Our ethel, p.1
Our Ethel, page 1
First published in Great Britain in 2023 by
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Copyright © 2023 Phil Batman
The right of Phil Batman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.
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This work is entirely fictitious and bears no resemblance to any persons living or dead.
ISBN 9781915853998
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For my Nan
Contents
Part I York, Thursday 12th February 1953
One
Two
Three
Part II York, April 1942
Four
Part III York, Summer 1952
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Part IV Leeds, Spring 1953
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Part V Rochdale, Tuesday 2nd June 1953
Thirty-Three
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Part I
York, Thursday 12th February 1953
One
Dr Lawson turned his Daimler up onto the ramp to the loading bay at the Public Mortuary and came to a stop in front of the sign on the double doors that read ‘Strictly no parking, twenty-four-hour access’. He knew that George would be assisting him with post-mortems for the next hour or so and wouldn’t need to get the van out to collect any more customers. It was a bright frosty morning and his mood always got a lift from his days at the Public. The work was easy; it was fun; few people wanted to do it; it paid well; and it didn’t really matter if he got things wrong. His patients couldn’t complain. They were all dead anyway.
He opened the boot, pushed his clubs to one side, and cursed under his breath and winced in pain as his arm took the weight of his briefcase. The loading bay doors were padlocked so he let himself in through the side door. The smell of fried bacon greeted him as he made his way slowly upstairs to the office.
‘Morning, Doc,’ George shouted down as he heard the door open. ‘Just two for you today, a big feller and a little feller. Hardly worth your while getting changed. You’ll be on the first tee by eleven.’
‘Piss off,’ he called back. ‘How many times do I have to tell you? I leave no stone unturned.’
The doctor took the chair at the side of the desk, picked up the Daily Mirror off the end, and turned to the sport on the back page.
‘You’ve taken the Marilyn Monroe calendar down, George? You’ve not chucked it out, have you?’
‘No, it’s in the drawer. Dr Randall complained. You want it?’
‘I know what she needs.’
‘Dr Randall or Miss Monroe?’
‘Both. But I’m too old for all that malarkey. Put the kettle on, George.’
‘You’re in your prime, Dr Lawson. But I’m getting too old for this malarkey, though.’
George dropped a pair of scissors down onto some papers with a soft thud, raised his bulk up from behind his desk, and went through to the gas hob in the next room. Dr Lawson leaned forward to open the cupboard and inspect the homemade wine. He rocked a large bucket full of dark red liquid and some bubbles left the sides and burst onto the surface.
‘Hey, George,’ he called through to the kitchen. ‘This is coming on a treat. Is it bramble again? Can’t wait for me first tipple.’
‘It is. I’ve had the berries in the freezer downstairs. Me and the missus picked them last September. I reckon the heat coming up from the back of the fridges gets the brew going like a train. Any road, Doc, I’m knackered. I’m serious. I’m getting too old for this game. The big feller died on the toilet on the top floor and they found him at eleven last night. I got the call at one this morning, and we didn’t get him down the stairs and back here till gone four. I’m dog-tired. I’ve not been back home to bed. Joey the budgie had fallen off his perch too, run out of water, but his cat was still alive. These dead pets are really getting to me.’
‘Did you manage to rehome the cat?’ asked the doctor. He put his finger into the juice then sucked it.
‘Yes, thank God. The old lady next door took him in. She’d not seen hide nor hair of the old boy for over a week, then she stuck her nose through his letterbox and picked up the smell. That bit might not be in your report.’
‘You’ll never retire, George,’ said the doctor. ‘You’d drink yourself to death within a week, then you’d be straight back in here. We’ll put you in lucky fridge number 7.’
He called through to the little room along the corridor with the table and the typewriter. ‘You got any reports for me yet, Beryl?’
Beryl, a police constable turned coroner’s officer, pulled her second typed report from the drum and brought them both along for the pathologist.
‘Two quick ones for you today, Doc. You’ll be out of here and on the fairway quicker than you can say Jack Robinson.’
‘Don’t you start. Tell me the tales. I’ll have a read of ’em when I’ve a bit more time.’
George reappeared from the kitchen with three cups of tea on saucers on a little wooden tray and put it down on his desk.
‘Start with Harry Moorhouse then. Sixty-eight-year-old man. Retired solicitor. Widowed about ten years ago, and then pulled up the drawbridge and kept himself to himself. Nice man by all accounts. His next-door neighbour says she’s been keeping an eye on him, but she’d not seen him for a week and his milk was collecting on the doorstep. She spoke with her daughter yesterday afternoon, and they got in touch with us in the evening. We found him dead on the toilet.’
‘Top floor, narrow staircase, eighteen stone,’ interrupted George.
Beryl wanted to be away early too. She carried on. ‘The house is a bit of a mess, single bloke, but I’ve seen worse. Poor health. No break-in. Niece down south, neighbour thinks, but we’ve not traced her yet. Your second customer, Doctor, is a cot death.’
‘Oh, Beryl, don’t do this to me. You know I hate ’em. I can never find owt. Leave it for Dr Randall tomorrow. Tell her it came in after I’d left.’
‘No, Doc, we can’t do that,’ she told him. ‘It needs sorting today, please. Mum needs to know as soon as I can tell her that it wasn’t her fault. I told her this morning I’d go back this afternoon when you’d had a look at him.’
‘Well, at least they’re quick jobs, I suppose.’
‘Thank you, Doctor. William Slater. He’s just four days old. Mother is Ethel Slater. I’ve had a chat with her this morning, and there’s summat fishy about this case I don’t like. Can’t put me finger on it. Maybe it’s just that she’s all alone. It’s not easy talking to her either ’cause she’s boss-eyed, and you don’t know which one to look at. Seventeen years old. Won’t say who the father is.’
‘Perhaps she didn’t catch his name,’ said George.
Beryl and the doctor both ignored George now. He had heard too many cot death stories before. He thought they were all the same and he didn’t like them. Nobody did. He picked up his scissors and his cup from his desk and disappeared back into the kitchen.
‘She lives with her mum and dad in St Paul’s Terrace. It’s one of those mucky little streets down by the railway station. Gave birth alone by all accounts. The GP saw the baby the day he was born and he wasn’t worried. Mum reckons she found him dead in her bed this morning with a bit of blood on his top lip. A neighbour got a phone call to the ambulance and they brought him straight here.’
‘Woke up to find him dead beside her?’ asked the doctor.
‘No, she’d gone downstairs to answer the door then nipped over the street. Says she found him dead when she came back up.’
‘Is the mother as upset as you’d expect? Owt else I should know?’
‘Broken family, I reckon. Mum’s as you’d want, bit worse if anything. Hysterical. Couldn’t get her words out. House is full of clutter, pram, nappies, baby stuff, the usual. But it’s not a wipe-your-feet-on-the-way-out type of place. Ethe l looks after her mum, or tries to. She’s got summat serious wrong with her, bed downstairs, sort of paralysed, I think. Her dad Dennis has had a few scrapes with the police. Short fuse. He’s well known. Petty stuff, but no serious violence. That we’ve ever found out about anyway.’
‘He’s a bit too young for a cot death, Beryl. It’s peritonitis and vomited up blood. I’ve seen it before.’
‘I knew I could rely on you, Doctor. You never let me down. I want to do me best for Mum.’
PC Jackson needed to flatter Dr Lawson to make him feel important, even though she knew he could make the occasional embarrassing mistake. And he could erupt if he was challenged. Whether he wrote down cot death or peritonitis on the death certificate would make no difference to a mother. All Ethel Slater needed to hear was that there was nothing she’d done wrong.
The doctor heard George running water into the sink through the wall. He’d rounded up the breadcrumbs from the board and herded them into a coconut shell feeder with the flat edge of his hand, and added the chopped bacon rind and the scrapings of fat from the frying pan. He’d hang it back up for the blue tits outside in the loading bay yard after the doctor had left for the day.
‘Come on, shift your bones, George, let’s get ’em fettled,’ the doctor called through to the kitchen. ‘We’ll have a look at Harry’s pulmonary artery, and the bit of blood come up from William’s twisted gut, then Bob’s your uncle.’
It was too nice a morning to waste, and Dr Lawson had arranged to meet in the clubhouse at a quarter to eleven.
*
George and the doctor made their way down the stairs, the soles of their shoes sticking to the carpet slightly with the lift from each step. George carried on straight at the bottom and into the viewing room to sprinkle some food into the top of the goldfish tank, and Dr Lawson doubled back along the passage and into the fridge room. A couple of trolleys had been pushed up against a bank of six metal doors built the full length of the wall from floor to ceiling. He turned into the changing room, hung his jacket behind the toilet door, kicked off his shoes and pulled on a pair of rubber boots, and put on an apron and gloves.
He could see the two white porcelain slabs through the hatch, both with a deep sink at the end full of steaming water overflowing onto the tiled floor. One was vacant and awaiting Harry, and spread-eagled in the centre of the other was William Slater. Stretched beside him and much the same size was a soft brown furry little companion with his knitted speckled waistcoat, leather patches for paws, and black buttons for eyes with red rims.
The pathologist stopped to stare at the two of them, alone and lost on the slab.
‘Jesus Christ,’ he said to himself. ‘Dead budgies in cages upset George, but teddy bears on slabs really get to me.’
George wheeled Harry Moorhouse in on a trolley and stationed it alongside the slab. Taking Harry’s left wrist and left ankle in each hand, he lugged him across onto it. Then lifting the back of the head off the porcelain with his left hand, George slid a wooden block under the corpse’s shoulders with his right. It lay back in a graceful arc.
‘Heart and lungs do you? No need for the top off?’ asked George.
‘Fine.’
George wielded his knife and launched it through a full circle, catching the handle in his palm. Always his opening piece, a juggler’s party trick. Then, with the ease of a fishmonger filleting a mackerel, he slit round the neck and down the centre of the chest, slid up through the ribs along the sides of the breastbone, cut through the windpipe and the back of the tongue, heaved the heart and lungs up and out of the chest, and sliced them off at the diaphragm. He dropped the organs onto a chopping board under Dr Lawson’s nose. With the weight of the lungs suspended from the heart, the doctor made one cut through the connection and found the glistening clot in the pulmonary artery.
‘Pulmonary embolus, just like I said,’ he told George.
‘Never go for a crap if you’ve got chest pain,’ advised George. The doctor had heard this line many times before and he didn’t react. He glanced up at the clock instead. Going well, he thought, ahead of time.
‘Let Beryl have the teddy bear, George, will you?’ he said. ‘Mum will want it back. And I’ll do this little mite myself.’
He held his fingers in the hot water in the sink for a minute or so. It eased the arthritis. He didn’t like little cases like this one. They bothered him. Life wasn’t fair. He squeezed out the water from a sponge and positioned it on the porcelain, then laid the baby on his back on top of it, allowing his head to tilt back. The eyes looked up at the pathologist, clear and unseeing, and he closed each eyelid gently with his index finger. He couldn’t allow the baby to be a witness to his own evisceration.
Tiny organs would require delicate instruments and a steady hand. Dr Lawson took his rolled canvas sleeve of baby tools from the shelf and unfurled its contents of fine probes, fresh scalpel blades, curved scissors, and a bone saw. He would start with the belly, he thought, and expose the twisted gut. His scalpel traced a sinuous line in the skin from the throat, down the centre of the chest, skirting round the navel and into each groin, piercing the point of the blade into the abdominal cavity in its travel. No spurt of blood as expected, but also no hiss of gas escaping from the belly. No twisted loop of intestine. Ominous and worrying signs that took him by surprise. He opened the stomach. There was no blood in it, but just a little thin, watery milk. This abdomen was normal, as pristine and dry as the day it was born. Dr Lawson stepped back and held his hands under the running hot water as he looked over at his case and gathered his thoughts. This was not going to plan, not what he wanted. Twenty minutes had passed on the clock since he last looked. Baby William Slater had ceased to be a person now in the care of a teddy bear. He had become a problem to be solved.
‘I don’t like the look of this at all, not one little bit,’ he told George.
George was stitching Harry back up.
‘Why not?’
‘I think the bleeding must have come up from the lungs and onto his face. I’m thinking this little chap might have been suffocated.’
‘Smothered?’
‘Mm. Maybe.’
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ said George. ‘I’ll go warn Beryl.’
For the next couple of hours Dr Lawson became a study in concentration, no longer the butt of ceaseless banter and well-rehearsed jokes. He neglected to look up at the clock on the wall again, and his sporty pals drove off from the first tee in his absence. Dark red fresh blood had flooded the baby’s lungs and washed up into his windpipe as the doctor had feared. Every organ in the chest and abdomen was now released from its moorings and laid out for inspection on the slab, their surfaces, vessels, tubes, and chambers squeezed, probed, teased apart, and scrutinised.
Last came William’s brain. The doctor had often lost interest before he reached this stage, but this case had gripped his attention. And he knew he could be criticised down the line, certainly by a lawyer and even by a judge, if he left this particular stone unturned. He ran a blade over the top of the scalp from ear to ear and turned back the skin. He paused to tease a bruise from the skull, the shape of a hen’s egg, a beautiful speckled pattern of browns and red. And then he ran his scissors along the membranes joining the bones and eased them apart like a poppy opening its petals for the sun.
He put his instruments down and stopped.
‘Oh, fuck,’ he said under his breath. ‘George,’ he bellowed upstairs, ‘get Beryl down here.’
Beryl appeared at the doorway, then clasped her hands behind her back and watched her feet as she picked her way carefully across the film of water on the floor.
‘We need some close-ups of all this, PC Jackson,’ he told her. ‘And your gaffer to see it too.’
She’d dispensed with wearing an apron, and her cheery smile had been replaced with a frown.
‘You’ve got your witness box face on, Dr Lawson. I just knew this one would go belly up,’ she said, keeping her hands behind her back and leaning forward to inspect his findings.
He took up a probe and laid its point against a crack in the skull.
