Nor All Your Tears by Keith McCarthy Page A

the reddest face, the longest beard and the most pungent body stench I have ever encountered (and believe me, I have worked in NHS casualty departments where I have experienced a fairly broad range of bad breath, body odour, gangrene and smelly feet). He mumbled a lot too, looking towards me but not at me; I moved to sit diagonally opposite him but it seemed to make no discernible difference in the intensity of his perfume, as if no matter how far I travelled, I was doomed to share the same atmosphere with this harbinger of pong for ever. During this time, there was a string of visitors, all in the company of police officers, all professing very little enthusiasm for their environment and all doing so in ripe language.
    Eventually I was dragged away from the entertainment by a tall, saturnine constable who seemed not to notice that life’s rich pageant was being displayed before him for his entertainment. Having asked of me briefly, ‘Dr Elliot?’ and received an affirmative, he punched a five-digit code into a lock on a door, carefully shielding his actions with his other hand and thereby demonstrating a highly commendable attitude towards security, despite the fact that it was only the drunk and I who were in the room at the time, and he was a good twenty feet away. He led me down a short corridor, then down two flights of stairs, then along another, longer corridor; the atmosphere improved for a short while, then deteriorated again, although now the overwhelming note was one of perspiration and cabbage stewed for a week or two, so that it had been turned back into primeval pond life. My guide saying nothing, I decided to make a venture at conversation as we walked along the drab corridor.
    â€˜Busy night so far?’ I asked, by way of a start on this resolve. My escort looked at me, his expression suggesting that he had heard there was an imbecile in the vicinity and nothing else that he could see would fit the bill so perfectly. He said after a short pause and in a voice that was both sepulchral and vexed, ‘It’s not yet nine o’clock and the cells are already almost full.’
    â€˜Oh, dear,’ was all I could find to say. I could understand how the working environment might predispose to a distinctly pessimistic view of life.
    At the end of the corridor was a T-junction at which seated at a desk was another uniformed police officer, this one no sunnier than his colleague. Along the sides of the perpendicular corridor were arrayed the cells, sixteen in all. The smell here was a heady mix of odours that did not so much assault the olfactory organs as decimate them, while there was an equally disagreeable attack on the auscultatory apparatus from the cells’ inhabitants as they sang, groaned, shouted and profaned with gay abandon. This custody sergeant – for thus it was – looked up after writing with intense concentration something in a ledger. He was a tall, well-built man of middle age, running to fat and beginning to lose his hair. Fearful that he should consider me a felon and instantly incarcerate me, I said quickly, ‘I’m Dr Elliot, the police surgeon,’
    This evoked no enthusiasm, even when my escort nodded assent at the questioning look from this stout guardian of the cells. Returning his attention to me, he said without noticeable gusto, ‘He’s in number three. Making a terrible fuss, he was.’ How he had determined this given the unholy cacophony that seemed part of normal life down there was beyond me. My escort, keys clanking on his thigh, moved forward and I followed. We turned left and walked perhaps twenty yards along the corridor, passing through a bedlam of sound that changed with every three steps. We stopped before a door that was like all the rest; it was made of heavy steel, painted in a sort of green-grey paint that was curiously reminiscent of the contents of a boil. There was a small semicircular indentation in the door at eye