Dead Like You

by Peter James

  ‘Go away!’ Yac shouted. ‘I’m sleeping!’

  Then he turned and started walking back down the stairs. As he did so he heard the rap, rap, rap again. It was starting to annoy him. They should not be on his boat. This was private property!

  The sound of splintering glass stopped him in his tracks just as he stepped on to the saloon floor. Anger surged inside him. That idiot. That stupid idiot had knocked too hard! Well, he would go and teach him a lesson!

  But as he turned, he heard a cacophony of leather and rubber-soled footsteps.

  A voice shouted out, ‘POLICE! DON’T MOVE! POLICE!’

  The man with the comb-over was clattering down the steps, followed by several police officers in their yellow vests. The man was still holding up the wallet. Inside it was a badge of some kind and writing.

  ‘John Kerridge?’ the man asked him.

  ‘I’m Yac,’ he replied. ‘My name is Yac. I’m a taxi driver.’

  ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Potting, Sussex CID.’ The man was now holding up a sheet of paper. ‘I have a warrant to search these premises.’

  You’ll have to speak to the owners. I’m just looking after it for them. I have to feed the cat. I’m late doing that, because I slept in today.’

  ‘I’d like to have a few words with you, Yac. Perhaps we can sit down somewhere?’

  ‘Actually I have to go back to bed now, because I need my sleep. It’s quite important for my night shift, you see.’ Yac looked around at the police officers standing in the saloon beside him and behind him. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I have to speak to the owners before I allow you on this boat. You will have to wait outside. It might be difficult getting hold of them because they are in Goa.’

  ‘Yac,’ Norman Potting said, ‘there’s an easy way to do this and a hard way. Either you cooperate and help us, or I arrest you. Simple as that.’

  Yac cocked his head. ‘Simple as what?’

  Potting looked at him dubiously, wondering if all the man’s lights were fully switched on. ‘The choice is yours. Do you want to spend tonight sleeping in your bed, or in a cell at our custody unit?’

  ‘I have to work tonight,’ he said. ‘The man who owns the taxi will be very angry if I don’t.’

  ‘OK, sunshine, then you’d better cooperate.’

  Yac looked at him. ‘I don’t think the sun is always shining.’

  Potting frowned, ignoring the comment. ‘Bit of a fisherman, are you?’

  ‘I’m a taxi driver.’

  Potting jerked a thumb up at the deck. ‘You’ve got fishing lines out.’

  Yac nodded.

  ‘What do you catch here? Mostly crabs?’

  ‘Plaice,’ Yac replied. ‘Flounder. Sometimes Dover soles.’

  ‘Good fishing, is it? I’m a bit of a fisherman myself. Never fished up this far.’

  ‘You broke my patio doors. You’d better fix those. They will be very angry with you. I’m not allowed to break anything.’

  ‘To tell you the truth, Yashmak, I don’t give a toss about your patio doors. I don’t actually give much of a toss about you either, and I don’t like your taste in underpants, but don’t let’s get personal. Either you’re going to cooperate or I’m going to arrest you, then take this floating skip apart, plank by plank.’

  ‘If you do that it will sink,’ Yac said. ‘You need some of the planks. Unless you’re a good swimmer.’

  ‘A comedian, are you?’ Potting said.

  ‘No, I’m a taxi driver. I do night shifts.’

  Potting held his temper with some difficulty. ‘I’m looking for something on this boat, Yashmak. Anything you’ve got here you’d like to tell me about – and show me?’

  ‘I have my high-flush toilet chains, but they’re private. You can’t see those – except the ones I have in my berth. I can show you those.’ Yac perked up suddenly. ‘There’s a really good high-flush toilet near Worthing Pier – I could take you over there and show you them if you like?’

  ‘I’ll flush you down your own sodding toilet if you don’t shut it,’ Potting said.

  Yac stared back at him, then grinned. ‘I wouldn’t fit,’ he said. ‘The diaphragm’s too small!’

  ‘Not by the time I finished with you, it wouldn’t be.’

  ‘I – I’ll bet you!’

  ‘And I’ll bet you, sunshine. I’ll bet you we find something here, all right? So why don’t you save us all lot of time and show us where the ladies’ shoes are?’

  He saw the flicker in the strange man’s face and instantly he knew he had hit the mark.

  ‘I don’t have any shoes. Not ladies’ shoes.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Yac eyeballed him for a moment, then looked down. ‘I don’t have any ladies’ shoes.’

  ‘That’s good to hear, Yashmak. I’ll get my team to verify that and then we’ll be off.’

  ‘Yes,’ Yac said. ‘But they can’t touch my toilet chains.’

  ‘I’ll let them know that.’

  Yac nodded, perspiration running down him. ‘I’ve been collecting them a long time, you see.’

  ‘Toilet chains?’ Norman Potting said.

  Yac nodded.

  The Detective Sergeant stared at him for some moments. ‘Tell you what, Yashmak, how about I flush you down the sodding toilet now?’

  1998

  74

  Friday 16 January

  Roy Grace hated coming to this place. He got the heebie-jeebies every time he drove in through the wrought-iron gates. The gold lettering made them seem like the entrance to some grand house, until you took a closer look at the wording: BRIGHTON AND HOVE MORTUARY.

  Not even the Rod Stewart cassette playing on his car’s stereo, which he’d put on to try to cheer himself up, was having any effect on his gloomy mood. There was a line of cars occupying all the spaces close to the entrance, so he had to drive to the far end and park beside the exit doors to the covered receiving bay. As if to make it even worse, the rain started coming down harder - solid, pelting stair-rods. He switched the engine off and ‘Maggie May’ died with it. The wipers scratched to a halt across the screen. Then he touched the door handle and hesitated.

  He was really not looking forward to this. His stomach felt as though it had curdled.

  Because of the heat of the burning van in the field and the difficulty of getting any fire hoses down to it, it had been midday yesterday before the vehicle had cooled enough to allow an inspection, and for it to be identified as stolen. The stench of scorched grass, burnt rubber, paint, fuel, plastic and seared human flesh had made him retch several times. Some smells you never ever got used to, no matter how often you’d experienced them before. And some sights too. The van’s unfortunate occupant had not been a pretty one.

  Nor had Sandy’s expression been when he’d arrived home, at 4 a.m. on Wednesday, to get his head down for a few hours before returning to the scene.

  She had said nothing – she was in one of her silent moods. It was what she always did when she was really angry, just went silent on him, sending him to Coventry, shutting him out, sometimes for days. Not even the massive bunch of flowers he’d bought her had thawed her.

  He had not been able to sleep, but it wasn’t because of Sandy. She’d get over it eventually, she always did, and then it would be forgotten. All night he’d just lain in bed thinking one thought, over and over. Was the body in the van the missing Rachael Ryan?

  Charred human corpses were the worst thing of all, so far as he was concerned. As a rookie PC, he’d had to help recover the remains of two children, aged five and seven, from a burnt-out house in Portslade after an arson attack; the horror had been made ten times worse because it was children. It had given him nightmares for months.

  He knew what he was about to see in the mortuary would have a similar effect and would be staying with him for a long time. But he had no choice.

  Already late because his SIO, Jim Doyle, had called an early briefing which had overrun, he climbed out of
the car, locked it, then hurried to the front door of the mortuary, holding the collar of his mackintosh tight around his neck.

  The briefing had been attended by a sergeant from the Accident Investigation Unit, the team which forensically examined all vehicles involved in serious crashes. It was early days with the van, the sergeant had told them, but on first impressions the fire was extremely unlikely to have been caused by the accident.

  He rang the bell and moments later the door was opened by the Senior Mortician herself, Elsie Sweetman, wearing a green apron over blue surgical scrubs that were tucked into long white wellington boots.

  In her late forties, with a bob of curly hair, Elsie had a kind face and a remarkably cheery demeanour, considering the horrific things she had to deal with on a daily – and nightly – basis. Roy Grace always remembered she’d been kind to him when he had nearly keeled over at the first post-mortem he’d attended. She had led him into her sitting room and made him a cup of tea, telling him not to worry, that half the coppers on the force had done the same thing.

  He stepped in through the door, which was like the front door of any suburban bungalow, into the narrow entrance hallway, and there the similarities ended, starting with the pervading reek of Jeyes Fluid and Trigene disinfectant. Today his nostrils detected something else, and the curdling in his stomach worsened.

  In the small changing room he wrestled a green apron over his head and tied the tapes, then put on a face mask, tied that securely too, and slipped his feet into a pair of short white rubber boots that were too big. He clumped out along the corridor and turned right, passing the sealed, glassed-in room where corpses that had died of suspected contagious diseases were examined, then walked into the main post-mortem room, trying to breathe in through his mouth only.

  There were three stainless-steel tables on wheels, two of which were pushed to one side against a cupboard. The third was in the centre of the room, its occupant, lying on her back, surrounded by people similarly clad to himself.

  Grace swallowed. The sight of her made him shiver. She didn’t look human, her blackened remains like some terrible monster created by the special effects team on a horror or sci-fi movie.

  Is this you, Rachael? What happened? If it is you, how did you come to be in this stolen van?

  Leaning over her, with a surgical probe in one gloved hand and tweezers in the other, was the Home Office pathologist, Dr Frazer Theobald, a man Grace always thought was a dead ringer for Groucho Marx.

  Theobald was flanked by a fifty-year-old retired police officer, Donald Whitely, now a Coroner’s Officer, Elsie Sweetman, her assistant mortician, Arthur Trumble, a drily humorous man in his late forties, with Dickensian mutton chops, and a SOCO photographer, James Gartrell, who was intently focusing his lens on a section of the woman’s left leg that had a measuring rule lying across it.

  Almost all of the dead woman’s hair was gone and her face was like melted black wax. It was difficult to make out her features. Grace’s stomach was feeling worse. Despite breathing through his mouth, and the mask over his nose, he could not avoid the smell. The Sunday lunchtime smell of his childhood, of roast pork and burnt crackling.

  It was obscene to think that, he knew. But the smell was sending confused signals to his brain and his stomach. It was making him feel increasingly queasy and he was beginning to perspire. He looked at her again, then away, breathing deeply through his mouth. He glanced at the others in the room. They were all smelling the same thing, with the same associations too; he knew that, they’d talked about this before, yet none of them seemed affected by it the way he was. Were they all so used to it?

  ‘Here’s something interesting,’ the pathologist announced nonchalantly, holding up an oval object, about an inch wide, in his tweezers.

  It was translucent, scorched and partially melted.

  ‘See this, Detective Sergeant Grace?’ Theobald seemed to be addressing him specifically.

  Reluctantly, he moved closer to the corpse. It looked like it might be a contact lens of some kind.

  ‘This is most curious,’ the pathologist said. ‘Not what I would have expected to find in someone driving a motor vehicle.’

  ‘What is it?’ Grace asked.

  ‘An eye shield.’

  ‘Eye shield?’

  Theobald nodded. ‘They’re used in mortuaries. The eyes start to sink quite quickly post-mortem, so morticians pop them in between the eyelids and the globes – makes them look nicer for viewing.’ He gave a wry smile. ‘As I said, not what I’d expect the driver of a motor vehicle to be wearing.’

  Grace frowned. ‘Why might this woman have been wearing it?’

  ‘I suppose possibly if she had a false eye, or had had some kind of reconstructive surgery, it could be there for cosmetic purposes. But not in both eyes.’

  ‘Are you suggesting she was blind, Dr Theobald?’ Arthur Trumble said, with a mischievous twinkle.

  ‘A bit more than that, I’m afraid,’ he replied. ‘She was dead quite a long time before she was put into this vehicle.’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘Are you absolutely certain?’ the Coroner’s Officer asked him.

  ‘There’s a small amount of lung tissue that’s survived, which I’ll need to take and examine in the lab, but from what I can see with my naked eye there is no sign of smoke or flame inhalation – which, to put it bluntly, means she wasn’t breathing when the fire started.’

  ‘You’re saying she was dead before the accident happened?’

  ‘Yes, I am,’ he said. ‘I’m certain she was.’

  Trying to make sense of this in his mind, Grace asked, ‘Are you able to estimate her age, Dr Theobald?’

  ‘I would say she’s quite old – late seventies, eighties. I can’t be specific without tests, but certainly she’s no younger than mid-fifties. I can get you a more accurate estimate in a couple of days.’

  ‘But definitely no younger than mid-fifties?’

  Theobald nodded. ‘Absolutely not.’

  ‘What about dental records?’ Grace asked.

  The pathologist pointed his probe at her jaw. ‘I’m afraid one of the effects of intense heat is to cause the crowns to explode. There’s nothing I can see remaining that would get you anywhere with dental records. I think DNA’s going to be your best chance.’

  Grace stared back down at the corpse again. His revulsion was fading just a fraction, as he got more accustomed to the sight of her.

  If you’re not Rachael Ryan, who are you? What were you doing in this van? Who put you there?

  And why?

  75

  Wednesday 14 January

  Roy Grace followed Tony Case down the back stone staircase into the basement of the CID headquarters. No one could accuse Sussex Police of squandering money on the decor here, he observed wryly, walking past cracked walls with chunks of plaster missing.

  Then the Senior Support Officer led him along the familiar, gloomily lit corridor that felt like it was leading to a dungeon. Case stopped in front of a closed door and pointed at the digi-alarm pad on the wall, then raised his index finger.

  ‘OK, first thing, Roy. Anyone wanting access would need the code for this – only a handful of people, such as your good self, have it – and I’ve given it to them personally.’

  Case was a solidly built man in his mid-fifties, with close-cropped hair and tough good looks, dressed in a fawn suit, shirt and tie. A former police officer himself, he had rejoined the force as a civilian after retirement. With a small team, he ran the CID headquarters and was responsible for all the equipment here, as well as in the three other Major Crime Suites in the county. He could be an invaluable aide to those officers he respected and a total pain in the butt to those he didn’t, and his judgement was usually right. Fortunately for Roy Grace, they got on well.

  Tony Case then raised a second finger. ‘Anyone who comes down here – workmen, cleaners, anyone like that – is escorted all the time.’

  ‘OK, but
there must be some occasions when they would be left alone – and could rummage through files.’

  Case looked dubious. ‘Not in a place as sensitive as this evidence store, no.’

  Grace nodded. He used to know his way around here blindfolded, but the new team had rearranged the filing. Case opened the door and they went in. Wall-to-ceiling red-painted cages, all with padlocks, stretched into the distance. On the shelves behind them were red and green crates stacked with files, and sealed evidence bags.

  ‘Anything in particular you want to see?’

  ‘Yes, the files on the Shoe Man.’ Although Grace had summary files in his office, all the actual evidence was kept securely in here.

  Case walked along several yards, then stopped, selected a key from a bunch dangling from his belt and opened a padlock. Then he pulled open the cage door.

  ‘I know this one,’ he said, ‘because it’s currently being accessed by your team.’

  Grace nodded. ‘Do you remember Detective Superintendent Cassian Pewe, who was here last autumn?’

  Case gave him a bemused look. ‘Yeah, don’t think I’ll forget him in a hurry. Treated me like his personal lackey. Tried to get me hanging pictures in his office for him. Nothing bad happened to him, I hope. Like he didn’t fall off another cliff and this time didn’t have you around to save him.’

  Grace grinned. Saving Pewe’s life had turned out to be the least popular thing he’d ever done.

  ‘Unfortunately not.’

  ‘Can’t understand why you didn’t get a bravery medal for what you did, Roy.’

  ‘I can.’ Grace smiled. ‘I’d only have got it if I’d let him fall.’

  ‘Don’t worry. He’s a shit. Know what they say about shit?’