The Fireman by Stephen Leather Page A

want?’ I asked.
    ‘He wants to know if you will buy any flowers.’ He could see my confusion, so waved his hand, taking in the tower blocks around us. ‘These are all funeral parlours. He just assumed that you are here to make funeral arrangements and he hopes you will buy one of his wreaths.
    ‘Tell him to fuck off, Howard,’ I said. Two more taxis had pulled up behind ours and more of the vultures descended, grabbing for the door handles before the wheels had stopped turning.
    ‘Where do we go?’ I asked Howard, and he led me down a small side road towards a high wall. There was a sign there which said Kowloon Public Mortuary with a row of Chinese characters below it. Across a tarmac car park was a building the colour of creme caramel. We walked to two glass doors at the entrance but they were locked and Howard had to press the bell by the side of the doorway until a young Chinese girl in a white coat came to open it. We walked into a cool hall tiled like an East End butcher’s shop. There was a big steel freezer door to the left but we walked past it, Howard talking to the girl in English, slowly, pronouncing each word clearly and precisely.
    ‘She’s on the ground floor, this way,’ he said to me. We followed the girl to another freezer door, which she pulled open with a grunt. Plumes of cold air billowed out and the temperature dropped a couple of degrees. I don’t know what I expected, but this wasn’t it. I’d visited mortuaries in Britain but they were as sanitized as a supermarket, bodies neatly stored away in oversize filing cabinets. This place was obscene. The fridge was filled with metal racks, like steel bunk beds, three high. Each was occupied by a corpse. Not one was covered, they were just lying there in the clothes they’d been delivered in. There was an old man in a pair of green and white pyjamas, his face twisted into a sneering grimace, a child with her throat cut, her head practically severed from her body, a young man in a safari suit who’d obviously gone through a car windscreen. All of them just lying there like broken robots.
    ‘Why aren’t they covered with cloths or something?’ I asked the girl, but I’d spoken too fast and she just gave me a puzzled look. ‘This is macabre, Howard. It’s like something out of a cheap horror movie.’
    At the far end two corpses, stiff with rigor mortis, had been stacked against the wall like planks of wood. They were both men, and both had been placed with their foreheads against the side of the fridge, arms frozen by their sides.
    All the bodies had labels tied to their big toes, name, date and identification number.
    The girl walked towards the two standing bodies, and then turned left and pointed at one of the racks.
    ‘Oh God, I don’t believe this,’ I said. The corpses were all dressed in the clothes they’d died in, and Sally had been wearing nothing when she’d fallen from the hotel. Now she was lying on a sheet of metal as naked as the day she was born, her flesh as cold and white as a boiled chicken, frost collecting on the black triangular thatch of hair between her legs. Close up I could see she was covered in grey bruises and contusions and then I realized I was looking at the good side, the side that hadn’t hit the ground first. Howard put his hand on my shoulder and tried to pull me back but I shook him off and stepped forward, my arms stretched out towards her. Her left side was crushed and mangled, the face, down the arm and hip and her leg, the blood congealed and hard, the flesh ripped and shredded from the impact, fragments of bone protruding through the punctured skin. I looked at Howard and his face said: ‘What did you expect after falling fifteen floors?’ and though the words were never phrased I said: ‘I thought she’d at least have been covered. At least they could have covered her up.’ I pointed at the girl in the white coat, my finger wavering before her startled face.
    ‘Get a cloth, something