Like now.
‘What did you have planned, matey?’
‘The kids. One of the few weekends Ari is letting me have them. I was going to take them to Legoland. Now she’ll have something else to use against me.’
Glenn was going through a bitter divorce. His wife, Ari, who had once encouraged him so hard to join the police, was now using the unpredictability of his hours as part of her argument for not agreeing contact arrangements for the children to see him. Grace felt a sharp twinge of guilt. Perhaps he shouldn’t have requested Glenn join him. But he knew his marriage was doomed, whatever happened. The best favour he could do his friend was to ensure his career came out of it intact. ‘You think taking the weekend off would help save your marriage?’
‘Nope.’
Grace grinned. ‘So?’
‘You ever see that movie,
He shook his head.
‘You’ve lived a sheltered life.’
‘Lot of sex in it, was there?’ Grace retorted.
‘Yeah, right.’
They put on face masks, raised their hoods and snapped on protective gloves. Then the pair of them signed in on the scene guard’s pad, and ducked under the blue and white police crime scene tape. It was a fine, blustery day. They were high up on the ridge of a hill, with open farmland stretching for miles in all directions, and the glinting blue water of the English Channel visible on the horizon to the south, beyond the Downs.
They walked towards a long, single-storey shed with clapboard walls and a row of roof vents that stretched away into the distance, two tall steel silos standing beside it. Grace pushed the door open. They went inside to the glare of artificial lighting, to the sour stench of confined animals, and the din of thousands of protesting hens.
‘Had eggs for breakfast, old timer?’ Branson asked.
‘Actually, I had porridge.’
‘Guess at your age, cholesterol matters. Low fat milk?’
‘Cleo’s put me on soya.’
‘You’re under her thumb.’
‘She has pretty thumbs.’
‘That’s how every relationship starts. Pretty face, pretty thumbs, pretty damned everything. You love every inch of her body and she loves every inch of yours. Ten years on, you’re struggling to remember one damned thing about each other that you once liked.’ Branson patted him on the shoulder. ‘But hey, enjoy the ride.’
Roy Grace stopped and Branson stopped beside him. ‘Matey, don’t become a cynic. You’re too good for that.’
‘I’m just a realist.’
Grace shook his head.
‘Your wife vanished on your thirtieth birthday – after you’d been together several years, right?’ said Branson.
‘Uh huh. Getting on for ten years.’
‘You still loved her?’
‘As much as the day I met her. More.’
‘Maybe you’re an exception.’
Grace looked at him. ‘I hope not.’
Branson stared at him, his face full of pain. ‘Yeah, I hope not too. But it hurts. I think of Ari and the kids constantly, and it hurts so much.’
Grace stared down the length of the shed, with its gridded steel floor, a section of which, towards the far end, had been lifted. He could see, suited up, the stocky Crime Scene Manager David Green; three SOCOs including the burly, intensely serious Crime Scene Photographer James Gartrell; DS Simon Bates; the Duty Inspector Roy Apps, and the Coroner’s Officer Philip Keay.
‘Let’s rock and roll.’ Grace stepped on to the grid.
‘Not sure I feel much like dancing,’ Glenn Branson said.
‘So, you and the dead body have something in common.’
12
The dead body was very definitely not dancing. Partly on account of the fact that it was embedded in several feet of chicken excrement, partly because its legs were missing, and partly because it had no hands or head, either. Which would have made co-ordination difficult. A cluster of blowflies buzzed around, and the stench of ammonia was almost overpowering.
Glenn, close to retching, turned away. Grace stared down. Whoever had done this had little forensic awareness, and even less finesse. The headless, limbless torso, with desiccated flesh missing in patches, covered in excrement and crawling with flies and maggots, was barely recognizable as human. The skin, which appeared acid-scorched in the patches where it was visible, was a dark, leathery brown, giving it the air of a shop-window dummy that had been salvaged from a bonfire. The rank stench of a decaying body, all too familiar to Grace, rose all around him, making the air feel heavy and cloying. It was a smell that always accompanied you home, in your hair, on your clothes, in every pore of your skin. You could scrub yourself raw, but you’d still smell it again the next morning.
The only person he never noticed it on was Cleo. But maybe Glenn was right, and in ten years’ time he would. He hoped not.
‘Coq au vin for dinner, Roy?’ the Crime Scene Manager greeted him, dressed in a white protective suit, with breathing apparatus, his mask temporarily raised.
‘Not if it does that to you, thanks!’
Both men stared down into the space, four foot below the grid, at the torso. The first thought in Roy Grace’s mind was whether this was some kind of gangland killing. ‘So, what do we have so far?’
In answer to his SIO, David Green picked up a sealed polythene evidence bag from the floor, with an air of pride, and held it up with a gloved hand.
Grace peered inside. It contained two jagged pieces of badly soiled fabric, with an ochre checked pattern just visible. What looked like parts of a man’s suit.
‘Where did you find these?’ Grace asked.
‘Close to the body. Looks like it might have been something he was wearing – for some reason the only parts that didn’t decompose or get taken by rats for a nest. Maybe we’ll find more when we start our fingertip search.’
‘
‘One of the few bits that weren’t cut off, chief, if you get my drift.’
Grace nodded, uncomfortably getting his drift.
‘Must have been a made-to-measure suit,’ Glenn Branson said.
Grace and Green looked at him. ‘Can you tell that from the cut of the cloth?’ Grace asked.
‘No, chief.’ Branson nodded down at the remains and said, drily, ‘I’m imagining they would have had a bit of a problem finding something off-the-peg to fit him.’
13
Inside the house, just like all Gaia’s homes, the floors looked like Italian marble. Just like the stone that had been imported slab by slab from the Fantiscritti quarry in Carrara that, historically, had supplied the Medicis with
