M.R. Hall: The Disappeared

The Disappeared

M.R. Hall

For Bob and Romayne

and many brave years

Veil not thy mirror, sweet Amine,

Till night shall also veil each star, Thou seest a twofold marvel there:

The only face so fair as thine,

The only eyes that, near or far,

Can gaze on thine without despair.

James Clarence Mangan

Chapter 1

During her six months as coroner for the Severn Vale District, Jenny Cooper had known only a handful of corpses remain unidentified for more than a day or two. Jane Doe, or JD0110, had been wrapped in her white plastic shroud in the refrigerator at the Vale hospital's mortuary for a little over a week. Owing to the large backlog of bodies awaiting postmortem, she remained unopened and unexamined.

She had been washed up on the English side of the Severn estuary at the mouth of the Avon; sucked in with the tide and deposited naked on a mudbank a little downstream from where the M5 motorway thundered across the river. She was blonde, five feet eight inches tall, had no body hair and had been partially eaten by gulls. There was little left of the soft tissue of her abdomen and breasts, and in common with all corpses left open to the elements for any length of time there were empty sockets where her eyes had once been. For the purposes of identification Jenny had insisted that glass ones be fitted. An unnatural blue, they gave her face a dumb, dolllike quality.

Alison Trent, the coroner's officer, had arranged for a number of potential identifiers to attend the mortuary late on a Friday afternoon, but at the last minute she had been called to a supermarket depot, where the bodies of three young African men had been discovered in a refrigerated trailer amongst a cargo of beef carcasses imported from France. Rather than leave the families in suspense, Jenny reluctantly left the office early to preside at the mortuary herself.

It was the final week of January; freezing sleet slanted from a gunmetal sky. It was not yet four o'clock and daylight had all but bled away. Jenny arrived to find a group of a dozen or so waiting in the unmanned reception area of the mortuary building at the rear of the hospital. The antique radiators were either not switched on or were broken. As the couples amongst them whispered to one another their breath emerged in wispy clouds. Most were middle-aged parents who wore expressions of dread masking deeper feelings of guilt and shame. How did it come to this? their grim, lined faces seemed to say.

Since there was no assistant available to help conduct the viewings, Jenny was forced to address the group in the manner of a schoolteacher, instructing them to take it in turns to pass through the slap doors and along the corridor to the refrigerator at the far end. She warned them that the body might not be instantly recognizable and provided the details of a private laboratory which would take their DNA samples and compare them with that of the Jane Doe: it entailed a modest expense but not one her meagre budget would extend to. They dutifully noted down the company's email address and phone number, but one of them, Jenny noticed, did not. Nor did he enter his details onto the list of those wishing to be informed in the event that other unidentified bodies surfaced. Instead, the tall, lean man, somewhere in his mid-fifties, stood away from the huddle, his slender, sun-weathered face expressionless, his only sign of anxiety the occasional raising of his hand to smooth his short black hair streaked with grey. Jenny noticed his arresting green eyes and hoped he wasn't the one whose tears would spill onto the tiled floor.

There were always tears.

The building was arranged to maximize the visitors' trauma. Their twenty-yard journey through the mortuary required them to pass an extended row of gurneys, each bearing a corpse wrapped in an envelope of shiny white polythene. The stale air was heavy with the smell of decay, disinfectant and an illicit hint of cigarette smoke. One after another, three separate couples made the walk along the corridor and steeled themselves to look down on the bare head and shoulders of the Jane Doe, her skin now starting to yellow and take on a papery texture. And one after another they shook their heads, their expressions of relief mixed with uncertainty and the fear of similar ordeals to follow.

The man with green eyes did not carry himself like the others. His footsteps approached briskly, his manner was abrupt and businesslike, yet somehow seemed to cover a sadness or uncertainty that Jenny read as regret. Without flinching, he looked down at the Jane Doe's face, studied her for a moment, then shook his head decisively. Curious, Jenny asked him who he was looking for. In a cultured transatlantic accent he explained briefly that his stepdaughter had been travelling in the UK and had failed to make contact for several weeks. Her last email was sent from an internet cafe in Bristol. The police had told him about the body. Before Jenny could find a pretext to extend the conversation, he turned and left as quickly as he had come.

Mr and Mrs Crosby arrived after the main group. He was in his late fifties and dressed in the business suit that befitted a high-level professional or businessman; she was several years younger and had the well-preserved features and softer manner of a woman who had not been ground down by life in the workplace. With them came a young man in his late twenties, also dressed formally in a suit and tie. Mr Crosby introduced him stiffly as Michael Stevens, his daughter's boyfriend. The term seemed to embarrass him: a father not yet ready to surrender the affections of his grown-up daughter. Jenny offered a sympathetic smile and watched them gaze down at the body, take in the contours of the staring, lifeless face, exchange glances and shake their heads.

'No, it's not Anna Rose,' Mrs Crosby said with a trace of doubt. 'Her hair isn't that long.'

The statement seemed to satisfy her husband, but the young man was stealing another glance, wise enough to know, Jenny could tell, that the dead can look deceptively different from the living.

'The eyes are glass,' she said, 'so the colour could be different. There are no distinguishing marks and the body was completely depilated.'

Mr Crosby's eyes flitted questioningly towards her.

'She has no body hair,' his wife explained.

He gave a dismissive grunt.

'It's not her,' Michael Stevens said finally. 'No, it's definitely not her.'

'If you're at all unsure I'd advise you to take a DNA test,' Jenny said to the parents.

'We adopted Anna Rose,' Mrs Crosby said, 'but I expect we can find something of hers. A hairbrush would do, wouldn't it?'

'A hair sample would be fine.'

Mr Crosby offered a terse thank you and placed a hand in the small of his wife's back, but as he made to lead her away she turned to Jenny.

'Anna Rose has been missing for ten days. She's a physics graduate - she works at Maybury with Mike. She didn't have any problems, she seemed perfectly happy with life.' Mrs

Crosby paused briefly to collect herself. 'Do you ever come across that?'

Mr Crosby, embarrassed at his wife's naivety, lowered his eyes to the floor. Mike Stevens glanced uncertainly between his missing girlfriend's parents. There was alarm in his eyes. He was out of his depth.

'No. Not often,' Jenny said. 'In my experience, suicide - if that is what's in your mind - is invariably preceded by depression. If you were close to the person, I think you would know.'

'Thank you,' Mrs Crosby said. 'Thank you.'

Her husband steered her away.

Mike Stevens glanced briefly at Jenny in such a way that she assumed he had a question of his own, but whether from shyness or family protocol, he kept it to himself and followed the Crosbys out.