Looking Good Dead

  Today he felt positively elated. Not because of the dead body he was coming to study, but because of the woman who worked here. His date for tonight.

  But he wasn’t about to tell Glenn Branson that.

  17

  Tom carefully reversed his Audi out of the bay in the Gravytrain Distributing parking lot, nervous of hitting Ron Spacks’s Ferrari, then stuck his phone into the hands-free cradle and dialled Kellie, deep in thought.

  That image of the woman being butchered was chilling him, going round and round in his mind. It was a movie, must have been – there were hundreds of movies he had never seen – just a scene from a thriller. Or maybe a trailer for one. You could create all kinds of effects these days. It was a film.

  It had to have been.

  But he knew he was just trying to convince himself. The trashing of his computer, the threatening email? He shivered as if a dark cloud had slipped across his soul. Just what the hell had he really seen on Tuesday night?

  Then he heard Kellie’s voice, a tad more cheery now.

  ‘Hiya,’ she said.

  ‘Darling?’ he said. ‘Sorry about that, I was with a very difficult customer.’

  ‘No, it’s OK, it’s probably just me. It’s just – you know – it was spooky.’

  As he drove along past a row of factory and warehouse units, another plane was coming in to land, and he raised his voice above the din. ‘Tell me exactly what happened.’

  ‘It was just a phone call. The man asked if this was the Bryce residence, then if I was Mrs Kellie Bryce, and when I told him I was, he hung up.’

  ‘You know what it is?’ Tom said. ‘It’s probably one of those con men. I read about them in the paper the other day – there’s a whole ring operating. They call up people pretending to be from their bank, saying it’s a security check; they get them to confirm a whole load of stuff about their house, their passwords, then their bank details and credit cards. It could have been one of those interrupted in mid-flow.’

  ‘Maybe.’ She did not sound any more convinced than he felt. ‘He had a strange accent.’

  ‘What kind of an accent?’

  ‘Sort of European, not English.’

  ‘And he didn’t say anything else at all?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you expecting any deliveries?’

  There was an awkward silence. ‘Not exactly.’

  Shit. She had bought something. ‘What do you mean not exactly, darling?’

  ‘The bidding hasn’t closed.’

  Tom didn’t even want to know what today’s extravaganza might be. ‘Listen, I’ll try to get home early. I have to go into town and collect my laptop – it’s being fixed again.’

  ‘Still wrong?’

  ‘Yes, some glitch that won’t go away. How’s the weather?’

  ‘Brightening up.’

  ‘Maybe if I get down in time we could have a barbecue with the kids?’

  Her response was strange, almost evasive, he thought as he pulled out onto the main road, looking for the signs to London at a roundabout a short distance ahead. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Well, OK, maybe.’

  All the way, on the slow crawl along the M4 bottleneck, thanks to John Prescott’s cursed bus lane (for which many times Tom could have boiled the Deputy PM’s testicles in oil), he was trying to work out all the reasons someone might have made that call and then hung up. And the most likely was a delivery driver who got cut off. Simple as that. Nothing to get worried about.

  Except he did worry, because he loved Kellie and Max and Jessica just so damned much.

  His parents had been killed in a car smash in fog on the M1, when he was twenty, and his only sibling, his brother Zack, five years younger than him, who had never really got over it, was a dope-head dropout living in Bondi Beach in Sydney, doing odd jobs and a bit of surfing. Apart from Zack and a maternal uncle who lived in Melbourne who he had not seen since he was ten – and who hadn’t bothered to come to his parents’ funeral – Kellie, Max and Jessica were all the family he had, and that made them even more precious still.

  Just as the motorway ended and became Cromwell Road, his phone rang. No number showed in the caller display.

  Tom pressed the button to answer it. ‘Hello?’

  A male voice with a strong eastern European accent asked, ‘Is that Tom Bryce speaking?’

  Guardedly he said, ‘It is, yes.’

  Then the man hung up.

  18

  The remains of the dead woman lay on a steel trolley in the sterile post-mortem room, bagged in translucent plastic like frozen produce from a supermarket.

  The torso was wrapped in one sheet; the two legs and the hand that had been recovered from the field of rape were each parcelled separately. The hand was in a small bag, and there was a separate bag tied over each of the feet – this was done to protect any fibres or skin or soil particles that might be lodged under the nails. Then one large sheet had been wrapped around everything.

  It was this outer plastic sheet that Dr Frazer Theobald was very carefully removing, painstakingly checking for anything, however microscopic, that might have fallen from the dead woman’s skin or hair, which could have come from her killer.

  Grace had been to this place more times than he cared to remember. The first time had been some twenty years back, when he was a rookie cop attending his first post-mortem. He could still recall it vividly, seeing a sixty-year-old man who had fallen off a ladder, laid out stark naked, devoid of all human dignity with two tags bearing his name – one buff and one green – hanging from his big toe.

  When the mortician had cut around the back of the scalp, just beneath the hairline, then had peeled it forward so that it hung down over the face, exposing the skull, and the pathologist, wielding a rotary bandsaw, began to grind into the top of the skull, Grace had done what more than a few rookie cops do, which was to turn a horrible shade of green, stagger out to the toilet and throw up.

  He didn’t throw up any more, but the whole place still weirded him every time he came here. In part it was the reek of Trigene disinfectant that you carried away with you, in every pore of your skin, for hours after you had left the building; in part the diffused light that came in through the opaque windows, giving this room an ethereal quality. And then there was always the sense that the mortuary was a depot, a repository, a brutal halfway house between dying and resting in peace.

  Bodies were kept here until the cause of death was ascertained, and in some cases until they had been formally identified, then they would be released to an undertaker under the directions of relatives. Occasionally bodies were never identified. There was one, of an elderly man, in a fridge in the back storage room, which had been there for nearly a year. He had been found dead on a park bench, but no one had claimed him.

  Grace wondered sometimes, in his darker moments, if that might happen to him one day. He had no wife, no kids, no parents – just his sister, and if he outlived her? But he never dwelt on that too much – he had enough problems just with living – although he did think about death a lot. Particularly in here. Sometimes, staring at a body on a trolley or at the freezer locker doors, a chill would seep deep through his veins as he wondered how many ghosts this building contained.

  Cleo Morey, the Chief Mortician or Senior Pathology Technician, to give her her formal title, helped Dr Theobald lift the large outer sheet away and then carefully folded it for storage; it would be sent to a forensics laboratory if the body yielded no clues. Grace let his eyes linger on her for some moments. Even in her working clothes she looked strikingly beautiful, he thought, a view shared by everyone who met her.

  Then the Home Office pathologist unwrapped the torso and began the laborious task of measuring and recording the dimensions of each of the thirty-four stab wounds.

  The flesh looked paler than yesterday, and although much of it, including the dead woman’s breasts, was lacerated into strips of crimson pulp, he could see the first signs of marbling starting to occur. br />
  The room was dominated by two steel post-mortem tables, one fixed, the other, on which the remains of the woman lay, on castors. There was a blue hydraulic hoist and a row of fridges with floor-to-ceiling doors. The walls were tiled in grey and a drain gully ran all the way round. Along one wall was a row of sinks and a coiled yellow hose. Along another was a wide work surface, a metal cutting board and a glass-fronted display cabinet filled with instruments, some packs of Duracell batteries and grisly souvenirs that no one else wanted – mostly pacemakers – removed from victims.

  Next to this was a wallchart itemizing the name of the deceased, with columns for the weights of each brain, lungs, heart, liver, kidneys and spleen. All that was written on it so far was anon. woman.

  It was a sizeable room but it felt crowded this morning. In addition to the Home Office pathologist and the Chief Mortician, there was Darren, the Assistant Mortician, a sharp, good-looking and pleasant-natured lad of twenty with fashionably spiky black hair, Joe Tindall, the senior SOCO officer, who was photographing the ruler in position on each stab wound, Glenn Branson and himself.

  The visitors wore protective green gowns with white cuffs and either plastic overshoes or white wellington boots. The pathologist and the two morticians wore blue pyjamas and heavy-duty green aprons, and the pathologist had a mask hanging loosely below his chin. Grace looked at Cleo Morey, caught her eye, then the brief but very definite grin she gave him, and his nerves jangled.

  He felt like an excited kid. And it was wrong, it was unprofessional – every ounce of his concentration should be on this case right now – but he couldn’t help it. Cleo Morey was distracting him and that was a fact.

  They had already been out on a date just a few days ago. Well, it had been a date of sorts – a quick drink in a pub which got cut even shorter by a phone call calling him urgently back to work.

  God, she was gorgeous, he thought. And however many times he saw her, he could never quite square this young, leggy woman in her late twenties with her long blonde hair, English-rose face and quick brain, with working in this place, doing one of the grimmest jobs in the world. With her looks she could have been a model or an actress, and with her brains she could probably have had any career she set her mind to – and she had chosen this. Long hours on call day and night. At a moment’s notice she would get summoned to a riverbank, to a burned-out warehouse, to a shallow woodland grave to recover a body. To prepare the body for the pathologist to carry out the post-mortem, then to reassemble it as well as possible, no matter how burned or decomposed, for identification by relatives, and to offer them some succour, some glimpse of hope that their loved one’s death had not been quite as bad as the body indicated.

  As he watched Dr Theobald press a ruler against the fifth stab wound, right above the young woman’s belly button, he did not envy Cleo her task on this one. With luck, identification would be done by DNA, he thought; no parent should ever have to see this sight. Yet, he knew only too well just how important it was to some people to see for themselves. Often, despite all efforts to dissuade them, loved ones would insist on a viewing, just to see them one more time, to say goodbye.

  Closure.

  Something he’d never had. And that helped him to understand the need for it. Without closure you had no hope of moving on. Which was why he’d been stuck in a state of limbo since Sandy’s disappearance. There was a hot young medium coming to Brighton tomorrow, performing to just a small audience at a holistic health centre, and Grace had bought a ticket. It would probably turn out to be another blank, he knew, but the British and international police had exhausted every conventional avenue.

  Cleo shot him a glance, a warm, definitely flirty glance. Careful to check first that Branson wasn’t watching, he shot her back a wink.

  Christ, you are so gorgeous! he thought, heavy-hearted and feeling so damned guilty about Sandy. It was as if still, after all these years, he was being unfaithful to her by dating another woman.

  His mobile phone beeped, signalling a text message. He pulled it from his inside pocket and glanced at the display. It was from DC Nicholl back at the Major Incident Suite.

  Teresa Wallington eliminated.

  Immediately Grace sidled up to Branson and motioned him over to the rear of the room. ‘I think you need to work on your hunch technique,’ Grace said to him. Then he held up the phone for his colleague to read the message.

  ‘Shit. I had a feeling – like I really had a feeling about this,’ the Detective Sergeant said. He looked so despondent Grace felt sorry for him.

  Giving him a pat of encouragement, he said, ‘Glenn, in the movie Se7en Morgan Freeman had a hunch that didn’t turn out quite right either.’

  Glancing sideways at him, Branson said, ‘Are you implying this is some trait common to black cops?’

  ‘Nah, he’s an actor.’ Grace eyed Cleo again, watching her streaked blonde hair swinging, incongruously pretty, against the green apron strap around her neck. ‘Maybe it’s just common to big, bald gorillas.’ He gave him another friendly pat.

  Then he dialled Nick from the landline phone on the work surface beside him. The new digital phones the police were being issued with scrambled all conversations, but at present their conventional mobile phones were simple to eavesdrop on, so he avoided using them on anything sensitive.

  ‘She got cold feet about the wedding,’ Nick Nicholl explained. ‘Did a runner. Now she’s come back very contrite.’

  ‘Sweet,’ Grace said sarcastically. ‘I’ll tell Glenn. He loves a good weepie with a happy ending.’

  Silence down the phone. DC Nick Nicholl possessed a good brain but a sense of humour bypass.

  They ran through the remaining shortlist of missing women who fitted the description, and Grace told Nicholl to make sure the police had something that DNA could be extracted from, from each of the four women. Nicholl updated him on the state of the continuing inch-by-inch grid search of the area surrounding where the body had been found, for the girl’s head and left hand. Privately, Grace did not expect them to turn up. The hand possibly, because a dog or a fox might have run off with it. But he doubted they would ever find the head.

  He made another quick call, to check on the progress of the trial of Suresh Hossain – a case which had become very personal to him. It was a difficult case; the Crown Prosecution Service had made some blunders, and he hadn’t handled it as well as he should have done. He’d been stupid in taking a piece of evidence, a shoe belonging to the murdered man, to a medium. The defence counsel had found out about it and humiliated him in court.

  Dr Frazer Theobald was making his usual slow but thorough progress. His examination of the dead woman’s stomach indicated she had not eaten in the immediate hours before she was killed, which would give some help in gauging when she might have died – early in the evening rather than late, if she had not had an evening meal. There was no smell of alcohol either – which would have been present after just a couple of drinks – which meant it was unlikely although not impossible that she had been to a bar.

  Shortly after half past twelve, when Grace stepped away again, this time to call Dennis Ponds to check on the 2 p.m. press conference, Glenn Branson walked over to him, looking uncharacteristically shaken and bilious.

  ‘You’d better come and look at this, Roy.’

  Grace killed the call he was about to make and followed him across the room. Everyone was standing around the table in what looked to him like shocked silence. As he approached he could smell the vile stench of excrement and bowel gases.

  The woman’s torso had been opened up, her ribcage was exposed and he could see that her heart, lungs and the rest of her vital organs had been removed, and lay waiting to be bagged and put back inside her chest when the post-mortem was finished, leaving an empty carcass.

  On the metal-edged dissecting tray, raised some inches above her, was a length of pale brown tube which looked like a long sausage. It was about an inch in diameter, lying in a mess of blood, e
xcrement and mucus. Dr Theobald had made an incision in it, which he was holding open with forceps for everyone’s benefit.

  The pathologist turned to him, his moustachioed face even more serious than usual. Then he pointed. ‘I think you should take a look at that, Roy.’

  Anatomy had never been Grace’s strong point, and sometimes when peering at the organs of a cadaver it took him some time to orient himself and figure out what was what. He looked down, trying to work out what this might be. Part of the intestines, he thought. Then, as he was looking, Dr Theobald used the forceps to open the incision he had made further, and now Grace could see something in there.

  Something that everyone else in the room had already seen.

  Something that made him stare, for some moments, in complete, mind-boggled shock.

  Then he took an involuntary step back as if he wanted to get away from it.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said, closing his eyes for an instant, feeling the blood draining from his head. His stomach was boiling in shock and revulsion.

  ‘OhmyGod.’

  19

  It was a shiny, fat, black beetle, two inches long, with spiny feet and a ribbed back, and it had a single curved horn protruding from its head.

  Frazer Theobald picked it up, delicately, with a pair of tweezers and held it aloft for all to see. The creature was motionless.

  Grace who had never cared for beetles, took another step back. In truth he was not good at creepy-crawlies in general; he had been scared of spiders all his life and was very definitely wary of beetles. And this was – oh Jesus – one seriously horrible-looking creature.

  He caught Cleo’s eye and saw a flash of revulsion in her face.

  ‘That’s what, exactly?’ Branson said, his voice quavering, pointing down at the dissecting table, involuntarily rescuing Grace from asking a potentially dumb question.