stands next to DC McGann and looks in, thinking about what is under the sheet. The last time she was in this hospital was with Jim.
‘I’d expected him to be in a drawer,’ she says. ‘You know, like on the television.’ She can make out Ted’s feet under the sheet, his gut, the peaks and troughs of him, hills and valleys, the whole rolling landscape. ‘It’s him, though,’ she says. ‘I can tell.’
DC McGann glances at her. ‘Ready?’
She nods. This copper is no more than a boy; poor bugger, having to do this.
‘Now as I explained in the car, Mrs Watson, you need to prepare for the fact that there has been considerable damage to the face, OK?’ He walks away and through a door at the far end of the glass divide.
She holds her breath. He disappears for a moment before reappearing on the other side of the glass. Slowly he peels back the sheet. Some TV series, she thinks. Some murder victim. Ted emerges inch by inch. His black hair is matted, crusted with dried blood, his face a pulp, save for one shiny bulge, hard and round and split: his eye. She steps away from the glass and puts her hands to her knees while the bouncing blackness clears.
‘My God.’
Taking in what she hopes is enough breath, she rolls her body slowly into a standing position, leaving her head until last. She looks in again, hand over her mouth. Ted’s head is still a mess.
‘Can you take the whole sheet off?’ She mouths the words, mimes the action with one hand.
The DC hesitates. He shakes his head but looks unsure. She feels suddenly old, old enough to be his mother.
She holds up her hands in prayer. ‘Please.’
DC McGann frowns, pulling back the sheet from Ted’s skin, which is yellowish and shot through with mouldy patterns. His swollen body is dead, so dead. Grey fogs his ribs. There is his appendix scar; his shrivelled penis nestling in the dark frizz; his legs, bluish, hairy, bald patches on his shins. She can’t stop looking. DC McGann is already pulling the sheet back into place. The sheet. The shroud.
Carol turns away from the window and presses her hands to her face. Nausea rises in her chest. She wanted to see all of him. To see that it was all of him. And it was him and not him, familiar and strange: slack and bare, skinny limbs, gigantic belly, no vanity left now in death.
Behind her, DC McGann sniffs. She didn’t notice him come back out.
‘Bruises killed him,’ she says. ‘And here’s me, covered in bruises all my life and still alive.’
‘He took quite a beating.’
‘He’d have hated to be seen like that. Always pulled his stomach in for photos.’ She steps back and bends over, crosses her arms over her belly against another rush of nausea. What was she expecting? To feel nothing? That she could pretend he was someone else, someone else’s, not as much a part of her as her own bones? She presses her fingertips to the glass, stares at her fingers, splayed and white around the tips. Her engagement and wedding bands shine yellow – looser now than when she ran away. She left them on out of some sense of loyalty, as if taking off two silly rings would amount to betrayal after she’d abandoned him without so much as a note.
She twists the rings around her finger. ‘I should take these off. The diamond keeps dropping underneath. It bangs on the surfaces, you know? I’m terrified of scratching everything.’
‘Mrs Watson.’
‘Thirty-five. Beaten to death outside his local, silly bloody bugger. Drunk, I assume.’
‘Mrs Watson?’
‘He’ll be somewhere even whisky can’t take him now, won’t he?’
‘I knew it was him,’ says the copper, touching her lightly on the elbow. ‘Recognised him myself. We’ve had a few … dealings with your husband these last few months.’
‘What do you mean, dealings?’
‘Trouble, you know. He was lucky he hadn’t been locked up before now. Or unlucky, I suppose. All I’m saying is, this wasn’t the first time, like.’
‘It’ll be the last, though, won’t it?’
He looks at his shoes, then back at her. ‘Listen, there’s some papers to sign, some personal effects, et cetera.’
Head thrumming, she lets herself be steered away.
* * *
From the patrol-car window, the grand houses in the old part of town slide away, one after the other. Iron gates protect them; mature shrubs skirt their long front gardens. Further back, chimney pots float in a sky slowly