The Resurrection of the Body (4 page)

T
he Easter Service

On Sunday morning the children were up early opening their Easter eggs. Silver paper was strewn across the living room and there were chocolatey finger-marks on the door. I had been up before dawn for our early service; now I had a break before the main event. Harriet made preparations for lunch, to which some friends and family were coming, and I went across the road to my study in the church to try to put the finishing touches to my Easter sermon.

I looked at the pages in front of me, dully. Once again I was assailed by doubt. Was this really what they wanted, expected of me? Didn’t they just want simple words of faith, the traditional story reaffirmed? What was I doing
here at all if I didn’t believe, if I could talk only vaguely about mysteries and symbolism, trying to justify my own lack of real belief?

I picked up my pen and crossed out a paragraph. There was a knock on the door.

A man in a suit was standing in the doorway. He had a wallet in his hand which he opened up to me, and I
recognised
him at once as the detective I had complained to at the Stoke Newington Police Station concerning their
treatment
of Mercy. Perhaps he didn’t want to be reminded of this; at any rate he made no mention of our previous meeting.

‘Detective Chief Inspector Stone,’ he said. ‘I would like to have a few words with you. Do you mind if I come in?’

‘No, please do.’ Although I know it is very rude, and I try never to do this, I couldn’t help glancing at my watch.

Detective Chief Inspector Stone sat down opposite me. He was a haggard-looking man, greying slightly; his suit was shabby, with dandruff flecking the collar. He seemed in an irritable mood; perhaps he was annoyed at having his Easter Sunday ruined. He said, ‘I hope you don’t mind my calling in on you like this, unannounced. If you didn’t mind, I thought that I would come to the service, hear what you had to say. Try to get the feel of the place, if you understand.’

I said that he was very welcome, but that I only had about twenty minutes to finish my sermon. I could give him a few minutes, then perhaps he would like to sit and wait in the church.

Stone said, ‘A very serious crime has been committed.
So far, we have very little to go on. I hope that I can count on your help.’

‘Of course. But I think I told the detective sergeant everything I know yesterday, when I made my formal statement.’

He was looking at me oddly. The way he stared made me quite irritated, in fact more than that, quite angry. I began to worry that Sidney might have said something to him about Jim, and that he expected me to say something about it. Well, if that was the case, he was wasting his time.

‘The post-mortem was carried out yesterday,’ Stone continued. ‘Death was caused by a single blow with a long-bladed knife, entering between the sixth and seventh ribs, piercing the lung, the apex of the heart, and the
pulmonary
artery. It was twisted before it was pulled out, to cause the maximum damage.’ He paused. ‘It’s not easy to kill someone with a knife, you know.’

I had never thought about this. Again, the tone in Stone’s voice and the manner of his questioning made me uneasy.

‘I’m sorry, I don’t follow you.’

‘What I’m saying is that this seems to have been a deliberate, perhaps premeditated, murder. It wasn’t a
frenzied
attack by a madman, or someone trying to protect themselves who happened to have a weapon to hand. No, this was a cold-blooded killing by someone who knew what he was doing.’

‘I see.’ I was taken aback; I couldn’t see what this had to do with me.

‘But there’s another problem. Somebody is very keen to make sure that we don’t get to the bottom of this.’ Again he kept his eyes on me, no doubt waiting for my reaction. ‘Well, I suppose I had better tell you what’s on my mind. The truth is, something quite extraordinary has
happened
. They telephoned this morning, at about 6.15, to say the body has been stolen from the mortuary.’

T
he Body Vanishes

After he had said this there was a long silence in the room. The first thing that came into my head was that somebody was playing the most extraordinary kind of practical joke. I wondered if it was Stone, his way of getting back at me for what I had said to him weeks ago over the incident with Mercy. I thought of what Harriet had said, that the doctor on the phone might have been ironical. It actually crossed my mind at that moment that perhaps they were all playing some savage kind of trick on me.

But that was paranoid. A man had died. My thoughts were utterly egocentric. I pushed them to the back of my mind and forced myself to think clearly. Perhaps this kind of thing was not uncommon. Perhaps dozens of bodies
were illegally removed from mortuaries each year, though I couldn’t imagine why, or who would want them. It was just the timing that made this seem so strange. My skin was prickling with that irrational fear which can overtake you, say, in a cemetery on a dark night. I glanced down at my watch; I had a few minutes left. I looked up at Detective Chief Inspector Stone.

‘I’m afraid I don’t know what to say. When did it happen?’

‘In the early hours of this morning, it seems.’

‘But how could they steal a body? From Bart’s? Didn’t anybody see anything?’

‘The post-mortem wasn’t done at Bart’s. It was done in the city mortuary, by a forensic pathologist. The place is locked up at night but there’s no one on guard …’ He rolled his eyes heavenwards. ‘It seems it was a piece of cake.’

I got to my feet; I was aware that time was short, and that somehow, despite this shocking news, I had to get through the service. I said, ‘I’m sorry, fascinating as it is, I have to go now. Perhaps we could continue this
conversation
afterwards.’

‘Do you mind if I use your phone?’

I sighed and pushed it over to him. He dialled a number and spoke mainly in monosyllables, while I could hear the faint squeaking of a woman’s voice in the earpiece. I made a few unnecessary corrections to my sermon, stood up, leaving Stone still talking, and went to the vestry to prepare myself.

I remember little of the service. The church as always
was full and decorated with flowers. At the front of the church stood the little Easter garden with its empty papier mâché tomb, made by the children from the Sunday School. The children came up to collect their Easter eggs with happy, eager faces. I ended my sermon with a
reference
to that so often misquoted saying of David Jenkins, that whatever else the resurrection was it was not just ‘a conjuring trick with bones’. We had to understand it in the spiritual sense and not just the physical one. The sermon seemed to go down well; one or two people said that they had particularly enjoyed it, and certainly nobody took me to task about it afterwards.

When I got back to the vicarage Harriet and her sister Frances had the lunch well organised, the children were running round the garden with their three cousins,
everything
seemed under control; there was nothing in particular that I needed to do. There was that strong feeling of anticlimax which always follows the Easter marathon. Normally I would have sat down in the living room and read the papers, but this morning there was no hope of that. It was two hours till lunchtime. I told Harriet that I had to see someone urgently; I made my apologies to Frances, took the car, and drove down to the city.

The city mortuary is situated near the Barbican, in that no-man’s land of huge modern office blocks and streets devoid of life. It is a grey modern concrete building, with the mortuary on the ground floor and the coroner’s court and office above it, and from the signs I could see that the building contained, among other things, a family planning clinic. I recognised it only from the presence of police cars
outside. There is no large sign saying where the mortuary is. People are not supposed to die; all signs of death are carefully hidden away. Probably if they put up a sign
people
would complain about it, think it in poor taste; nobody likes to be reminded of their mortality. There were two or three police cars in the street, and police standing about, looking, I must say, fairly bewildered. I went up to one of them and explained who I was, and asked what had happened.

It appears that what had happened was this.

On Saturday morning the body had been transferred here from the hospital, so that the post mortem could be carried out by a forensic pathologist. This had been done early on Saturday afternoon, and the body then returned to one of the storage cabinets. Although there is someone present during the day, the building is not manned at night.

Whoever it was had got in through the ambulance bay at the back. The alarm had gone off, but at that time, in the early hours of Easter Sunday morning, no one had been there to notice. The bell could have rung for hours without anyone hearing it. Just after dawn a police car patrolling the empty streets had heard the bell and driven to the scene. They found the green concertina doors drawn back, but no signs of anything damaged or broken.

The police had informed the mortuary superintendent, who had come down to have a look, and established that one of the bodies, marked as U/K369, was no longer there.

‘Was it easy to break in?’

‘Child’s play. There’s just a simple mortice lock, and a
gap between the two doors – easy to force open. Once inside, they could get the keys, no problem … Are you waiting for somebody?’

I asked if Detective Chief Inspector Stone was there.

‘He’s inside. Do you want to wait in here? You can sit down if you like.’

I followed him into the porter’s office. There was a tray with a kettle and cheap mugs. I could see the little key cupboard, which hung open, displaying a row of keys hanging on hooks. There was a rather outmoded alarm system mounted on the wall. The policeman sat on the desk.

‘This is all a bit of a puzzle, isn’t it? What do you make of it?’

‘So the lock was forced?’ I asked.

‘Seems like it.’

‘Did they have to break anything else?’

‘No. When the porter closed up last night he forgot to lock the key cupboard … they could have helped
themselves
. Besides, the cold storage cabinets there aren’t locked … they just had to whip the body out and take off with it.’

‘But there must be some security … don’t they have video cameras or anything?’

The policeman laughed. ‘Well, I have to say this sort of thing doesn’t go on very often, you know. Of course, there’s very strict security in all the usual procedures … you can imagine what kind of a fuss relatives would kick up if a body went astray. But if someone is determined to take a body … well.’ The policeman shrugged. ‘Is it the
Detective Chief Inspector you’re wanting to see?’

I said that it was.

‘Hang on a minute. Wait, come down with me. I’ll see if he’s free.’

We walked down a long corridor. We walked past the post-mortem room and I looked through the glass panels in the door, at the cold comfortless metal tables where the bodies would be laid and the reflections on the shiny white tiled surfaces. We went through into the room where the bodies were stored. There was one large cabinet, with glass panels on the doors. Inside one I could dimly see a body, shrouded in white, spookily reminiscent of the drawings I had seen of Christ bound in grave-clothes in the tomb.

Detective Chief Inspector Stone was in the room. He looked exasperated when he saw me.

‘So you’ve come to see the evidence of the
resurrection
,’ he said to me drily.

I told him I thought the remark in very poor taste.

‘Well, what is it then?’

‘I wanted to talk to you,’ I said. ‘I’ve remembered something that could be important.’

‘Yes?’ His manner showed me plainly that he had no time for me.

I said, ‘I’d rather talk in private, if you don’t mind.’

Stone took me across the street to his car. We went and sat in the front seats; I don’t know why he chose this place, perhaps it was the only way he could get away from everyone. As I walked with him my heart was pounding. I had nothing to say to him; I didn’t know why I was doing
this. My mind was racing, trying to think of something rational I could say which would justify my intrusion into his time. I wanted to speak to him, I wanted to find out something which would explain what was happening, but I had no specific detail to impart.

We sat in the car and he lit a cigarette. He looked at me sideways with his shifty eyes. ‘Well?’ he asked.

I wildly said the first thing that came into my head. ‘I thought when I looked at that man in the church that I had seen his face somewhere before,’ I said. ‘I’ve just realised what it was. When I was giving my sermon this morning, I was looking at the picture of the baptism of Christ which is at the back of the church, behind the font. The likeness is quite amazing.’

Detective Chief Inspector Stone stared at me. I realised with a cold shock even as I said these words that they were quite true. I must have noticed this, as I had said, during the service, and repressed it, because the thought was so frightening. I began to wonder whether I really had gone mad.

‘You can verify it yourself, if you want to,’ I said. ‘You must have taken photographs of the body in the mortuary.’

‘Yes, we have,’ said Stone. ‘Photographs, dental impressions, fingerprints. There was no identification on the body. Nobody has come forward. We haven’t had a lot to go on. Nobody has seen anything, there was nobody answering his description in the local pubs, nothing from the house-to-house calls, nothing from anybody on the
street. Nobody has seen a thing, not a dicky-bird. All indoors, having lunch, watching television. They might as well all be dead.’

He looked at me again, inhaled deeply on his cigarette. ‘Of course, this theft may make things easier. It’s no longer an ordinary assault. Somebody wants to make sure we don’t get at the body. Why?’

I said, ‘There are some religions who are opposed to post-mortems. The orthodox Jews, I believe, don’t like the body being disfigured because they believe this will make things a bit tricky on the day of judgement. Might that be a motive?’

‘If it was they were too late. They did the post mortem yesterday.’ Stone opened the car door, dropped his cigarette stub and put his foot out to grind it into the tarmac. He slammed the door shut again and turned to face me. ‘If you’re having any thoughts in that direction yourself, I mean about a body coming back to life, I think you should address yourself to what happens at the post mortem. The body is opened from the throat down to the navel or lower.’ He made a graphic gesture with his finger. ‘All the internal organs are removed and weighed. The stomach is examined, as are the vital organs. These parts are simply put into a plastic bag and deposited back into the
abdominal
cavity, which is padded out with wadding before it’s all stitched up. If you think that can come back to life again, you’ve got to be joking.’

‘I have no thoughts in that direction, I can assure you,’ I said quietly, defensively.

Detective Chief Inspector Stone looked at me coldly.

‘There’s something I want to ask you, while you’re here,’ he said. ‘In the creed, when you get to that bit at the end, that you believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting – is that meant to refer to Christ’s body, or all our bodies?’

I was amazed that he should ask me such a question. I said, ‘It refers in fact to everyone’s body.’

‘So we’re supposed to believe this, are we? That our bodies come out of the grave and all that. How can
anybody
take that rubbish seriously?’

There was no point in trying to enlarge upon it now, or getting into a discussion about all these issues, such as whether Christians really believe in hell, or whether hell is merely absence from God, or how a good God could
torment
people eternally. I simply let my hands fall in a
gesture
of passive resignation. Stone got out of the car and I followed him back to the mortuary. When we reached the door he left me without a backward glance and went inside.

I was struck once again by his coldness and rudeness. Couldn’t they train the police in communication skills? Or was it just me he disliked for some reason?

I stood in the street, not knowing what to do. The thing was incredible. Of course, there might be reasons for stealing a body. If you take a body before it is identified, you are removing the biggest clue for those who are
investigating
, because if you don’t know who’s been murdered it’s rather difficult to work out who would have killed him and why. Perhaps they didn’t realise the post-mortem would be done so promptly; perhaps they imagined
nothing
 
would be done over the bank holiday weekend. It crossed my mind that it might be some medical students playing a macabre practical joke, but this didn’t seem to make sense; surely they would have had to come forward and admit to it, the consequences of not doing so would be too awful. Besides, what would they do with the body?