Ronnie’s body was found by a jogger, out before seven on the following Monday. In the day between his being dumped and being found his corpse had already begun to deteriorate.
But the pathologist had seen far, far worse. He watched dispassionately while the two mortuary technicians stripped the body, folded the clothes and placed them in tagged plastic bags. He waited patiently and attentively while the wife of the deceased was ushered into his echoing domain, her face ashen, her eyes swelled to bursting with too many tears. She looked down at her husband without love, staring at the wounds and at the marks of torture quite unflinchingly. The pathologist had a whole story written behind this last confrontation between Sex-King and untroubled wife. Their loveless marriage, their arguments over his despicable way of life, her despair, his brutality, and now, her relief that the torment was finally over and she was released to start a new life without him. The pathologist made a mental note to look up the pretty widow’s address. She was delicious in her indifference to mutilation; it made his mouth wet to think of her.
Ronnie knew Bernadette had come and gone; he could sense too the other faces that popped into the mortuary just to peer down at the Sex-King. He was an object of fascination, even in death, and it was a horror he hadn’t predicted, buzzing around in
the cool coils of his brain, like a tenant who refuses to be ousted by the bailiffs, still seeing the world hovering around him, and not being able to act upon it.
In the days since his death there had been no hint of escape from this condition. He had sat here, in his own dead skull, unable to find a way out into the living world, and unwilling, somehow, to relinquish life entirely and leave himself to Heaven. There was still a will to revenge in him. A part of his mind, unforgiving of trespasses, was prepared to postpone Paradise in order to finish the job he had started. The books needed balancing; and until Michael Maguire was dead Ronnie could not go to his atonement.
In his round bone prison he watched the curious come and go, and knotted up his will.
The pathologist did his work on Ronnie’s corpse with all the respect of an efficient fish-gutter, carelessly digging the bullet out of his cranium, and nosing around in the stews of smashed bone and cartilage that had formerly been his knees and elbows. Ronnie didn’t like the man. He’d leered at Bernadette in a highly unprofessional way; and now, when he was playing the professional, his callousness was positively shameful. Oh for a voice; for a fist, for a body to use for a time. Then he’d show this meat-merchant how bodies should be treated. The will was not enough though: it needed a focus, and a means of escape.
The pathologist finished his report and his rough sewing, flung his juice-shiny gloves and his stained instruments on to the trolley beside the swabs and the alcohol, and left the body to the assistants.
Ronnie heard the swing-doors close behind him as the man departed. Water was running somewhere, splashing into the sink; the sound irritated him.
Standing beside the table on which he lay, the two technicians discussed their shoes. Of all things, shoes. The banality of it, thought Ronnie, the life-decaying banality of it.
‘You know them new heels, Lenny? The ones I got to put on my brown suedes? Useless. No bleeding good at all.’
‘I’m not surprised.’
‘And the price I paid for them. Look at that; just look at that. Worn through in a month.’
Paper-thin.’
‘They are, Lenny, they’re paper-thin. I’m going to take them back.’
‘I would.’
‘lam.’
‘I would.’
This mindless conversation, after those hours of torture, of sudden death, of the post-mortem that he’d so recently endured, was almost beyond endurance. Ronnie’s spirit began to buzz round and round in his brain like an angry bee trapped in an upturned jam-jar, determined to get out and start stinging –
Round and round; like the conversation.
‘Paper-bloody-thin.’
‘I’m not surprised.’
‘Bloody foreign. These soles. Made in fucking Korea.’