The Turning Tide by Brooke Magnanti Read Free Book Online Page B

work for the UN in Srebrenica and Grozny.
    Yugoslavia made Omagh look like child’s play. The mass graves overflowed with bodies of men who had been rounded up, their arms and legs tied together with wire, shot in the head and dumped into pits. Three generations of men in some families. Sometimes children. Iain and the others pulled the bodies out of the ground in the same clothes they had died in. They washed the clothes after the post-mortems, left them out to dry on the grass. Every day weeping women came past, hoping to recognise a T-shirt, a pair of trousers, a hat. It was terrible when they didn’t. It was worse when they did.
    Iain manoeuvred the trolley up to the first examination table and slid the tray across. The post-mortem team waited in the doorway outside the autopsy suite. Apart from Iain himself, the team today numbered only two. Pathologist Harriet Hitchin chatted with a ginger whip of a police photographer. The young man was looking decidedly green around the gills. Iain unzipped the bag. Inside it was another, a black sports bag.
    ‘First day?’ Harriet Hitchin asked the snapper, who nodded. ‘What’s your name?’
    ‘Dougie,’ he said.
    ‘Well, welcome to the morgue, Dougie.’ Harriet’s cut-glass English accent was much at odds with her distracted and unkempt air. She washed and powdered her hands, selecting thick rubber gloves for herself and for the snapper. ‘Has MacLean deserted you?’ she asked, referring to the police sergeant who usually tagged along on these chores.
    ‘Ali said he had a few things to get from the van,’ Dougie said. His eyes darted towards the examination table, where a very wet and very smelly piece of luggage sat in the middle of the opened body bag. It did not look promising. ‘And wanted a smoke before he came in.’
    Harriet nodded. Alastair MacLean’s extended smoke breaks were the stuff of legend. Most people reckoned he spent as little as one minute in ten on the job. Not that it seemed to have a negative outcome on his work that anyone could see.
    Bit mean to leave the new kid to cover this on his own, though. ‘Documenting autopsies is never a good way to follow breakfast,’ she said with a brisk assurance that might have passed for sympathy. ‘By the way – if you’re going to vomit, make sure you do it before you get up on the stepladder to take the top shots, please?’
    ‘Vomit?’ Dougie asked.
    Iain waved at the pair to let them know he was ready. Harriet showed the photographer where they kept the wellies, then how to step over the half wall blocking the doorway to the autopsy suite. On the other side was a basin on the floor filled with disinfecting solution for them to walk through.
    Dougie watched Harriet roll a disposable plastic apron off a spool and tie it over her scrubs, then motion for him to do the same. ‘Does everyone vomit?’
    ‘Either that or they faint,’ Iain said. ‘If you don’t do either then you’re a sociopath.’
    ‘Great,’ Dougie said. He reached into his pocket and withdrew a small container of mentholated chest rub to ward against a wave of stench.
    Iain spotted the snapper about to dab some of the gel under his nose. ‘Och, you don’t want to be doing that,’ he said. ‘That’s a myth. It doesn’t help with the smell.’ Dougie looked at him doubtfully. ‘Makes it worse,’ Iain nodded. ‘Instead of getting delightful overtones of corpse à la carte, you’re now getting full on corpse plus noxious top notes of pine cleaner. You’ll wantae boak in no time.’ Iain stared hard until Dougie pocketed the chest rub.
    ‘Not what you thought it would be is it?’ The kid shook his head. ‘Nah,’ Iain said, half to Dougie and half to himself. He had seen enough trainee police and university students wander through, especially in the last ten years or so, hoping for something more technological, more glamorous than the reality the mortuary offered. ‘Not like the television is it. Too bright in