Life on the Edge - The true story of the hero who saved the lives of twenty-nine people at Beachy Head. Keith Lane
have to go through the pleasantries, but I remember thinking what a bloody stupid question that was. I was anything but all right.
‘I’ll tell you what we’re going to do,’ she continued. ‘We’re going to walk to the mortuary, you’ll be asked to enter and in order to confirm your wife’s identity you must say the words, “That is my wife.”’
‘OK,’ I replied, as I rose to my feet shakily. I was about to do something I’d never even dreamed I would have to do. But now it had to be done.
I was so weak that I could hardly walk – my brother took me on one side and my daughter got hold of the other so that we could follow the coroner down the long hospital corridor. I remember a blur of people, but it was as if they were from another world and I was just a silent witness to what was going on. Perhaps they felt the same about me. Tears streaked down my face as my loved ones propped me up, and I knew that every person we passed was looking at me. It was as if I was an animal in a zoo.
All those gawping people made me want to strike out, to say, ‘What do you think you’re looking at?’ The moments of anger that hit you when you’re grieving come out of nowhere and are sometimes hard to suppress. But I didn’t strike out, I didn’t say a word, I just kept on walking. Then, all of a sudden we were at the mortuary waiting room. This was it.
‘Before you go in,’ said the coroner, ‘I must ask if you would like Maggie’s clothes?’
I said I would like them and was handed two brown bags. One contained her clothes, the other her jewellery, including her engagement ring and her wedding ring. They were her things, but still I had to officially identify her.
I was shown the entrance to the room where her body lay. Slowly I walked toward the curtains that were draped across the door. I swept them aside and walked into the room. Once inside, I looked up. The image I was met with will never leave me.
It was Maggie.
Her head was the only part of her that was exposed. The rest of her body was covered by a blanket. I was staring at the woman who, only yesterday morning, had kissed me goodbye before work. Now she was dead on a slab.
I collapsed, slumping towards the floor. My brother and daughter caught me, took me from the room and sat me down. I hadn’t said the words I needed to say. I still hadn’t identified her.
‘Are you ready to go back in again, Mr Lane?’ enquired the coroner gently.
I nodded. I was ready.
I walked back in stood at the edge of the room. I looked up and began to cry.
‘Yes, that’s my Maggie,’ I said, looking at her. Somehow, I couldn’t leave the room right away. I needed some time. ‘Could I have ten minutes on my own?’ I asked.
‘Of course you can,’ came the reply.
Slowly I walked towards her. Once I got close I could see that this wasn’t the Maggie I recognised. She was horribly battered and bruised. There was a gash across her left eyebrow, and a larger one down her side. The situation hardly felt real.
I put my hand under the blanket and took her hand. It was stone cold.
I stood there for ten minutes and cried my eyes out. I’ve never felt such a sense of confusion, such an overwhelming feeling of despair. As I cried, I spoke to Maggie’s body through my tears.
‘Why?’ I said, ‘Why did you do it? Why have you left me like this? You know how much I love you, you know how much I care for you, so why, why, why?’
Those moments of grief were a sort of hysteria and within that hysteria there were some selfish moments. ‘How am I going to cope without you,’ I said, half-shouting, half-crazed. ‘What am I going to do?’ They were awful things to say – my wife was dead and I was asking her how I was going to cope. At least I was alive!
Eventually I let go of Maggie’s hand and walked out – in pieces. My daughter and brother held me for quite a while and we did nothing but cry. But it couldn’t go on forever. Eventually, I picked up Maggie’s belongings, walked back down the corridor, out of the hospital and back to the car.
I put my seatbelt on and then let out a huge sigh. It felt like it came from somewhere deep within me. I’m not sure quite what it was – exhaustion from the last 48 nearly sleepless hours of worry, or maybe a strange sense of relief. All I knew was that I’d just spent my last moments with Maggie, and that it was time to go home.
Everyone experiences pain when they lose loved ones. Some people experience greater losses than I did – they lose their entire family in one go, they lose their children to war – and my experience was by no means unique or exceptional in the grand scheme of things. But it was special to me. Identifying my wife in that mortuary was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.
As I sat in the car in that car park, it was almost impossible to believe that the only thing to do next was to drive back to the home that we had once shared.
* * *
The next few days passed in an unreal haze. There were things to be done, people to contact and legal procedures to go through. As if to add insult to injury, I was informed that I had to face an interview with the police just three days after Maggie’s death. She had gone over Beachy Head but had left no note, and there had been no witnesses.
‘Nobody saw her die,’ a policeman explained to me. ‘As part of our procedure we need to ask you some questions. I’m sorry, Mr Lane, but we don’t know whether you were the cause of your wife’s death.’ The police began to grill me as though I were a criminal. I was faced with a barrage of questions, some of them incredibly personal. I was gobsmacked and repulsed.
They asked me what our sex life was like. Had the sex gone off? Had we been fighting? Was I physical with her? Did I beat her? Was the relationship awful? Had I been driven to the point where I could have killed her?
Having to rake over everything in such a way, and so soon after Maggie had died, was almost too much to bear. Nevertheless, I answered all their questions. My distress must have been pretty obvious, because after some time the police cut it off suddenly.
‘Don’t worry, Mr Lane,’ they said. ‘We know you’re innocent, but we always have to push people until we’re sure one way or the other. We have to report back and be able to say, “That man did not kill his wife” to our superiors.’
It was obvious the police felt bad about what they had to put me through, and looking back I can completely understand it all. They were only doing their job.
Once the possibility of murder had been eliminated, they were left with the option of suicide or ‘open verdict’. It would be another six months, after Maggie’s case finally went to court, before an open verdict about her death was reached. Why? Because no one saw her go and there was no note.
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