You see it occurred to me the other night that in almost every crime series on television there is at least one scene where the spouses/parents/offspring/siblings of the deceased go to the mortuary to identify the body. And every time I see such a scene I’m reminded of my own experience of the ghastly process when we still lived in Edinburgh. It began when Alison received a phone call from the Police to inform her that one of her nieces, a particularly troubled nineteen year-old, had hung herself from a tree in a wood near her home. The girl’s father was said to be too “upset” (i.e. drunk and incapable) to deal with the matter, but he did manage to nominate his sister as the person to go to. So it fell to Alison, with my support, to meet the CID’s family liaison detective, obtain the death certificate, arrange the funeral, and even make sure that the poor lassie was dressed for the occasion. But first of all there was the requirement to formally identify the body. So one afternoon the young detective (who you’ll not be surprised to learn really, really fancied Alison) took us into some nondescript building just off the High Street and led us along a dark corridor to the viewing window. The room on the other side of the window was empty, but moments later two wee guys clad in medical gowns wheeled in the body on a trolley. Now those two guys were probably the nicest, most caring people you’d ever meet, but from their clockwork-like movements, their fixed, glazed expressions and the way they jerked back the sheet to reveal the lassie’s face, I just couldn’t help but think that they resembled a pair of J F Sebastian’s “friends” from Blade Runner. And sadly to this day I’ve never been able to get that image out of my head.