Ken McClure - Donor

‘What on earth?’ he murmured as the green doors closed and the van drove off. Why would any patient be brought to the back door under cover of darkness? Then he remembered that the mortuary was located in the basement corridor. It wasn’t a patient they had brought in, it was a corpse.

This new thought was no more understandable than the first. He couldn’t think of a good reason for delivering a body to Medic Ecosse any more than he could a patient to the basement. If he couldn’t work it out in his head he would have to find out for himself, he decided. He returned to his office and considered for a moment before deciding on a direct approach. He would go down to the mortuary and find out who the body belonged to.

He waited ten minutes, which he hoped would be long enough for the attendants to have put the body into the mortuary fridge, and left. He paused to listen at the top of the stairs leading to the basement. All was quiet. He tiptoed down and moved silently along to the mortuary door. He paused again, putting his ear to it. Again, there was no sound. He opened the door and slipped inside, feeling safer when the door had closed behind him. He let out his breath, which he hadn’t realized he’d been holding, then froze again when the refrigeration plant sprang into life and startled him. The sooner this was over the better.

He pulled back the heavy metal clasp securing the door and it swung back revealing, to his surprise, two occupants, both hidden under white sheets. He had expected to find only one. He removed the head cloth from the body in the upper tray and saw the parchment skin of a woman. She’d been in her late sixties, judging by her hair and teeth. He slid out the tray on its runners until he could reach the name tag tied to her toe: Angela Carter-Smythe.

He slid the tray back in and covered the dead woman’s face before shifting his attention to the occupant of the bottom tray. The size told him that this was the corpse he’d seen being carried in from the van. Unusually, the covering over the body was not a traditional shroud, which tended to follow body shape, but appeared to comprise several layers of waterproof material with white top sheets wrapped round it. Maybe this was because the corpse was so large, thought Dunbar. He gripped a loose corner of the material near the head, but couldn’t pull it back because of the sheer weight of the body; he couldn’t support the head with the palm of one hand.

Expecting to find the body of a very heavy, thickset man, he worked with both hands to free the head-sheet and recoiled when he looked down at the snout of a fully grown pig. The smell of it, freed from the waterproof sheeting, assaulted his nostrils. Its dead eyes looked through him.

When he’d recovered his composure, Dunbar searched for rational answers. The kitchen cold store had broken down or run out of storage space? Unlikely and highly unethical. Apart from that, the pig, as far as he could tell on cursory examination, was complete, not the sort of cleaned carcass a slaughterhouse or butcher would supply. This was seriously strange.

Dunbar slid his hand down under the sheeting covering the pig and felt its belly. He kept his hand there for a few moments so that surface cold and dampness from its short time in the fridge would not obscure what he was looking for. He felt his palm become slightly warm. The pig had not been dead long. He was more than a little bemused. He couldn’t make up his mind whether or not his discovery contravened any criminal laws or ethical rules. Why was the animal there? Why had a recently killed pig been brought to Medic Ecosse under cover of darkness?

After a few moments it occurred to him that it might not be any old pig, it might be some kind of experimental animal. James Ross’s research would almost certainly involve the use of animals. All transplant research did. The animal might be a laboratory pig. In the early days of transplant research, when research work had been largely concerned with technique, dogs and monkeys had played major roles; they had been used by surgeons to practise on. In more modern times the emphasis had swung away from technique, which had largely been mastered. Pigs had taken over in the research laboratory as eventual possible donors of organs to humans, once the immunology problems had been sorted out.

As a leading researcher in the field, Ross would almost certainly have a Home Office licence for animal work. That being the case, Dunbar started to view his discovery as bizarre rather than sinister. But why had the animal been brought here to the hospital? Surely Ross’s research labs must have their own animal autopsy and dissection facilities — unless, of course, the cuts in his budget had forced him to seek alternatives. Was that it? Dunbar was considering this when he heard voices in the corridor. He mustn’t be discovered in the mortuary. That would call for explanations he didn’t have.

He looked about him for somewhere to hide but there was nowhere. The only furniture was a simple table, which was too narrow to hide him from view if he got under it. That left the mortuary fridge… He opened the fridge door and looked at the inside of the clasp. It had a standard through-bolt release pin, which meant it could be opened from the inside in emergencies; not that emergencies would be common inside a mortuary fridge.

The voices were getting louder. There was no time for hesitation. He gripped the beam along the top of the interior frame and swung his legs up on to the top tray beside Angela Carter-Smythe. He wriggled round on to his stomach in the confined space and stretched down to ease the door shut. It clunked softly on to its clasp and he was suddenly in complete, suffocating darkness.

He squirmed down the tray, trying to get as far from the door as possible, but he was still vulnerable to a casual upward glance from below. To combat this he manoeuvred himself into the tiny gap between the top of Angela’s body and the ceiling of the fridge and lay still on top of the dead woman, as if locked in some hellish embrace.

As the minutes passed and there was no sound from outside, he started to have doubts. Was it silent because of the heavy insulation on the fridge doors and walls, or was there really no one out there? After all, the voices needn’t have been those of people on their way to the mortuary.

The fridge door suddenly opened and light flooded in. Dunbar froze. He saw that the head cloth had fallen away from Angela’s face. Please God no one had come for her! He held his breath.

With unutterable relief, he heard the lower tray being slid out. The pig was removed, to the accompaniment of much grunting and groaning from its bearers.

The fridge door slammed shut again, causing a sudden rise in internal air pressure that hurt Dunbar’s ears. When the buzzing stopped, he found himself in deep, dark silence again. He was surprised at how quickly the air inside the fridge was used up. Although it was cold, he was soon aware of a film of sweat forming on his forehead and of starting to feel generally uncomfortable. Time to leave.

He started to wriggle his way up to the front again, inevitably becoming less and less reverential towards Angela as he manoeuvred awkwardly in the confined space. He finally reached the bulkhead over the door and stretched down his right arm to grip the release pin on the clasp. There was just enough room for his arm if he kept it in one orientation, but when he tried to turn it to grip the pin properly he couldn’t do so and was forced to bend his wrist round at an unnatural angle. To his horror, the pin came clean away and fell with a clang on to the empty tray below.

Fear gripped him like a vice. His throat tightened and his head filled with nightmare thoughts. He was trapped. There wasn’t room for him to get down between the top tray and the wall of the fridge. The pin must be at least two feet below the limit of his reach, not that he could see it in the dark, anyway. Panic welled up in his throat but throwing in the towel and yelling for help would be of no use. The insulation on the fridge would reduce any sound to a murmur, and in any case there was no one out there to hear it. He’d be yelling his way into eternity and using up the limited air supply even faster.