I gave him a call. ‘OK, Graham,’ he said. ‘You crack on. I’ll get myself sorted and be with you soon.’ No hint of when. I was sure I detected the faint sound of his heart breaking. Once he’d battled his own demons and steeled himself for the emotional tightrope he was about to walk, I knew he would join me.
Invincibility cloak on, I headed to the quiet semi on a sprawling council estate, feeling like a trespasser, as I always do when crossing the threshold of a house where death has visited. There are no words that can comfort a family who have been robbed of a child. This household knew me well. In different times, we were antagonists, but now we were on the same side — probably, possibly.
I went in alone. The shock and bewilderment hit me like a force field. Tears streamed down the ashen cheeks of the parents and their three surviving young children as they hunched on the tatty sofa in the smoke-filled lounge, looking lost and stunned. Furniture was sparse but I had to sit. At six foot tall I would often use my height to an advantage with seated suspects, but now I had to get down to their level, using body language to demonstrate our equality; my role here was to serve, not intimidate. Only the coffee table remained vacant so I took my chances. Thankfully it was sturdy.
The account they whispered out through the sobs was typical, if the unexplained death of a baby can ever be typical. Fed well in the small hours, cuddled to sleep, put in the cot and slept forever. No crying, no pain, no clue. Found a couple of hours later for no other reason than Dad’s habitual check when he used the bathroom. Frantic attempts to revive, rushing to neighbours, panic, despair, and endless distress. Then the heartless system kicked in and took over.
‘You know we have to do some extra checking, Mike, with, well you know, the kids and the Social Services and all that?’ I explained. A reluctant but understanding nod was the affirmation I needed and all I knew I would get.
The worst part for me is seeing the body. Most deaths the police go to are tainted with blood or a dirty syringe but babies just go. Nothing helps you to rationalize their passing. Even Cleo, eventually Roy Grace’s second wife, with all her years’ experience in the mortuary, seeing the most terrible sights, never grew hardened to the death of a child; ‘they got her every time’.
I see them as china dolls, but always hope they will suddenly open their eyes. But of course they never will. They look so precious and fragile and all the more disturbing because of it. This baby was lying just as he had been when put to bed, never to wake again. Kids are different. They really get to you.
The personal angst Julie and I were going through made the horror of attending a baby death even harder but I snapped out of it and regained my professional composure. We had to seize the bedding, bottles and clothing in case they held clues. I decided that we needed to check with the neighbours just in case they had heard or seen anything untoward. This last measure was unusual but, in my judgement, necessary given the previous concerns. Mike understood and wanted it all over and done with as soon as possible so that he and his family could try to reconstruct what was left of their wrecked lives. I was soon to regret this decision.
Having finished at the house, I sucked in the crisp morning air to flush my mind of the horror and grief. Just then my pager chirped. ‘Graham, get back to the nick before you go to the mortuary. Clive,’ the message read. There were no mobile phones back then, and Clive knew I had to accompany the baby’s body to the morgue, so despite his message, I thought he would be happy to wait. Following the mortuary van through the streets of people waking to a new day, I wondered how many of the bleary-eyed souls we passed could ever guess the wretched cargo it carried.
After the little body had been booked in I phoned Clive, presuming he wanted an update. ‘Since when did we do house-to-house enquiries for cot deaths? Might as well have arrested them for murder,’ he yelled.
What had got to him, when he hadn’t even had the balls to come to the scene? Bite your tongue, Graham. Say nothing you’ll regret.
‘Clive, I’m not having this conversation with you on the phone. This is hard enough. I’ve done what I’ve done and now I’ve got the post mortem from hell to watch.’
‘Don’t you know what these poor families go through? Well I do and it’s agony. They don’t need you trashing their lives further,’ he shouted.
He wasn’t bloody listening. Where was his heart? Oh yes, I’d heard it breaking when I called him earlier.
Seeing this as completely out of character, I finished by saying, ‘You don’t know what I know and feel. I’ll see you later,’ and hung up.
I knew what was behind his rant, but he didn’t realize the personal battles I was fighting. Why should he? He was my boss though; I knew he wouldn’t let me get away with talking to him like that, and I’d have to face the music when the time came. However, that was nothing compared to what awaited me in the next room.
Peter James describes, with eerie accuracy, what a mortuary feels like. In Dead Simple he writes: ‘A post mortem was the ultimate degradation. A human being who had been walking, talking, reading, making love — or whatever — just a day or two earlier, being cut open and disembowelled like a pig on a butcher’s slab.’ Now replace those verbs with ‘gurgling, crawling, giggling, suckling’ and you start to get a picture of what it’s like at the post mortem of a baby. Horrific, surreal, scarring but necessary.
As I was gowning up, my stomach heavy with dread, in walked Clive. ‘Hi, Graham, thought I’d come down and give you some support.’ His sudden change of mood stunned me.
‘Clive, is this the right place for you to be? You don’t have to stay, I’ll be fine.’
‘No, you can’t do this alone.’
‘It would be a lot easier if I did,’ I muttered so he couldn’t hear, fearing another Incredible Hulk moment.
I will never forget the tenderness of the pathologist as he dismembered that little boy. He was so gentle but seeing that delicate body cut up was the saddest, most solemn experience of my life. The only thing that helped me through was the knowledge of how much doctors learned from post mortems.
In the UK post mortem examinations, or autopsies, are carried out to determine how someone died. They happen where the death is unexpected, sudden or violent or, in some circumstances, to help medical researchers understand more about a particular illness or condition. One day, the opening up of the body of a barely cold baby might unlock the key to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome itself. Or, as sometimes happens, the pathologist might learn the cause of death was something much darker. I was here to ensure that, in that eventuality, the coroner and the criminal courts had the best evidence to help them reach the right decision. My personal demons were, for now, locked away.
When the autopsy came to an end neither Clive nor I fancied the traditional breakfast detectives indulge in when they have been called out early. Neither of us mentioned the slanging match from earlier either. Had he forgotten? Unlikely. Was he embarrassed? Probably.
Whatever we did and did not talk about, one thing is for sure; we should have got that morning out of our system, but in those days a stiff upper lip was the only acceptable response — unless the sun was over the yardarm, when it was all right to have a large whisky or two.
No suspicious circumstances were found, so my involvement should have ended that day. That was the plan.
Cops aren’t made of stone though; we take this stuff home with us. We bury it while we can but it burns away from the inside. It hurts, it scars, it changes us. And what I had seen, smelt and experienced that morning would subsequently test my marriage to the limit.