Elephants

Joseph:
"Mort went over to the Major Incident Caravan, just in case any member
of the public saw anything. Y'know, they're invited in, they go and
have a cup of tea or coffee and talk about it, with a policeman. It's
usually full of uniformed blokes, they're generally farting around. And
I goes over to see the Scenes of Crimes Officers, but then I was
escorted over to a tent by one of them, and Mort stayed where he was,
and then we went inside this tent.
There was me, one SOCO bloke, the corpse, and the car. The SOCOs had
obviously done much of their role. First of all, they'd established
what the accelerant was, that wasn't too hard. The whole tent just
reeked of petrol, and they took swabs from the body and around the car,
which showed that basically the accelerant was petrol. SOCO could tell
us that petrol had been poured over the body, it wasn't a case of the
fuel tank exploding. Petrol had been poured over it . . . and then the
body was torched.
The car was completely gutted, I mean there was just nothing left of
the inside and that's the odd thing - in a situation like that, when
someone says like, "There's the body," you have to really focus your
eyes, and on this particular occasion I think he had to point out which
end was the head because the guy's all sort of scrunched up in a sort
of foetus shape inside. Everything is . . . ah . . . gutted inside, so
you've got warped metal supports going up to the window and the
doors.
The roof of the car is very distorted, all the windows are smashed,
nothing inside the car is as you'd expect it to be because all of the
materials for 'round the back seats, and the front seats has burnt
off.
So all you're left with is a lot of dust, and springs, and the body
sort of - because the springs get so hot, the body melts into the
springs, so it's not that discernible as a body. It's very hard to sort
of - once someone says "Well, there's the head," and you look at it,
and you think, "Yeah, okay," and you have to really focus your eyes to
see where the arms go, and where the body and the legs are, because
it's all fused, it's very difficult to make sense of it.
I've seen plenty of bodies before, but I had a lot of trouble focusing
on this one. Because they'd set fire to him, the fuel tank hadn't
exploded, it ruptured which just intensified the heat even more.
Imagine these bits of metal and these springs getting red hot, all the
clothes burn off him, then the flesh burns off and all the muscles and
sinew, everything burns off. You're left with a black sort of crispy
substance over the body. With the blackened springs and all, it's
difficult to sort of make it all out. When the SOCO said, "There's the
head," I was thinking, "Uh-oh, I just can't really make this out." Then
he pointed to the hip and and then I saw it for what it was, which was
this skeleton . . . blackened skeleton that was covered in crispy bits,
melted into this bed of springs. He had a little bit of hair left,
strangely enough - I think that must've been where they'd moved the
body a bit, and maybe the heat hadn't quite got to that, but it was
black and shrivelled.
It's not like a clean skeleton that you would see in a doctor's
surgery. It's still covered in the crap and debris from the car for one
thing, the bones are scorched and when a bone scorches it sort of goes
this brown-beigey sort of, dirty sort of colour, but again it's not
just bone either because you've still got - even when the skin burns,
it doesn't just burn off and gas off and go, when it burns it's just
that all the fluid goes out so you end up with this like, mummified
person, but the skeleton's really showing through, and it's mainly
black in colour with brown bits and other bits of material splattered
around it, that make sense? Bits that've obviously burned, but not to
ashes.
The teeth are still there, you can still see the teeth, and part of the
nose. But the eyes had gone. The eyes are the first thing to go when
you're burned. Just melt, drip down yer face.
The SOCO pointed to the head. There was a hole in the skull big enough
to put your fist through. At that time SOCO thought that's probably
what had killed him, so at that stage they were working the assumption
that he was already dead because of this hole in his head. You couldn't
see anything else inside the hole other than just -y'know, blackness.
The brain would literally've boiled off, turned into liquid by the
fire, and then it would've solidified into some new shape within the
skull.
Yeah, quite a sizeable hole. But the autopsy showed that the body had
smoke in his lungs, which obviously meant that he was breathing when he
was burning, so he wasn't already dead when they burnt him. Not that
he'd have been aware of anything, not with a hole that size in his
head. Which is probably just as well, all things considered.
Looking at the remains of the body, lying there all curled inside that
burned out car, I didn't feel anything, nothing at all. It was just a
body. Anyway, that's what I thought until I saw the coins.
I didn't . . . you don't think of this - this thing as a person, it is
just a thing. I couldn't imagine that being a person. I couldn't even
tell the difference between the head and the feet until the SOCO guy
pointed out where the hip was. And then it all snapped into focus. The
change in his pocket had melted into his hip, and it was shining there
in all that mess.
Just an everyday item like that. And suddenly I started to think that
maybe once this thing used to talk and breathe. I thought, "Christ, I
bet you weren't expecting that when you got up this morning," and I
almost laughed out loud."

Raymond:
"I didn't want to be there. I'd just been promoted to DC and the other
detectives had been telling me how bad it was going to be. But I had to
attend because I was the officer in charge of the case, there was no
way around it.
The mortician already had the body out. It was on a slab, a stainless
steel slab. Like a sink draining board with a plughole at the bottom
left hand corner, for the juices to run into. The mortician was chirpy
and cheerful, the way they usually are. I told him it was my first one
and he said, "If you want I'll tell the coroner, but he'll probably
just make it worse for you. That's what he's like. It's all a big joke
to him."
I said, "Don't bother."
The coroner came in, Calvert Leigh was his name, I think. He put his
gloves on, and asked me if I was squeamish. I said, "Yeah, I am," and
he said, "Well if it gets too bad for you, just don't look. When I cut
into the chest there'll be a smell. It's really unpleasant but you get
used to it after a few minutes."
The first thing he did was cut right across from one shoulder to the
other, and from the Adam's apple down to just above the pubic area.
Then he picked up something that looked like a pair of bolt-croppers. I
remember thinking to myself,
"What the fuck is he going to do with that?"
What he did was cut through this sort of gristle cage in front of the
ribs. It looked like hard work, he really had to struggle with it. Then
he cut the breastplate off and puts it to one side.
There was a big microphone suspended from the ceiling, and as he worked
he spoke into it, saying things like, "I'm now cutting through the
chest wall, I'm reaching into the body and holding the heart. This is
fine that's fine, there's a mark here."
Now I could see inside the body, and the smell that came off it was
awful. I was repulsed, absolutely repulsed. I did not want to see what
I was seeing, I did not want to smell what I was smelling. Which was
funny really, because my senses seemed to be working overtime, smell,
sight, hearing. I heard the sound of the knife slicing into skin and as
the breastplate was cut out it made this wet, cracking sort of
noise.
I kept telling myself that I had to be there for continuity of
evidence, so that if anyone questioned the coroner's findings I could
say, "This is the body that I found, which is the same body that the
coroner worked on, and I witnessed the autopsy being performed."
I tried to focus on a corner of the table, not on the body, but my eyes
kept getting drawn back towards what the coroner was doing. It's crazy
isn't it, something totally disgusting like that, but you still can't
stop yourself from taking a peek at what's going on.
He removed all the vital organs and sliced and cut them to check for
injury and disease, because it might not have been stabbing that killed
the guy. He might have had a heart attack before the lad stuck the
knife in him, and then it wouldn't have been murder.
Then, just to make sure the victim didn't have a brain haemorrhage
before he died, the coroner had to go into the head. He put a wooden
block beneath the neck of the skull, which made the head go right back,
and cut from the back of the head right around to the front, leaving
about half an inch of skin on the forehead. Then from the back, he
yanked the skin up over the top of the head. It didn't come away
easily, he had to really work at it.
When people die, they usually keep the expression that they had when
they stopped breathing. Because this man had his face in a pillow at
the time, his nose was bent to one side, his eyes were shut and his
mouth was wide open. So that was how he looked on the slab. Until the
coroner started pushing his face.
The first thing that happened was the forehead and the eyebrows started
to really furrow. I think the coroner was looking for some sort of
mark, and he pushed until he found it. Then the whole face just moved
to one side and slipped down off the skull like a rubber mask.
He got a circular saw and cut all 'round the skull, but not deep enough
to penetrate completely. He got a hammer and chisel, stuck it into the
groove he'd made, tapped a couple of times on one side, and then the
other. I heard a wet pop and then he pulled the top of the skull off.
He said to me, "If you've never seen a brain before you'll find this
really interesting," made a cut and took the brain right out of the
head.
At first I was intrigued by what he was doing, because I was expecting
the brain to be grey, but actually it was sort of brown. Then I was
disgusted. I felt very sick, really sick. Then it all started to get
distant, like it wasn't real. I became this third person, if you like.
I was watching me, watching what was going on and that seemed to be an
easier way to cope with it.
Then he put the brain into something that looked like a bacon slicer,
which went backwards and forwards, slicing off thin sections of the
brain, until it had all been dissected.
He inspected each slice and said, "Yeah right, brain was clean. Cause
of death was this knife wound to the heart." End of story."

Christopher:
"Knew she was dead as soon as I got there. There was like an inch depth
of blowflies, dead on the window ledge. And loads more crawling all
over the glass. That's usually a good sign. The more flies there are,
the longer the person's been dead. As soon as I saw the files I
thought, "Oh fuck." I knew that she'd be rotting.
We didn't have the keys to the place so I had to kick the door in. The
smell hit me straight off, which just confirmed what we were dealing
with. I couldn't say anything on the radio yet, I had to see the body
first, because for all I knew it could have been a murder. So, in my
mind, I'm starting to think of things like evidence, because you don't
want to disturb anything until you can see whether it's a murder, or
whether it's a suicide, or someone's just died of old age. You're the
first person on the scene and you have to make that judgement.
I went in, and basically saw this: a short hallway, the carpet covered
in empty wine bottles, crisp packets, and general rubbish that's been
building up for God knows how long. And there were little paths running
through it, one went off to the living room, the other to the
kitchen.
I stepped into the living room. Over by the far end I saw the back of
this old-fashioned easy chair. Poking out the top I could see a mop of
grey hair, with a hand hanging down one side, and the hand was like,
black.
I picked my way through this stuff on the floor and walked around to
the front of the chair.
She was just sitting there, with her head back. She looked really
distended, bloated. At first I thought her skin looked black, but it
was also like, blue, grey, brown, all sorts of colours. And her hair
was moving.
I called the other bloke in, he was a probationer, just out of
training. It was obvious she hadn't been murdered, that she'd just
died. The procedure is to call for a doctor, who has to come and
certify that death has occurred. If he can say the cause of death, then
that's nice and straightforward, but usually they'll wait until the
autopsy before they say for definite. In this particular case we made
the decision that she had died through natural causes.
The doctor turned up and said, "Yeah, she's dead."
I said to the probie, "All right, well. What we'll do, we'll lift her
out of the chair, to make sure she hasn't got a knife in her
back."
So I got one side of her and the probie took the other. Apart from
stinking to high heaven, the clothes were decomposing as well as the
body, which made getting a grip on her very unpleasant. We moved her
forward first, and there was this horrible wet slurping sound.
What had happened was her hair had fused to the back of the chair, so
as we pulled her forward the skin just came away from the back of her
head and stuck to the chair. And the inner surface of skin with just a
mass of crawling maggots. It was fucking grim.
And if that wasn't bad enough, she started to groan, as dead bodies do
when you move them, because of the gases. So as we shifted her she was
going, "Uhhhhhhh," like this, and the smell was 'orrible. Obviously
there wasn't a knife in her back, so we thought, "Fuck this," and let
her fall her back, because we didn't want to touch her anymore.
That was when her stomach exploded. The doctor hadn't quite finished
yet, but later I bet he wished he had. It went everywhere. I was
covered in the stuff. And you cannot imagine what it smells like. It's
like a mixture of the worst fart that you can ever imagine, mixed with
the stink of vomit, mixed in with the stench of the gases, and all this
brought together in one instant hit on your nose. It just makes you
retch.
The doctor was quite pragmatic about it, though he was none too
impressed that he got splattered with the stuff.
It's not the most horrible thing I ever came across, not by a long
chalk. But it affected me more than anything else I've ever
encountered, and I haven't got a clue why."

David:
"He got to the house at about eight o'clock in the morning. Jerry made
him a cup of coffee . . . things started to get a bit heated and Zoe
which was Jerry's wife heard the argument and she was sat at the top of
the stairs in the hallway and she had a cigarette on her left hand side
and a cup of coffee on her right hand side . . . and . . . Jerry got up
to do something and Nigel shot him in the back got the gun out pulled
the trigger and the bullet entered the back bounced off the spine and
went straight through Jerry's heart killed him stone dead . . . so then
- Nigel ran out into the hallway looked up the stairs and just took a
pot-shot . . . at uh Zoe . . . and he hit her in the shoulder and that
forced her to go down you can tell all this because of the way the
blood splatters y'know and the bullet sort of goes through and out into
the wall behind? So they work out the trajectory and then what happened
so yeah the first one hit her in the right shoulder and she fell back
and as she came up - he got to the top of the stairs pistol-whipped her
. . . put the gun right on her temple and pulled the trigger . . . and
he obviously thought she was dead he turned 'round and walked down the
stairs . . . but the bullet had hit . . . the skull . . . but it hadn't
um penetrated so it slid between the skin and the skull 'round and blew
out the back . . . so she got back up again . . . and he turned 'round
an' - I can only imagine the panic and in the murderer's mind by now
thinking y'know she's not gonna fucking die . . . so - just pulls the
trigger and the bullet enters her cheek . . . smashes her upper palate
goes through her tongue . . . and then blows out on the joint of the
jaw and goes back into her shoulder . . . but this time she stays down
. . . and so the - again all this is being recorded - right? You can
hear the shots and the noises in the background - Jerry's recording it
all, because he was so paranoid he had his whole house bugged it's
really really strange - so you hear him go down stairs . . . and uh . .
. Zoe sort of . . . possibly pulls herself together . . . and - turns
herself over onto her front and then slowly at first but then she gets
quicker she crawls into her bedroom - and she gets on the phone - and
she dials 999 . . . now - anyone that phones the operator all of that
is also recorded so we had all that back as well - so the conversation
went something like - em, "Hello emergency - which service do you
want?" and Zoe bear in mind she's been shot through the tongue she's
lost her upper palate and her jaw's fucked all you hear is her saying,
"Huhee-huhee," like this - and this woman says, "I'm sorry I can't hear
you my love what do you want?" and you hear, "Hulice-hulice!" with a
lot of panic in the voice because she's obviously very frightened - and
the woman says, "Look - I'm sorry you're going to have go and get mummy
I can't understand a word you're saying." . . . and then a -you can
hear the footsteps rapidly coming up the stairs . . . you hear the door
- burst open . . . you hear her trying to scream - now but it's just a
pitiful . . . screech more than a scream . . . and he pulls the duvet
off the bed - puts it across her head - puts the gun to the back of her
head n'pulls the trigger and that's her dead now that's gone right into
the brain and it was probably a good thing really at least it's over
for her now . . . then you hear him go back downstairs and he continues
with his search and quite a methodical search he made of the house -
y'know he's so cold uh this individual . . . and uh - then he got hold
of Jerry's body and he - dragged Terry's body into this - like anteroom
off the kitchen and poured drugs over him . . . and that was just to
make it look like it had been a drugs killing . . . but it wasn't a
drugs killing it was for the fifteen grand everyone thought Terry had
stashed in the house . . . he murdered them out of pure greed and
nothing more."

Anthony:
"The two of us were on night duty in a patrol car and got a call at
about three o'clock in the morning that there'd been a car crash. A
Mini jumped a red light and had a head-to-head with another car.
Lucky for them it happened right next to a fire station, and we were
pretty close to the scene ourselves. But you know, even at that time in
the morning Rent-A-Crowd turned up. You always get Rent-A-Crowd, they
just love to stare at dead people.
We had to push them back so that the firemen could do their job. They
cut the roof off the Mini, and they could see a bloke in the driver's
chair. But he was totally incoherent, punchy from the impact and on top
of that, obviously pissed as a fart.
The bloke in the other car, which was a Jag incidentally, was sitting
on the kerb completely uninjured, although he looked to be in
shock.
God, I hate doing crash scenes. You're dealing with the crowd, and at
the same time you're responsible for the injured parties.
Anyway, we took this pissed bloke out of the Mini, and, although he
could walk and he could talk, you couldn't understand what it was he
was trying to say, but he was definitely trying to say something.
The ambulance turned up for them, I called traffic to say, "You can
deal with this now, it's an accident. The bloke in the Mini's obviously
been drinking, he's in the driver's seat, he caused the accident, deal
with it."
I had to follow on to the hospital with the two of them, get the blood
off them, that sort of thing. So the two men were taken away, I was
about to get into my patrol car. The fire brigade were clearing up,
putting the roof back on top of the Mini.
The only thing I had to do now was have a look inside both cars,
because the contents are my responsibility. So I reached into the Mini
first, taking bits and pieces out, and - I felt this flesh. Under the
passenger seat.
So I shouted "There's somebody in here!" The firemen ran over with
their stuff, and hydraulically lifted the chair out.
It turned out this girl was the driver and the pissed bloke was her
passenger. During the collision the Mini turned over, and while it was
spinning she hit the roof, then she travelled back, and the Mini went
over on its side, he was pushed into the driver's seat. But the
pressure of it hitting the ground had then collapsed the car down on
top of her, and that's why we couldn't find her.
She was very pretty. About nineteen. What got me was the fact that she
was still warm, and looked uninjured, apart from the fact that her head
was bent right back. She looked like you thought if you shook her,
she'd wake up. Her eyes were open. They still had that life, that
sparkling look about them. It takes about half an hour before the eyes
lose that and start to look glassy. Like marbles."

William:
"I'm a reader, it passes the time. I've checked out what Sartre has to
say about existence, and basically I don't agree. I mean, God maybe
dead, but to be honest, who gives a fuck? And I reckon there is such a
thing as human nature. I know all about it, believe me. I see it in
action every working day.
Human nature's ugly, insane, and most of all, violent. As for freedom,
none of these poor fuckers are free, Christ, that's why they do what
they do. Fucked out of their heads all the time. Killing or being
killed.
I've seen death come to so many people, suddenly, unexpectedly, in the
midst of their oh-so-busy lives. They never think it's going to get
them. But I know that it can reach out for you at any time."