I enjoyed my job – all of it, even if it did include a bit of death.
My first dead body showed up on my second day on the streets. It was a cold, crisp early day in January and my tutor, PC Joe Gardiner, walked me along one of the busiest roads in the East End.
Traffic was building up. I took each step with trepidation, remembering the photo albums we’d seen at training school of fatal traffic accidents, murders and accidental deaths. We passed two of my fellow probationers stopping vehicles driving in the bus lane and I wished I could join them.
As we made our way up the main road I saw what looked like a bundle of rags up ahead by the kerbside. I felt giddy. This was it.
A few steps closer.
Another.
I saw it. Him. The body. A tramp. A dead person.
The world was going about its business, ignoring, or not seeing, the man frozen to the ground. PC Gardiner and I stood looking down at him.
‘What are you waiting for?’ Joe said.
I looked at Joe. Looked at the tramp. I felt the weight of my policewoman’s hat on my head. I didn’t know what to do, what to say. I was a fraud. I wasn’t qualified to deal with dead bodies. I wanted to run.
I took a deep breath and crouched down, the hem of my skirt skimming the icy pavement. My stocking-clad legs were cold, as cold as the end of my nose and the tips of my toes in my polished black flat shoes, not yet scuffed by life. Or death.
I leant forward and could hear the sounds of traffic driving by, rattling engines and belching exhaust fumes. I looked at the man’s face. Icy dewdrops had frozen on his white beard. He had frost in his eyebrows and on his eyelashes. A smattering of frosty spider web had settled in his dirty grey hair.
I pulled off my gloves and bent closer to feel for a pulse in his neck. I knew I wouldn’t find one. There was something about his eyes. Glassy, non-seeing, half-open. The death stare.
He was a wizened old tramp with the stench of dirt and stale alcohol that wafted up my nose with my first smell of death. I touched the poor fibre of his clothing. Thin. So very cold. And old. Like his body. He might snap if we moved him. His face was white and purple and I wasn’t sure whether it was bruising or lividity. He was half-curled, almost but not quite foetal.
‘He’s definitely dead,’ I said.
‘You the doctor now, Ash?’ asked Joe.
‘Hmm. No.’ I thought about it. ‘Do we call the doctor? Or do we need an ambulance?’
‘An ambulance is for the living. Does he look like he’s just died? Can we save him? You want to give him the kiss of life?’
I gulped, repulsed, embarrassed. ‘No. No, I don’t think so. But … I’ve never seen a dead body. How can I tell?’
Joe softened his tone. ‘He’s not warm. He’s covered in frost. Okay, that could happen when he’s asleep but there’s no sign of life, no pulse and he looks like he’s been here for some time.’ He waved a gloved finger over the man’s face. ‘He’s long dead.’
Joe called for the divisional surgeon, who wasn’t a surgeon at all but a GP who was on call for the police and the only one who could officially pronounce life extinct. Each district had on-call doctors who worked on a rota basis and topped up their salary working for the police. Today they’re known as Force Medical Examiners, or the FME. Ordinarily, we would call a deceased’s own doctor, but we didn’t know this man, or who his doctor was.
Scenes of Crime Officers (SOCO) only attended suspicious deaths or suicides, as would CID, so the rest was up to us, the uniform shift. I had to draw a sketch plan of where we’d found the body. I made a note of his clothing. We had to search the body and seize anything of value. In this case, there was nothing but small change. No wallet. No identification. Nothing.
Then we had to wait. And wait. And wait. The doctor came and pronounced life extinct, then the undertaker finally came to collect the body to transfer it to the mortuary. There was no point taking him to A&E.
Back at the station, PC Gardiner gave me the sudden death forms that needed completing for the coroner. My Girl Guide skills came in handy when one of the questions asked which direction the body faced. North-west.
‘Fax it to the Coroner’s Office,’ Joe said. ‘And be on standby for the post-mortem.’
Post-mortem. When I’d woken up that morning the last thing on my mind was a post-mortem. I hadn’t thought about dead bodies. My head was full of chasing suspects, catching burglars, sorting out a lovers’ tiff, my own romantic ideals. I’d never imagined I would be picking up a dead tramp by the side of the road.
Two o’clock that afternoon when I should have been clocking off duty, I stood by a metal trolley in the mortuary looking at the naked body of our unknown vagrant, the stench of death firmly entrenched in my nose and in my head. Today, I know that smell anywhere and can magic it up on a whim. You never forget.
The body of a very large man lay on the gurney next to our tramp. He’d been dragged beneath a bus for a hundred yards or more. Most of his skin was missing and the body looked black.
An old lady lay on the third trolley up. She’d had her post-mortem and her chest was stitched up in a ‘y’ shape. She was waiting to be put into the fridge before being taken to the undertaker.
If all of this shocked me, I wasn’t prepared for the post-mortem itself. I didn’t faint, I wasn’t sick, but it was unlike anything I’d anticipated. It’s not nice, not pleasant, but it is fascinating. And for the sake of the queasy, I’m not going to detail it.
Our tramp had frozen to death. Hypothermia. Such a sad way to die, lonely and cold and hungry. His last meal had been some chips about twelve hours before he’d been found.
I did cry a tear for him when our efforts to find out who he was failed. His fingerprints were not on the system and he wasn’t known to police. He wasn’t a regular vagrant around our area, so we sent a headshot to all the stations in central London. They failed to recognise him too, even though he’d obviously lived on the streets for some time. We checked and re-checked missing persons records to no avail. The local paper published his photograph and wrote an article about how he was found but still nobody came forward to claim him. Six months later, the council informed us he’d be given a pauper’s funeral.
Who was he and where was his family? What had he done with his life? How and why had he ended up on the streets? When had he given up? Why? All of these questions remain unanswered. My first dead body: John Doe.
Nobody ever claimed him but I will always remember him.
One of the most difficult and heart-rending jobs of a police officer is to tell someone a loved one has died. Like most jobs nobody wanted, the task of delivering a death message was given to the women or the rookies and for a time I was both. I was given them all. I hated it and often had to fight back tears as I gave the terrible news. I would rather have dealt with the actual death than have to inform the relatives. I’m the sort of person who cries at a stranger’s funeral.
As soon as I came on duty one night, PC Jim McBean and I were sent to a house to pass on some bad news. We stood outside the