by Peter James
'OK.'
'You sound a bit - low.'
'Never felt better, Roy. I'm tired, that's all. Been here on my own all week - short-staffed - Doug's on holiday.'
'Those lads who were killed on Tuesday night - are they still in the mortuary?'
'They're here. And so is Josh Walker.'
The one who died afterwards, in hospital?'
'Yes.'
'I need to come over, take a look at them. Would now be OK?'
'They're not going anywhere.'
Grace always enjoyed her dark humour. 'I'll be there in about ten minutes,' he said.
The Saturday-afternoon traffic was heavier than he had expected and it was nearly twenty minutes before he entered the busy gyratory system, then turned right, past a sign saying 'Brighton & have city mortuary' and through wrought iron gates attached to brick pillars. The gates were always open, twenty-four hours a day. Like a symbol, he reflected, that the dead didn't have much respect for business hours.
Grace knew this place far too well. It was a bland building with a horrible aura. A long, single-storey structure with grey pebbledash rendering on the walls and a covered drive-in on one side deep enough to take an ambulance or a large van. The mortuary was a transit stop on a one-way journey to a grave or a crematorium oven, for people who had died suddenly, violently or inexplicably - or from some fast-onset disease like viral meningitis, where a post-mortem might reveal medical insights that could one day help the living.
Yet a post-mortem was the ultimate degradation. A human being who had been walking, talking, reading, making love - or whatever just a day or two earlier being cut open and disembowelled like a pig on a butcher's slab.
He didn't want to think about it, but he couldn't help it; he'd seen too many post-mortems and knew what happened. The scalp would be peeled back, then the cap of the skull sawn off, the brain removed and sliced into segments. The chest wall would be cut open, all the internal organs taken out and sliced and weighed and some bits sent off for pathological analysis, the rest crammed into a white plastic bag and stitched back inside the cadaver like giblets.
He parked behind a small blue MG sports car, which he presumed was Cleo's, and hurried through the rain over to the front entrance and rang the bell. The blue front door with its frosted glass panel could have come straight from a suburban bungalow.
Moments later, Cleo Morey opened it, smiling warmly. No matter how many times he saw her, he could never quite get used to the incongruity of this immensely attractive young woman, in her late twenties, with long blonde hair, dressed in a green surgical gown, with a heavy-duty green apron over the top and white Wellington boots. With her looks she could have been a model, or an actress, and with her brains she could have probably had any career she set her mind to - and she chose this. Booking in cadavers, preparing them for post-mortems, cleaning up afterwards - and trying to offer crumbs of comfort to the families of the bereaved, invariably in
shock, who came to identify the bodies. And for much of the time she worked alone here.
The smell hit Roy immediately, the way it always did, that sickly sweet reek of disinfectant that permeated the whole place and made something squirm in his guts.
They took a left off the narrow entrance hall into the undertaker's office, which doubled as reception. It was a small room with a blower heater on the floor, pink Artexed walls, a pink carpet, an L-shaped row of visitor chairs, and a small metal desk on which sat three telephones, a stack of small brown envelopes printed with the words 'personal effects', and a large green and red ledger bearing the legend 'mortuary register' in gold block lettering.
There was a light box on one wall, as well as a row of framed 'public health and hygiene' certificates, and a larger one from the 'british institute of embalmers', with Cleo Morey's name inscribed beneath. On another wall was a closed-circuit television camera, which showed, in a continual jerky sequence, views of the front, back, then each side of the building, then a close-up on the entrance.
'Cup of tea, Roy?'
Her clear bright blue eyes engaged with his for just a fraction longer than was necessary for the question. Smiling eyes. Incredibly warm eyes.
'I'd love a cup of tea.'
'English breakfast, Earl Grey, Darjeeling, China, camomile, peppermint, green leaf?'
'I thought this was the mortuary, not Starbucks,' he said.
She grinned. 'We also have coffee. 'Espresso, latte, Colombian, mocha--'
He raised a hand. 'Builder's tea, perfect.'
'Full fat milk, semi-skimmed, with lemon--'
He raised both his hands. 'Whatever milk you have open. Joe not here yet?'
He had asked Joe Tindall, from SOCO, to attend.
'Not yet, do you want to wait until he gets here?'
'Yes, we should.'
She flicked a switch on the kettle and disappeared into the locker room opposite. As the kettle began burbling, she returned with a
green gown, blue overshoes, a face mask and white latex gloves, which she handed to him.
While he pulled them on, she made his tea for him and opened a tin containing digestive biscuits. He took one and munched it. 'So you've been here on your own all week? Doesn't it get you down? No conversation?'
'I'm always busy - we've had ten admissions this week. Eastbourne was going to send over someone from their mortuary, but they got too busy as well. Must be something about the last week in May'
Grace pulled the band of the mask over his head, then let the mask hang loose below his chin; the young men had not been dead long enough to smell too bad, in his experience. 'You've had the families of all the four young men up?'
She nodded. 'And has the guy who was missing, the groom, turned up yet?'
'I've just come from the wedding/ Grace said.
'I thought you were looking a bit smart for a Saturday, Roy' She grinned. 'So at least that's resolved itself?'
'No,' he replied. 'That's why I'm here.'
She raised her eyebrows but didn't comment. 'Anything in particular you want to see? I can get you copies of the pathologist's reports to the Coroner's office.'
'What I want to start with when Joe gets here,' he replied, 'are their fingernails.'
48
Followed by Joe Tindall, who was tugging on his gloves, Grace followed Cleo along the hard, speckled floor, watching her streaked blonde hair swinging against the neck of her green gown, past the glass window of the sealed infection chamber, into the main postmortem room.
It was dominated by two steel tables, one fixed, one wheeled, a blue hydraulic hoist and a row of fridges with floor-to-ceiling doors. The walls were tiled in grey and the whole room was surrounded by a drain gulley. 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 cabinet filled with instruments and some packs of Duracell batteries. Next to the cabinet was a chart itemizing the name of each deceased, with columns for the weights of their brain, lungs, heart, liver, kidneys and spleen. A man's name, Adrian Penny, with his grim recordings was written in blue chinagraph pen.
Seeing what Grace was looking at, she said cheerfully, 'A motorcyclist we did a PM on yesterday. Overtook a lorry and didn't notice a steel girder sticking out the side - sliced the poor sod's head clean off at the neck.
'How the hell do you remain sane?' he asked.
Grinning, she replied, 'Who said I'm sane?'
'I don't know how you do your job.'
'It's not the dead who harm people, Roy, it's the living.'
'Good point,' he said. He wondered what her views were about ghosts. But this was not the time to ask.
The room felt cold. There was a hum from the refrigeration system, and a sharp clicking sound from overhead, from one fluorescent light that hadn't come on properly. 'Any preference who you want to see first?'
'No, I'd like to see all of them.'
Cleo marched up to the door marked '4' and pulled it open. As
she did
so there was a blast of icy air, but it wasn't the cold that instantly sent a chill through Grace. It was the sight of the human form beneath the white plastic sheets on each of the four tiers of metal trays on rollers.
The mortician wheeled the hoist up close, cranked it up, then pulled the top tray out onto it and closed the fridge door. Then she pulled back the sheet to reveal a fleshy white male, with lank hair, his body and waxy white face covered in bruises and lacerations, his eyes wide open, conveying shock even in their glassy stillness, his penis shrivelled and limp lying in a thick clump of pubic hairs like some hibernating rodent. Grace looked at the buff tag tied around his big toe. The name read 'Robert Houlihan'.
Grace's eyes went straight to the young man's hands. They were big, coarse hands, with very grimy nails. 'You have all their clothes here?'
'Yes.'
'Good.' Grace asked Tindall to take scrapings from the nails. The SOCO officer selected a sharp tool from the instrument rack, asked Cleo for a specimen bag, then carefully scraped part of the dirt from each of the nails into the bag, labelled and sealed it.
The hands of the next body, Luke Gearing, were badly mangled from the accident, but apart from blood under them, the nails, bitten to the quick, were reasonably clean. There was no grime on Josh Walker's hands either. But Peter Waring's were filthy. Tindall took scrapings from his nails, and bagged them.
Next he and Grace carefully examined all their clothes. There was mud on all their shoes, and plenty of traces of it on Robert Houlihan and Peter Waring's clothes. Tindall bagged all of these items separately. 'Are you going back to the lab now with these?' Grace asked him.
'I was planning to go home - be quite nice to see it before the weekend is over and have a life - or some pretence of one.'
'I hate to do this to you, Joe, but I really need you to start work on these now.'
'Great! You want me to cancel my U2 concert tickets for tonight, which I paid fifty fucking quid each for, stand my date up and haul my sleeping bag out of the office cupboard?'
'U2 - she really is young, isn't she?'
'Yes, and you know what, Roy, she has a short fuse. She's high
itenance.'
'There might be a man's life at stake here.'
His anger rising, Tindall said, 'I want the price of my tickets back ffrom your budget.'
'It's not my case, Joe.'
'Oh - so whose is it?'
'Glenn Branson's.'
'And where the hell is he?'
'At a birthday party in Solihull.'
'It gets better all the time.'
By the row of lockers Tindall peeled off and binned his protective clothing and said, 'Have a nice sodding evening, Roy - go and ruin someone else's weekend next time.'
'I'll come over and keep you company.'
'Don't bother.'
Tindall slammed the door behind him. Moments later Grace heard the angry revving of a car engine. Then he noticed that, in his pique, the forensic expert had left behind the black bin liner containing his bags of evidence. He debated whether to run out after him, then decided to drive it over himself and try to calm the man down. He could understand his being hacked off - he would have been too, in the same circumstances.
He ducked into the sitting area, helped himself to another digestive biscuit and drained the remains of his tea, which had gone cold. Then he picked up the bin liner and Cleo walked him to the door. As he was about to step out into the rain he turned to her.
'What time are you finishing work today?'
'Another hour or so, with luck - assuming no one dies this afternoon.' Grace stared at her, thinking she really did look incredibly lovely - and suddenly feeling a bag of nerves as he glanced at her hands and saw no rings. Of course she could have taken them off for work. 'I--' he said. 'I - just wondered - do you - you know -1 mean - have any plans for this evening?'
Her eyes lit up. 'Actually I have a date to go to the cinema,' she
She dismissed the driver and helped Mark up to the front entrance, where he stared, bleary-eyed, at the door panel then managed to punch in his entry code accurately.
A few minutes later they were inside his apartment. Mark closed the door and slid the safety catch in place.
'I can't stay, Mark,' she said.
He began pawing at her clothes. She pushed his hands away. 'Let's have some coffee, and then I want you to tell me what the detective meant about having your car washed.'
Mark stared at her. She was wearing her white lace wedding dress, the veil pushed up. He lunged forward and kissed her on the mouth. She allowed him to kiss her on the lips and gave him a halfhearted kiss back, then pulled away. 'I mean it, I can't stay. I have to go round to Michael's mother and play the role of the grieving stood up bride - or whatever fucking role I'm meant to be playing. God, what an afternoon. What a nightmare.'
Mark staggered over towards the open-plan kitchen, opened a cupboard and pulled out a jar of coffee. He stared at it with a puzzled expression, put it back in the cupboard, opened the fridge and removed a bottle of Cristal champagne.
'I think we should have a proper toast to your wedding day,' he said.
'That's not amusing - and you've had more than enough to drink.'
Holding the unopened bottle, Mark slumped onto a sofa, then patted the cushion beside him, by way of an invitation.
After some moments of haughty hesitation, Ashley sat at the far end of the sofa, as far from Mark as possible, tugged off her veil, then crossed her legs and kicked her shoes off. 'Mark, I want to know what Grace meant about your having the BMW washed.'
'I have no idea.'
She was silent.
'Do you love me?'
Shaking her head in despair she stood up. 'Yes, I love you. I have no idea why at this moment, but I do. And Michael's mother is waiting for me to turn up and blub my bloody eyes out, which is what I am about to go and do.'
'Have a drink first.'
'Christ, Mark.'
He pushed himself up from the sofa, staggered towards her and took her in his arms. Then he nuzzled her neck. 'You know - if the accident hadn't happened - the wedding would've gone ahead. You'd be Mrs Michael Harrison now.'
She nodded, melting a fraction.
He stared into her eyes. 'You'd have been on your way to the Savoy in London. You'd have made love to him tonight, wouldn't you?'
'That's what wives are meant to do on their wedding night.'
'And how would you have felt?'
Cupping his face in her hands, she said, 'I would have imagined it was you.'
'Would you have gone down on him? Sucked his dick?'
She pulled away from him. 'Mark!'
'Would you?'
'No way.'
'Come on!'
'We had an agreement, Mark.'
He took the bottle over to the sink, removed the foil then took two glasses from the cabinet. He popped the cork then filled the glasses and handed one to her.
She took it reluctantly and chinked glasses with him. 'We had it all planned,' she said to him.
'We had Plan A. Now we're into Plan B.' He drank a large gulp, draining half his glass. 'Wash wrong wish shat?'
'The first is that you are pissed. The second is that I now don't happen to be Mrs Michael Harrison. Which means I don't get to participate in his half of Double-M Properties.'
'His two-thirds, actually,' Mark said.
'So?'
'So I do, under our shareholders' agreement, and our key man insurance policy'
'Provided he's dead.'
'Why do you say that? Provided?
'You plugged the air hole properly, didn't you? You used super glue like I told you?'
Squirming, he said, 'Yesh.'
She was staring hard at him, seeing through him. 'Are you sure?'
'Yesh. That lid was screwed down. I pulled the tube out and I put a ton more earth down on top. If he was alive he'd have made contact, wouldn't he?'
She gave him a strange look.
She drank some champagne, then walked over to the stereo and looked at the CD rack. 'How much do you love me?'
'How much? More than I could ever put into words.'
She pulled a CD out of its container, put it on the player and pressed the play button. Moments later, 'Love is All Around' filled the room. She put her glass down, took Mark's and put that down, then put her arms around him and began to lead him in a dance to the music. Pressing her lips against his ear she said, 'If you love me, you'll always tell me the truth, won't you?' They danced for some moments, then he said, 'There'sh shomething that's been bothering me for the past few daysh.'
'Tell me?'
'You know that Michael and I both use Palms for picking up email when we're out of the office. We've been careful not to copy him in on any emails about his stag night - but I think I might have messed
up: 'What do you mean?'
'I think I copied him on one by mistake. And he has it with him.' She pulled back from him, her eyes sharp as tacks. 'Are you saying he has it with him?' 'Possibly.' 'How possibly1?'
'I can't find it anywhere in his office - or in his flat.' 'It's in the grave with him?' 'It might be.' 'Mightbe?' Mark shrugged. 'You'd better make bloody sure, Mark.'
He stared at her in silence. I'm just telling you because--'
'Because?'
'Because it could be a risk.'
'You'd better get it back, hadn't you?'
'We're OK so long as no one finds him.'
Ashley sat down on a sofa and drank some of her champagne. 'I don't believe what I'm hearing. Why didn't you tell me this before?'
Mark shrugged. 'I thought -1--'
'You what?'
Mark joined her and attempted to clink glasses. Ashley withdrew hers, sharply.
'You'd better get it back,' she said. 'Pretty damned sharply. Like tonight. Capisce?'
50
As he drove back out towards the CID headquarters, Grace plugged his mobile into the hands-free and rang Glenn Branson. 'How's Solihull?' he asked.
'Pissing with rain. How's Brighton?'
'Pissing with rain.'
'And Ari's sister's gone to bed with a migraine.'
'So it's going to be a great birthday party.'