20

Mortuaries were places where the dead stopped being people and turned instead into being bags of meat, offal, blood and bone.  I had never been sick at the scene of a crime, but the first few times I had visited a mortuary the contents of my stomach had fairly quickly nearly been rendered up for examination.

          Eventually, the body bag was brought into the post-mortem room and the corpse of Vasily Kutziyez was laid out on the autopsy table, beneath the hum and glare of powerful halogen lighting.  The room was antiseptic with a stinging aroma of chemicals.  Voices were kept muffled, not so much out of respect but from a strange kind of fear.  The mortuary, after all, was one vast memento mori and what was happening to Vasily Kutziyez’s body would serve to remind each and every one of us that if the body were a temple, then it was possible to loot the temple and scatter its treasures and reveal its preciou