hearses and ambulances came to load and unload.
The young man scurried downstairs and punched a code into a keypad to one side of the door. There was a click and Foster pushed. He was inside. The air was chilly, though not freezing. He exhaled and caught a fleeting glimpse of his breath in front of him. Rows of cabins filled either side of the room, leaving a wide central area in the middle where a few tables stood. Only one was in use; Foster saw a black body bag. It wasn't empty.
'That one's waiting to be prepared for the tray,' Luke said, noticing where Foster's eyes were straying. 'Alcoholic,' he added, as if that explained the delay.
At the far end of the room was a chrome mechanism, a lift, a sort of dumb waiter that delivered the body to the autopsy room upstairs. Next to it Foster saw a large whiteboard. On it were the numbers of each cabin, written beside the surname of the deceased.
'Do you have any record of when these people died, or when their bodies were brought in?'
'It's in the register.'
'Get it, please.'
Luke departed while Foster went to a dispenser and put on a pair of latex gloves. By the time he'd worked them on, Luke had returned, his breathing slightly heavier, with a large black book in his hands.
'What dates interest you?'
'For a start, I want to have a look at everyone who was brought in late last Saturday night or on Sunday, regardless of when they actually died.'
Luke put the book down on one of the unoccupied metal tables, running down the page with his finger, then flicking it over. Foster wanted to grab it and look himself but, as he was about to, the technician spoke.
'Right, we have Fahey.'
Foster looked at the whiteboard. Couldn't see the name.
'Released to the funeral parlour on Thursday,'
Luke added. 'Road traffic accident.'
Foster made a note of which funeral parlour.
'Gordon.'
This one was on the wall. Cabin 13. Foster went over himself and pulled hard on the handle and the drawTer slid out. He unzipped the bag to reveal a man, slightly overweight, in his early fifties, he guessed.
His colour was pale blue and his jaw hung open.
Foster looked closely at his chest and torso, then lifted both arms. When he found nothing, he summoned Luke and asked him to help sit the body up.
With much effort, Foster carefully inspected his back.
There wasn't a blemish on the whole body.
'Heart attack?' he asked Luke, who nodded.
'At home on Saturday night.'
'Perhaps he won the lottery,' Foster said, zipping up the bag and shunting the cabin back into its home.
The next name on the list was Ibrahim.
'This one's in the deep freeze. Number 30,' Luke said.
Great, Foster thought, just what I need. There was always at least one cabin where the temperature was 200 below. It stored bodies that required freezing to prevent decomposition. Then, when they were needed, for a second autopsy perhaps, they were thawed out with hot water from the boiler.
'Is this a keeper?' he asked.
Luke shook his head. 'No, it was in an advanced state of decomposition when it was found.'
'Marvellous,' Foster muttered.
He pulled the door open and dragged out the tray.
The bag was smaller, not body-shaped. He opened it carefully, breathing deeply.
The cold prevented the stench from overpowering him, but what he saw almost did. The body was in bits. An arm here, a leg there, the torso in the middle, the head missing; it was green, not pale blue, and had obviously been maggot food for some time. Foster recalled the case. Another team was on it; probable honour killing was the word.
He picked up the severed stumps and examined them carefully. His nose caught a whiff of rotting flesh, so he started to breathe through his mouth. He checked every part, lifting them all up apart from the torso, which he flipped over like a burger, but there was nothing else. With as much haste as possible, he bundled the body parts back into their cover and out of his sight.
Next on the list was a John Doe. Luke said this one was brought in on Sunday morning. His age was difficult to gauge, though late forties had been the estimate. The face was sagging under the weight of death, black hair tangled and the black-grey beard unkempt. Foster did a double take. It was the tramp whose suicide they had been called to the previous Sunday, the one that Heather had been taking so personally.
He was about to zip it back up there and then, but something made him carry on looking. The chest was clear, the stomach too. He picked up the left arm, saw nothing; then the right, nothing apart from a few track marks. Obviously a junkie . . .
Tilting his head to one side, he looked once more at the punctures on his arm. Small nicks, all the world like the scars caused by injecting smack. But then they appeared to coalesce, to join together. He peered more closely. There it was: two slanted red cuts, a small cut bridging them. An 'A'. It was even less distinct than before, and done with less care, but it was possible to make out the other marks, letters and numbers. The same letters and numbers they had found on Darbyshire: 1 A 1 3 7.
He owed Heather an apology.
He put the arm down. 'Cause of death,' he shouted to Luke, his eyes still fixed on the body.
'Strangulation seems the likeliest option.'
'Anything from toxicology?'
'No. But there were signs of heavy drug and alcohol abuse.'
Foster completed a clockwise lap of the body.
He picked up one of the man's limp feet by the ankle. Strange, he thought. This guy's feet are in immaculate condition. He couldn't have been on the streets for too long. Most tramps' feet are knackered: covered in corns, bunions and blisters, filthy and stinking. It didn't make sense. Unless the guy used to be married to a chiropodist. The hands were soft, too; smooth and uncalloused like a clerical worker's, not the gnarled hands of a derelict who slept on the streets, smoked tab ends from the gutter and drank meths.
Something didn't add up.
Nigel had asked Ron for microfilm copies of the Evening News and the Evening Standard. It seemed to take him an eternity to return. Nigel sat there, cursing his name and his bulk, the building empty and quiet apart from the silent hum of a distant generator.
Darkness was beginning to fall and the huge bowls of light, suspended by chains from the ceiling, cast a sepulchral glow across the main reading room.
I need to do something, he thought. He got up and wandered into the second, smaller room. To one side of that was the microfilm reading room, a dark space bereft of natural light, lit only by an occasional lamp and the illumination of the reading screens.
Nigel had spent hours of his life in here, spooling through centuries of copy.
To his left, away from the microfilm readers, was a bank of computer terminals, a few of which were allocated for searching recent issues of the national newspapers by keywords. He sat down at one, hit a key and the screen burst to life. There was nothing on this database that would be much use to the investigation, it only went back a decade or so at most. It was the recent past, but still he fancied losing himself in it for a short time.
He wondered how high-profile a cop Foster was. In the search field he typed 'Detective+GrantsFoster'
and hit return. The machine chuntered reluctantly then produced its results: nineteen hits. The first few were reports of murder investigations in which he'd been quoted. But it was the seventh that caught Nigel's eye: 'Top Cop Cleared of 'Killing'
Father'.
The story was nearly eight years old. Nigel clicked the link immediately.
A Scotland Yard detective suspended after being suspected of murdering his father in a mercy killing has
