Jutta Profijt - Morgue Drawer Four

“There’s that guy again!” I screamed, extremely agitated.

“What in blazes is wrong now?” Martin roared at the top of his voice.

Birgit swung around and glared at him in stunned horror.

“I didn’t mean…uh, not you…” Martin stammered. The guy from the elevator crossed the lobby and left the building.

“I’m going,” Birgit said. “And I’m not sure I ever want to see you again.”

Martin stood there thunderstruck, watching her as she left.

“The guy who was just in the corridor. The one who just left. I’ve seen him somewhere before!” I yelled again.

“Fuck off,” Martin thought.

“I can’t remember anymore when or where I’ve seen him. But it’s definitely—”

Important, is what I’d wanted to say, but I was interrupted.

“FUCK OFF,” Martin repeated more clearly, as though I hadn’t understood him correctly the first time.

“Just please go and ask at the reception desk who he was and what he wanted here,” I said.

“Go fuck yourself,” Martin replied, turning around. He slowly, deflatedly climbed the stairs back up to his office and resumed dictating his reports, but he was so unable to concentrate that half an hour later he packed up his stuff and drove home. I left him alone.

The afternoon was shitty enough, but the night bored me to death. I was wallowing in infinite self-pity, which reached a climax at the darkest hour of the night, around five in the morning. But if I was ever going to be redeemed from my unusual undead existence, then my murder was going to have to be solved; this was one thing I was totally sure of. So I had to swallow my resentment, my personal disappointments, and my self-pity and get Martin to keep going. I thought any hope of this seemed fairly gloomy after the disastrous events of the previous day, but I had to at least try. I waited for him at the Institute with the utmost impatience.

The look on his face shocked me deeply, and it actually should have forewarned me of what other nasty things the day had in store for us, but my mind was on other things. That may have had to do with the fact that a new body had been delivered shortly before Martin’s arrival.

Normally the transport casket is brought into the autopsy section, and then two assistants grasp the body, say “one, two, heave,” and lift the corpse onto one of the stainless-steel surfaces at the Institute.

Not so in this case. The transport casket arrived, and I hung back a bit as usual since even now looking at the faces of these dead people still depressed me. The assistants then opened the casket, caught their breaths, and then agreed on the sequence: “top first.” They didn’t even count down, instead saying only “heave ho,” and, presto, the torso was neatly unloaded down to the bottom rib on the rib cage, along with the head and arms. The hip and right leg came next, followed by the left leg last.

Of course a corpse doesn’t care how many pieces it gets delivered in, but this sight seriously shocked me, so I didn’t think to look at the face on the body until much later. Otherwise I would already have been completely beside myself in distress when Martin finally arrived.

He really looked like shit, too; there was no other way to say it. Bloodshot eyes, the bruise on his cheek had morphed into various darker shades of purple and yellowish green, and for the first time since I’d known him his hair wasn’t properly combed. His part was totally crooked. I was dismayed.

“Good morning, Martin,” I said.

Martin winced, but didn’t reply. He went into the break room, poured himself a coffee (!), sat down at his desk, and pulled the cord to his old dictation headset out of the computer. He flung the thing, cord and all, into the drawer, and put on his stylish new headset.

“If you dictate even one single letter into my computer, I will never utter another word to you again, I will bring in an exorcist, and I will spread the most nightmarish gay-sex stories about you,” he whispered, noiselessly.

Uh-oh, his tone had clearly sharpened—and yet, he was talking to me again. Sometimes you have to delight in the little things.

“I will be so good you’ll wonder what happened to your old friend Pascha,” I replied. A snort was his only response.

“Did you talk to Birgit?” I asked.

“That is none of your business,” Martin replied.

Well, it looked like the two of us were in for some fun and games today.

Martin went back to work on the interrupted report from yesterday, and I left him in peace. Completely. I didn’t talk to him, didn’t try to establish contact with him on an emotional level, nothing. I remained downright unseen and unnoticeable. But I was quite near him, watching him. And what I saw worried me. Martin dictated a lot of sentences twice, and others ended abruptly in the middle, although they actually weren’t complete sentences at all. He took fairly long pauses to stare out into space or sharpen a pencil down to half its length. He listened to his phone ring for a full minute without really perceiving it, and when colleagues asked him a question or simply wished him a good morning he wouldn’t respond until they had repeated themselves for the third time. People were gossiping in the hallway and in the break room, and once again it was all about Martin.

The phone rang again around nine thirty and startled Martin out of his thoughts, so he answered immediately and let his boss talk him into autopsying the ménage-à-trois that just came in. We went downstairs.

Even though I still kept a certain distance during autopsies, I really don’t feel that uneasy anymore, like I did the first few times. After all, these are dead human beings we’re talking about, not zombies, aliens, or slimy critters. Just dead people. Which is why, as I’ve come to understand in the meantime, forensic pathologists can still pursue their work without losing it, mentally or emotionally. They are investigating human beings who are dead. And interestingly enough, this is how they help these people or their friends and families, although of course they can’t bring them back to life again. But they’re helping by determining the reason for the death.

In lots of cases it’s about life insurance payouts, but more and more frequently it’s about medical malpractice lawsuits, or it’s about the issue of murder versus not murder.

In the present case all this wasn’t so terribly difficult, because whenever you get a person delivered in three parts, the cause of death is relatively clear. However, that’s not how forensic pathologists work—we’ve covered that before. Even when a puzzle like this is lying on the table in front of them, the pathologists always start their exam, and subsequent report, with the clothing, then the scalp including hair, facial skin and facial hair (that is, eyebrows, eyelashes), the fold behind the ear, and things like that. One might think it’s excessive to cover such aspects in the case of a torso with the heart dangling out of it from below, a little to the side, but in the present case this assumption would have been rash and incompetent: behind the man’s left ear there were dermal abrasions and pressure sores that he had sustained shortly before his death. Presumably a blow from a sap, a kind of homemade weapon, usually a sock filled with sand or lead pellets. So it was possible that the man hadn’t thrown himself in front of the regional express train at all but may have been pushed. Another option: he may actually have already been dead before the locomotive’s high-quality, German-engineered steel wheels worked their charcuterie.

Of course Martin and his colleague determined all of this totally dispassionately, as usual, but I felt both proud of Martin, who might be solving a brazen murder here disguised as an accident or suicide, and sorry for the dead guy, since I personally thought this kind of serious bodily injury leading to death was almost like being murdered twice. So I looked compassionately into the man’s face—and let loose a shriek.