‘Doesn’t seem much of a basis to build a relationship on, lies.’
‘I’m not saying it’s all lies – I’m saying if you are looking for perfection, K, you’re going to end up alone. The only guys who aren’t ever going to lie to you are the ones lying in the fridges in your mortuary.’
‘Shit!’ Cleo said suddenly.
‘What?’
‘It’s OK. You just reminded me of something I have to do.’
‘Listen, I have an invasion coming any minute – Robert’s got a bunch of clients coming to lunch! Can I call you back this evening?’
‘No probs.’
When she hung up she looked at her watch and realized she had been so wrapped up in her thoughts about Roy that she had completely forgotten to go to the mortuary. She and Darren had left the woman’s body they’d brought off the beach last night on a trolley, because all the fridges were full – one bank of them was out of commission, in the middle of being replaced. A local undertaker was due to collect two of the bodies at midday, and she was meant to let him in, and at the same time put the woman in one of the vacated fridges.
She hauled herself to her feet. There was a message on her answering machine from her sister, Charlie, who had phoned about ten o’clock. She knew exactly what it would be about. She would have to listen to Charlie’s blow-by-blow account of being dumped by her boyfriend. Maybe she could persuade her to meet somewhere in the sun, in a park or down on the seafront, for a late lunch after the mortuary? She dialled the number and, to her relief, Charlie agreed readily, suggesting a place she knew under the Arches.
Thirty minutes later, after crawling along in heavy traffic headed for the beaches, she drove in through the mortuary gates, relieved to see that the covered side entrance, where bodies were delivered and removed out of sight of the public, was empty – the undertaker had not yet arrived.
The car’s roof was down and her spirits were up, a fraction, thinking about something Roy Grace had said to her a few weeks ago, as she had driven him out to a country pub in this car. You know, on a warm evening, with the roof down like this and you beside me, it’s pretty hard to think there is much wrong with the world!
She parked the blue MG in its usual place, opposite the front door of the grey, pebbledash-rendered mortuary building, and then opened her bag to take out her phone and warn her sister she was going to be late. But her phone wasn’t in it.
‘Bugger!’ she said out loud.
How the hell could she have forgotten it? She never, ever, ever left home without it. Her Nokia was attached to her via an invisible umbilical cord.
Roy Grace, what the hell are you doing to my head?
She closed the roof of the car, even though she was only intending to be a few minutes, and locked it. Then, standing beneath the exterior CCTV camera, she inserted her key into the lock of the mortuary’s staff entrance and turned it.
One of the vehicles in that solid stream of traffic trickling along the Lewes Road gyratory system, on the far side of the mortuary’s wrought-iron gates, was a black Toyota Prius. Unlike most of the rest of the traffic, instead of continuing on down to the seafront, it made a left turn into the next street along from the mortuary, then cruised slowly up the steep hill, which was lined on both sides with small terraced houses, looking for a parking space. The Time Billionaire smiled. There was a space right ahead of him, just the right size. Waiting for him.
Then he sucked his hand again. The pain was getting worse; it was muzzing his head. It didn’t look good either. It had swollen more during the night.
‘Stupid little bitch!’ he shouted, in a sudden fit of rage.
Even though Cleo had been working in mortuaries for eight years, she was still not immune to the smells. The stench that hit her today, as she opened the door, almost physically knocked her backward. Like all mortuary staff, she had long ago trained herself to breathe through her mouth, but the reek of decaying meat – sour, caustic, fetid – hung heavy and cloying, as if weighed down by extra atoms, cloaking her like an invisible fog, swirling around her, seeping in through every pore in her skin.
Just as quickly as she possibly could, holding her breath and forgetting about the call she was going to make, she hurried past her office and entered the small changing room. She pulled a fresh pair of green pyjamas off a hook, dug her feet into her white wellington boots, tore a fresh pair of latex gloves from a pack and wriggled her clammy hands into them. Then she put on a face mask; not that it was going to do much to reduce the smell, but it would help a little.
She turned right and walked down the short, grey-tiled corridor and into the receiving room, which adjoined the main post-mortem room, and switched the lights on. The dead woman had been booked in as Unknown Female, the name given to all unidentified women who fetched up here. Cleo always felt it was such a sad thing, to be dead and unidentified.
She was lying on a stainless-steel table, next to another three parked alongside each other, her severed arm placed between her legs, her hair hanging back, dead straight, with a tiny strand of green weed in it. Cleo strode up to her, flapping her hand sharply, sending a dozen bluebottles flying into the air and scudding around the room. Through the stench of decay, she could smell something else strongly as well. Salt. The tang of the sea. And suddenly, tenderly plucking the tendril of weed out of the woman’s hair, she wasn’t sure she wanted to meet her sister on the beach.
Then the back doorbell rang. The undertaker had arrived. She checked the image on the CCTV before opening the rear doors into the loading bay and helping the two casually dressed young men load the bodies, in their plastic body-bags, into the rear of the discreet brown van. They then drove off. She locked the bay doors carefully and returned to the receiving room.
From the cupboard in the corner she removed a white plastic body-bag and walked back to the body. She hated dealing with floaters. Their skin after a few weeks immersed had a ghostly, fatty-white colour and the texture seemed to change, so that it looked like slightly scaly pork. The terminology was adipocere. The first mortuary technician Cleo had worked under, who relished the macabre, told her with a gleam in his eye that it was also known as grave wax.
The woman’s lips, eyes, fingers, part of her cheeks, breasts, vagina and toes had been eaten away, by small fish or crabs. Her badly chewed breasts lay, wrinkled, splayed out to the right and left, with much of their inside tissue gone, along with every scrap of the poor creature’s dignity.
Who are you? she wondered, as she opened up the bag, laying it out under her, lifting her slightly but being careful in case her flesh tore.
When they’d examined her last night, along with two uniformed police officers, a detective inspector and a police surgeon, and Ronnie Pearson, the coroner’s officer, they had found no obvious signs to indicate she might have been murdered. There were no marks on her body, other than just the abrasions that might be expected for someone rolled along shingle by the surf, although she was in a considerable state of decomposition, and evidence might already have been lost. The coroner had been notified, and they had been authorized to recover the body to the mortuary for a post-mortem on Monday, for identification – most probably from dental records.
She was looking at her carefully again now, checking for a ligature mark around her neck that they might have missed, or an entry hole from a bullet, trying to see what she could learn about her. It was always hard to determine the age of someone who had been in the water a while. She could be anywhere from her mid-twenties to her forties, she guessed.
She could have been a drowned swimmer or someone who had gone overboard from a boat. A suicide victim, perhaps. Or even, as sometimes happened, a burial at sea that hadn’t been properly weighted down and had broken free, although it tended to be men more than women who were buried at sea. Or she could have been one of the thousands of people who just disappear every year. A misper.
Carefully she lifted away the severed arm and placed it on the empty stainless-steel table
next to her body. Then, very gently, she began the process of rolling her over on to her stomach, to check her back. As she did so, she heard a faint click from inside the building.
She raised her head and listened for a moment. It sounded like the front door opening, or closing.
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‘Sandy!’ he yelled. ‘SANDY!!!’
She was pulling away from him. Shit, she was running fast!
Wearing a plain white T-shirt, blue cycling shorts and trainers, clutching a small bag in her hand, the woman was racing along a path around the side of the lake. Grace followed her, dodging past a statue, and saw her weaving in between several children playing. She swerved around two Schnauzer dogs, each chasing the other. Back on to a path, past a smartly dressed woman on horseback and a whole crocodile of matronly women Nordic-walking in pairs.
Roy was now regretting his beer. Sweat was streaming down his face, stinging his eyes, semi-blinding him. Two roller-bladers were coming towards him. He swerved right. They swerved the same way. Left. They swerved the same way. He lunged right at the last minute, in desperation, his leg banging painfully into a small, free-standing bench, and fell flat on his face, the bench underneath him, digging into him.
‘T’schuldigen!’ One of the roller-bladers, a tall, teenage boy, was standing over him, looking concerned. The other knelt and held out a hand.
‘It’s OK,’ he gasped.
‘You are American?’
‘English.’
‘I am so sorry.’
‘I’m OK, fine, thanks. My fault. I—’ Shaken and feeling foolish, he took the boy’s hand and allowed himself to be hauled up. As soon as he was back on his feet, his eyes were hunting for Sandy.
‘You have cut your leg,’ the other said.
Grace barely gave it a glance. He saw there was a rip in his jeans on his left shin and blood was coming out, but he didn’t care. ‘Thank you – Danke,’ he said, looking ahead, to the left, to the right, in panic.
She had vanished.
The path ran straight on, for several hundred yards, through dense woodland and way in the distance opened on to a clearing. But there was also a right fork over a narrow, metal-railed bridge.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
He balled his hands in frustration. Think!
Which way had she gone? Which possible way?
He turned back to the two roller-bladers. ‘Excuse me, which is the nearest way to a road over there?’
Pointing at the bridge, one said, ‘Yah, this is the shortest way to the road. It is the only road.’
He thanked them, stumbled on for some yards, thinking, then forked right, weaving through a group of cyclists coming towards him over the bridge, and began to run faster, ignoring the stinging pain in his leg. Sandy would head for an exit, he figured. Crowds. He broke into a limping sprint, keeping off the crowded path, running along the grass beside it, shooting the occasional glance down at the ground ahead for benches, darting dogs, sunbathers, but mostly keeping his eyes fixed on the distance, looking desperately for a flash of blonde hair.
It was her! OK, he’d only caught part of her profile, and had not had a good look at her face, but it had been enough. It was Sandy. It had to be! And why the hell else would she have run off, if it wasn’t her?
He raced on, desperation numbing the pain. He could not have come so far, so damn far, just to let her slip from his grasp like this.
Where are you?
A brilliant ray of sunlight shone straight in his eye, like a flashlight beam, for an instant. A reflection off a bus moving along the road, no more than a hundred yards away. Then he saw another glint. It wasn’t sunlight this time.
He dodged around a jolly-looking group having their picture taken, just as the camera flashed, ran over a verge of ragged grass and reached an empty road with the woodland of the garden on either side and a bus pulled over. There was no sign of Sandy.
Then he saw her again, as the bus moved on, a hundred yards ahead of him, still running!
‘SANNDDDDDYYYYYY!’ he hollered.
She stopped in her tracks for a moment and stared in his direction, as if wondering whom he was shouting at.
Leaving her in no doubt, waving his arm frantically, he sprinted towards her, shouting, ‘Sandy! Sandy! Sandy!’
But she was already running again and vanished around a bend. Two mounted policemen appeared, coming towards him, and for a moment he wondered whether to ask them for help. Instead he sprinted on past them, conscious of their wary stares.
Then in the distance he could see the yellow wall of a building. She was running past a red stop light and a skip, over a bridge, past the building and a cluster of buses.
Then she stopped by a parked silver BMW and appeared to be searching in her bag for something – the key, he presumed.
And suddenly he was alongside her, gasping for air. ‘Sandy!’ he said elatedly.
She turned her head, panting hard, and said something to him in German.
And then, staring at her properly for the first time, he realized it wasn’t Sandy.
It wasn’t her at all.
His heart plunged like an elevator with a snapped cable. She had the same profile, uncannily the same, but her face was wider, flatter, much plainer. He couldn’t see her eyes, because they were behind dark shades, but he didn’t need to. It wasn’t Sandy’s mouth; this was a small, thin mouth. It wasn’t Sandy’s fine, silky skin; this face was pockmarked from childhood acne.
‘I’m – I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’
‘You are English?’ she said with a pleasant smile. ‘Can I help you?’
She had her key out now, hit the fob and the doors unlocked. She opened the driver’s door and rummaged around for something inside. He heard the jangle of coins.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I – I made a mistake. I mistook you – I thought you were someone I knew.’
‘I forgot the time!’ She patted the side of her head, indicating stupidity. ‘The police give you tickets very quickly here. Two hours only on the ticket!’
She pulled a handful of euros out of the door pocket.
‘Can I ask you a question, please? Ah – were you here – in the Englischer Garten – on Thursday? At about this time?’
She shrugged. ‘I think so. In this weather, I come often.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Last Thursday?’ she said.
‘Yes.’
She nodded. ‘Definitely. For sure.’
Grace thanked her and turned away. His clothes were clinging to his skin with perspiration. A ribbon of blood trailed across his right trainer. A short distance away he saw Marcel Kullen walking towards him. He felt totally crushed. He pulled out his mobile phone and raised it to his ear, as the woman walked across to the ticket-vending machine. But he wasn’t making a phone call. He was taking a photograph.
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Cleo continued listening. She had very definitely heard a click.
Halting midway in her process of rolling the slender, fragile, grey cadaver over, she gently lowered her back down on to the stainless-steel table. ‘Hello?’ she called out, her voice muffled by her mask.
Then she stood still, listening, staring uneasily through the door at the silent grey tiles of the corridor. ‘Hello? Who’s that?’ she called out, louder, feeling a tightening in her throat. She lowered her mask, letting it hang by the tapes. ‘Hello?’
Silence. Just the faint hum of the fridges.
A slick of fear shot through her. Had she left the outside door open? Surely not, she never left it open. She tried to think clearly. The smell when she had opened the door – could she have left it open to let some fresh air in?
No way, she would not have been so stupid. She always closed the door; it self-locked. Of course she had closed it!
So why wasn’t the person out there replying?
And in her over-revving heart she already knew the answer to that. There were some weirdos around for whom mort
uaries held a fascination. They’d had a number of break-ins in the past, but now the latest security systems had so far, for a good eighteen months, acted as an effective deterrent.
Suddenly she remembered the CCTV monitor on the wall and looked up at it. It was showing a static black and white image of the tarmac outside the door, and the flower bed and brick wall beyond. The tail lights and rear bumper of her car were just in frame.
Then she heard the distinct rustle of clothes out in the corridor.
Goosebumps broke out over her entire body. For an instant she froze, her brain spinning, trying to get traction. There was a phone on the shelf next to the cabinet, but she didn’t have time to get to it. She looked around frantically for a weapon that was in reach. For an instant she considered, absurdly, the severed arm of the cadaver. Fear tightened her skin; her scalp felt as if she were wearing a skullcap.
The rustling came closer. She saw a shadow moving along the tiles.
Then, suddenly, her fear turned to anger. Whoever the hell it was out there had no damn right to be here. She decided she was not going to be scared or intimidated by some sicko who got kicks out of breaking into the mortuary. Her mortuary.
In a few fast, determined strides, she reached the cabinet, slid the door open, noisily, and pulled out the largest of the Sabatier carving knives. Then, gripping it tightly by the handle, she ran at the opened doorway. And collided, with a scream of terror, with a tall figure in an orange T-shirt and lime-green shorts, who gripped her arms, pinning them to her sides. The knife clattered to the tiled floor.
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Marcel Kullen pulled over to the kerb and pointed across the street. Roy Grace saw a large, beige-coloured store on the corner. It had book-lined windows and the interior was dark. Lights inside, hanging from stalks, were switched on, providing decoration rather than any illumination. They reminded Grace of glow-worms.