‘I would like you to try and go back to the point that you, Ellie, see as the beginning. Maybe write down a few short lines about it.’
‘Now?’
He senses the panic in my voice.
‘No, no, over the next few days is fine. You don’t have to do it, of course. But think about it, and depending on how you feel, if and when you do write things down, you might wish to share your thoughts with me. Either way, I would like you to at least consider doing the exercise. If afterwards you prefer to keep your thoughts to yourself, that would be fine.’
‘I don’t have to show or tell you anything?’
‘Nothing, if that is what you want.’
‘Okay, I’ll think about it.’
‘Good. That pleases me, Ellie.’ He smiles.
I say nothing, but I sense I am only buying time.
‘So maybe we could meet again in a few days, just to give you time to think about what we have discussed?’ He smiles again, the type of smile that doctors use to put you at your ease.
‘All right.’
Just like yesterday, he stands up and gestures me with arm movements to the door and I, like a well-trained dog, stand up and move forward, doing exactly what is expected of me.
Mortuary, Tallaght Hospital
Friday, 7 October 2011, 6.30 p.m.
O’CONNOR WASN’T LOOKING FORWARD TO HIS VISIT to Morrison. Tallaght Hospital may have been a very different building from the old city morgue at Marino, but the slick lines of modern design and shiny floors were purely cosmetic when it came to the stench of death. He passed the visiting smokers and patients in their dressing gowns congregated outside; he was dying for a cigarette, but had no intention of lighting up with them. Once through the revolving doors, he entered the main hospital, busy with visitors, patients and hospital staff, all criss-crossing each other within their business of recovery, and the reality that for some of them anyway the fight might soon be over.
He had been just a rookie guard when he’d attended his first postmortem, but some things have a habit of never leaving you. He had expected similar smells to a hospital – clinical, sterile. What he hadn’t expected was the smell of decomposition, and that unforgettable feeling of everything being slowed down. The male victim had been in his late teens and had been discovered in an alleyway down from a popular nightclub. Laid out on the steel slab mortuary table, he’d been photographed fully clothed, the images taken at various angles. As the pieces of his clothing had been removed, the delayering process, the clothes, and any of the items found in them, were photographed in turn, forming separate links in the chain. The naked body was then photographed, again at varying angles, paying particular attention to any markings, some of which had occurred prior to his killing, but every single mark was photographed and referenced.
During the process, O’Connor had been surprised by the simplest of things: how the small metal rulers used for measuring and illustrating the size of body parts, wounds and abrasions had been the same type as the one he had used at school. Each of the metal rulers was disposed of at the end of the autopsy, a new one for every corpse. The chrome scales used to weigh the individual organs looked similar to those he remembered from old-style butchers, and the plastic buckets to hold organs were not unlike the kind you would find in any hardware store. All of this activity happened within a bubble of time slowed down, everyone speaking in the same calm monotone, sometimes reduced to a whisper, as if the guy on the slab might somehow hear and answer back.
O’Connor had learned something that day. He had learned that when it came to autopsies, you needed to think, and not let your feelings get in the way. You had to take in the angle of the knife, the potential size of the weapon, the penetration of entry wounds to the torso, and anything else that might help solve the crime. Nobody was a spectator at an autopsy, everyone had a purpose, and he wasn’t going to let anything get in the way of him doing his job, no matter how difficult it might be.