He double-parked and got out. Only one tyre mark was visible from the road; the other was under one of the newly parked cars. He got down on his knees to look. There were fragments of red plastic in the gutter under the car. He picked up the largest of them, which was about the size of his thumb. It looked like part of a lens cover. A brake light, maybe?
He checked the lights of the parked car, then stood up and stared around. He was standing near the corner of a brick-built unit. SPEEDY REPAIRS AND MOT. Williams walked to the end of the building, which was the last in the row before the multi-storey car park. Between the two was an alleyway, a patch of littered grass, a steel fence.
And, behind the fence, a bicycle.
It was years since Emrys Williams had climbed anything, and he’d got heavy or his arms had got weak – one or the other. Maybe both. He got halfway up and then just hung there, and three men in Wales shirts stopped and shoved him the rest of the way with encouraging grunts and a general-purpose ‘Ooooooooh’ as he hit the ground on the other side.
He brushed himself down from the ungainly drop and thanked them, and they waved and went on walking.
Williams gazed down at the bike. It was an old Peugeot ten-speed racer, but it had been in good condition until whatever had happened had happened to it. Now it was just a Chinese puzzle of blue and chrome, the chain drooping and the wheels twisted rubber loops.
The lens of the rear light had been smashed. Williams put the thumb of red beside it.
It matched.
He hauled himself back over the fence with new gusto and twisted his ankle as he dropped on to the pavement. He cursed out loud and vowed to start jogging again. He walked feelingly back to the car and drove the short distance to the car park.
He found one of the few spare bays on the second level and got out. From here he could see the back of the station, through the bare branches of a tree.
I had to jump out of the car park and into a tree.
With curiosity bubbling in his belly, Emrys Williams walked as briskly as his ankle allowed to the concrete wall that hemmed the second level. It was chest high. You’d have to be mad to jump it. Mad or desperate.
Cars were parked all along the wall and he squeezed behind them.
Directly opposite the tree, the concrete wall was cracked and missing several large chunks, which lay on the ground, along with more broken glass – clear and orange this time. Headlight and indicators.
Williams leaned against the wall and looked over the parapet. It was a good twenty-five feet to the grass below. The dark branches of the tree were flecked with raw cream, where boughs and twigs had snapped and splintered as something large had fallen through them.
Something as large as Patrick Fort.
It was eleven forty-four.
Emrys Williams thought the dissecting-room technician looked like a cadaver himself. He was gaunt and pale and had a funereal air about him. He also smelled of rotting flowers.
Williams did his best to hold his breath while he spoke, which was less than successful.
‘I understand you are missing one of your heads,’ he opened.
Mick Jarvis looked at him in almost comic astonishment.
‘What?’ he said. ‘First I’ve heard of it.’
‘Really?’ said Williams. ‘That does surprise me. Would you mind checking?’
The technician immediately strode to the back wall of the hangar-like room and started unzipping what Williams now realized were body bags. He kept his distance.
‘Head,’ said Jarvis impatiently as he went down the row. ‘Head. Head. Head. Shit.’
‘No head?’ enquired Williams, and Jarvis nodded.
Jarvis called the chair of the medical school to report the theft, and then made them both a cup of strong tea.
‘I’m not surprised,’ said Jarvis. ‘That kid was always weird. He broke in twice before, you know?’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. Found him in here once, going through confidential files. Then one night he threw a shoe at me in the dissecting room. Biscuit?’
Williams took a HobNob. ‘How does one break into a place like this?’
‘Well, the first time he used his own entry code, but at a time when he was not allowed to be here. But that code was suspended once he was expelled.’
‘So how did he get in last night?’
‘Let’s see,’ said Jarvis, and fired up the computer. He stared at the screen, while making annoying little half-sounds that he seemed to imagine were keeping Williams informed.
‘That’s there. Here we… There. Now we’ll see… OK, I get it… Cheeky little bastard!’
‘What?’
‘He must have used another student’s code. Belongs to a girl called Megan Jones. Here, you see? At a quarter past midnight.’
Williams nodded slowly. He had a thousand questions, but as he dunked, he asked the one he felt was most pertinent. ‘This sounds like a silly question, Mr Jarvis, but I’ll ask it anyway. Is it at all possible that Number 19 was a murder victim?’
Jarvis laughed. It was a strange sound in a strange place and from a strange-looking man. ‘Absolutely not. Our donors have generally died from age-related heart conditions or cancers, or complications like pneumonia. Every death is properly certified by an attending doctor. Even then, we can only accept donations if the body has not been too badly damaged by an illness or injury. We need them to be in reasonable shape so that students know what a standard body looks like. There’s no point training students on bodies with broken limbs or with severe internal degradations.
‘For the same reason we can’t accept autopsied bodies, so the donors will have been expected to die from their disease or injuries. Autopsies are always performed on murder victims.’
‘If you know they’ve been murdered,’ mused Williams.
‘True,’ nodded Jarvis and took another biscuit, so Williams did the same. He’d missed breakfast because of all this.
‘Would it be possible to see the paperwork relating to Number 19?’
‘Of course.’ Using a key that was poorly hidden under a saucer, Jarvis opened one of the two filing cabinets and withdrew a slim folder.
Emrys Williams studied the records. The first form was a donor application in the name of Samuel Galen.
‘This is dated almost ten years ago!’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said Jarvis. ‘People can make a donor application at any time. If they change their minds, they only have to let us know and we destroy the documentation.’
Williams ran his eye down the form. He noticed that Samuel Galen and he shared a birthday. Same day, same year. Emrys and Sam. He wondered whether Sam had celebrated his birthdays the same way he did – with a few pints down the Three Tuns and a phone call from his aged mother, who never forgot.
It gave him an uncomfortable sense of his own existence being on temporary loan, and he had to brush the idea aside to concentrate on the matter at hand.
The donation form was short and contained questions that left no room for sentiment.
I consent to my body parts being retained by the nominated establishment.
I consent to unidentifiable photographs of my body parts being taken and retained for training, education and research.
Burial/cremation