just gets worse somewhere else.’
‘I suppose.’
They all knew the reasoning; there was no point in going over it again.
‘Do you want to get some air?’ asked Max.
‘No, let’s get it over with.’ Freddie held out the packet of cigarettes.
Max raised his hand, declining the offer. ‘I’ve just put one out.’
‘Take one,’ said Freddie. ‘For the smell.’
Max had been in hospitals before, but only ever to visit wounded friends. Those airy, spotless wards with their ordered rows of beds and their gruff, thick-ankled nurses had nothing in common with the mortuary of the Central Hospital.
It occupied a run of vast and gloomy ground-floor rooms. Their windows were partially shuttered, allowing in just enough light to make identification possible. Corpses carpeted the tiled floors. Some of the bodies were covered, others not, and some weren’t bodies at all.
‘We’re out of blankets, I’m afraid,’ said Freddie, as they picked their way through the first room. He might just as well have been apologizing to a house guest, and his matter-of-factness went some way towards calming Max’s nerves. An orderly in what must once have been a white coat was mopping the floor. He was young; too young, you couldn’t help thinking, to be exposed to such sights. His tin pail screeched in protest as he manoeuvred it around the floor with the mop. It was the only sound. The stench was indescribable.
The second room was almost as large, and the first thing Max noticed was a pile of limbs stacked up in the corner like so much firewood. The next thing he noticed was a Maltese man emptying the contents of his stomach on to the floor. He was being held around the shoulders by a ragged old fellow in a threadbare suit emitting deep and sonorous sobs. They had evidently just identified the body at their feet, and an orderly looked on awkwardly, clipboard poised to register the details.
It was a pathetic sight, upsetting—two broken men bent over a broken body—and Max was relieved when Freddie led him through double swing-doors out of the charnel house and into a long corridor.
‘There are so many.’
‘It’s been a bad week. And coffins are hard to come by, so they lie here for days, backing up.’
‘Some of them are, well, remarkably intact.’
‘Blast victims, snuffed out by the shock wave. Although it often scalps them.’
Their destination was a small room at the far end of the corridor. Aside from a wooden desk in the corner, the room was empty. Max’s relief was short-lived, though; he hadn’t spotted the gurney pushed up against the wall behind the door. A body lay on it—a woman, judging from the bare feet poking out from beneath the piece of tarpaulin which covered her.
‘This is what you wanted to show me?’
‘She was found yesterday morning in Marsa, lying in the street.’ He reached for the tarpaulin.
‘Freddie, I’m not sure I…’ He trailed off.
‘There are some wounds, but I’ve cleaned them up.’
‘What’s this all about? I don’t understand.’
‘You will.’
‘Try me now.’
He was already steeling himself against the long walk back past the silent ranks of damaged and dismembered corpses; the thought of scrutinizing one of them up close filled him with alarm and horror.
Freddie didn’t release the tarpaulin. ‘Max, you’re my friend, and I don’t know who else to tell.’
They looked at each other in silence. Then Max nodded and Freddie folded back the tarpaulin.
The girl was young, maybe eighteen or nineteen, with an innocent beauty which even the cold pallor of death couldn’t erase. Her hair was long, straight, black as bitumen, and it framed an oval face which descended to an elfin chin. Her lips were large and surprisingly red. Lipstick, he realized. Which was odd. It was in short supply, and not many Maltese girls wore it at the best of times.
Freddie tilted her head to the right and gently drew back her hair. A raw and ragged gash ran from beneath her ear towards her collar bone, widening as it went.
‘Christ…’
Freddie’s hand delved beneath the tarpaulin and produced a jagged shard of metal, twisted and razor-edged. ‘Ack-ack shrapnel. It was still in her when she was brought in.’
It was a common cause of injuries and deaths, the lethal hail of metal dropping back to earth from exploding artillery shells. You could hear the splinters tinkling merrily in the streets and on the rooftops whenever a raid was on, a deceptively harmless sound.
‘She bled to death?’
‘It looks that way.’
‘So?’
Freddie hesitated. ‘I think it was made to look that way.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean these…and these.’
Freddie raised her wrists in turn. The marks were faint, easy to miss.
‘Rope burns…?’
‘Her hands weren’t bound when she was found. And look at her nails.’
They were long, painted red, and several of them were cracked or broken.
‘She fought back. There’s also some bruising around her shoulder and her thighs. Also her labia.’
What a horrible word, it struck Max, enough to extinguish all thoughts of carnality. It was about all he could think as he struggled to take in what Freddie was telling him.
‘You think she was violated?’
‘I know she was violated. And probably by the same man who then killed her.’
‘Freddie, come on, that’s a leap too far.’
‘She’s not the first.’
‘What?’
‘There have been others, two others I’ve seen since the beginning of the year. Not like this, not exactly. One had been crushed by falling masonry, the other one had drowned.’
‘Drowned?’
There were many ways to die on Malta, but drowning wasn’t the first that sprang to mind, certainly not since the beaches had been wired off against invasion.
‘She fell into a collapsed cistern walking home in the dark. At least, that’s the way it looked. Both were sherry queens from the Gut.’
‘Sherry queens’ was Service slang for the Maltese dance hostesses who worked the bars and bawdy music halls which infested the lower end of Strait Street in Valletta, a disreputable quarter dubbed the Gut.