instruments, some packs of Duracell batteries and grisly souvenirs that no one else wanted – mostly pacemakers – removed from victims.
Next to this was a wallchart itemizing the name of the deceased, with columns for the weights of each brain, lungs, heart, liver, kidneys and spleen. All that was written on it so far was anon. woman.
It was a sizeable room but it felt crowded this morning. In addition to the Home Office pathologist and the Chief Mortician, there was Darren, the Assistant Mortician, a sharp, good-looking and pleasant-natured lad of twenty with fashionably spiky black hair, Joe Tindall, the senior SOCO officer, who was photographing the ruler in position on each stab wound, Glenn Branson and himself.
The visitors wore protective green gowns with white cuffs and either plastic overshoes or white wellington boots. The pathologist and the two morticians wore blue pyjamas and heavy-duty green aprons, and the pathologist had a mask hanging loosely below his chin. Grace looked at Cleo Morey, caught her eye, then the brief but very definite grin she gave him, and his nerves jangled.
He felt like an excited kid. And it was wrong, it was unprofessional – every ounce of his concentration should be on this case right now – but he couldn’t help it. Cleo Morey was distracting him and that was a fact.
They had already been out on a date just a few days ago. Well, it had been a date of sorts – a quick drink in a pub which got cut even shorter by a phone call calling him urgently back to work.
God, she was gorgeous, he thought. And however many times he saw her, he could never quite square this young, leggy woman in her late twenties with her long blonde hair, English-rose face and quick brain, with working in this place, doing one of the grimmest jobs in the world. With her looks she could have been a model or an actress, and with her brains she could probably have had any career she set her mind to – and she had chosen this. Long hours on call day and night. At a moment’s notice she would get summoned to a riverbank, to a burned-out warehouse, to a shallow woodland grave to recover a body. To prepare the body for the pathologist to carry out the post-mortem, then to reassemble it as well as possible, no matter how burned or decomposed, for identification by relatives, and to offer them some succour, some glimpse of hope that their loved one’s death had not been quite as bad as the body indicated.
As he watched Dr Theobald press a ruler against the fifth stab wound, right above the young woman’s belly button, he did not envy Cleo her task on this one. With luck, identification would be done by DNA, he thought; no parent should ever have to see this sight. Yet, he knew only too well just how important it was to some people to see for themselves. Often, despite all efforts to dissuade them, loved ones would insist on a viewing, just to see them one more time, to say goodbye.
Closure.
Something he’d never had. And that helped him to understand the need for it. Without closure you had no hope of moving on. Which was why he’d been stuck in a state of limbo since Sandy’s disappearance. There was a hot young medium coming to Brighton tomorrow, performing to just a small audience at a holistic health centre, and Grace had bought a ticket. It would probably turn out to be another blank, he knew, but the British and international police had exhausted every conventional avenue.
Cleo shot him a glance, a warm, definitely flirty glance. Careful to check first that Branson wasn’t watching, he shot her back a wink.
Christ, you are so gorgeous! he thought, heavy-hearted and feeling so damned guilty about Sandy. It was as if still, after all these years, he was being unfaithful to her by dating another woman.
His mobile phone beeped, signalling a text message. He pulled it from his inside pocket and glanced at the display. It was from DC Nicholl back at the Major Incident Suite.
Teresa Wallington eliminated.
Immediately Grace sidled up to Branson and motioned him over to the rear of the room. ‘I think you need to work on your hunch technique,’ Grace said to him. Then he held up the phone for his colleague to read the message.
‘Shit. I had a feeling – like I
Giving him a pat of encouragement, he said, ‘Glenn, in the movie
Glancing sideways at him, Branson said, ‘Are you implying this is some trait common to black cops?’
‘Nah, he’s an actor.’ Grace eyed Cleo again, watching her streaked blonde hair swinging, incongruously pretty, against the green apron strap around her neck. ‘Maybe it’s just common to big, bald gorillas.’ He gave him another friendly pat.
Then he dialled Nick from the landline phone on the work surface beside him. The new digital phones the police were being issued with scrambled all conversations, but at present their conventional mobile phones were simple to eavesdrop on, so he avoided using them on anything sensitive.
‘She got cold feet about the wedding,’ Nick Nicholl explained. ‘Did a runner. Now she’s come back very contrite.’
‘Sweet,’ Grace said sarcastically. ‘I’ll tell Glenn. He loves a good weepie with a happy ending.’
Silence down the phone. DC Nick Nicholl possessed a good brain but a sense of humour bypass.
They ran through the remaining shortlist of missing women who fitted the description, and Grace told Nicholl to make sure the police had something that DNA could be extracted from, from each of the four women. Nicholl updated him on the state of the continuing inch-by-inch grid search of the area surrounding where the body had been found, for the girl’s head and left hand. Privately, Grace did not expect them to turn up. The hand possibly, because a dog or a fox might have run off with it. But he doubted they would ever find the head.
He made another quick call, to check on the progress of the trial of Suresh Hossain – a case which had become very personal to him. It was a difficult case; the Crown Prosecution Service had made some blunders, and he hadn’t handled it as well as he should have done. He’d been stupid in taking a piece of evidence, a shoe belonging to the murdered man, to a medium. The defence counsel had found out about it and humiliated him in court.
Dr Frazer Theobald was making his usual slow but thorough progress. His examination of the dead woman’s stomach indicated she had not eaten in the immediate hours before she was killed, which would give some help in gauging when she might have died – early in the evening rather than late, if she had not had an evening meal. There was no smell of alcohol either – which would have been present after just a couple of drinks – which meant it was unlikely although not impossible that she had been to a bar.
Shortly after half past twelve, when Grace stepped away again, this time to call Dennis Ponds to check on the 2 p.m. press conference, Glenn Branson walked over to him, looking uncharacteristically shaken and bilious.
‘You’d better come and look at this, Roy.’
Grace killed the call he was about to make and followed him across the room. Everyone was standing around the table in what looked to him like shocked silence. As he approached he could smell the vile stench of excrement and bowel gases.
The woman’s torso had been opened up, her ribcage was exposed and he could see that her heart, lungs and the rest of her vital organs had been removed, and lay waiting to be bagged and put back inside her chest when the post-mortem was finished, leaving an empty carcass.
On the metal-edged dissecting tray, raised some inches above her, was a length of pale brown tube which looked like a long sausage. It was about an inch in diameter, lying in a mess of blood, excrement and mucus. Dr Theobald had made an incision in it, which he was holding open with forceps for everyone’s benefit.
The pathologist turned to him, his moustachioed face even more serious than usual. Then he pointed. ‘I think you should take a look at that, Roy.’
Anatomy had never been Grace’s strong point, and sometimes when peering at the organs of a cadaver it took him some time to orient himself and figure out what was what. He looked down, trying to work out what this might be. Part of the intestines, he thought. Then, as he was looking, Dr Theobald used the forceps to open the incision he had made further, and now Grace could see something in there.
Something that everyone else in the room had already seen.
Something that made him stare, for some moments, in complete, mind-boggled shock.
Then he took an involuntary step back as if he wanted to get away from it.
‘Jesus,’ he said, closing his eyes for an instant, feeling the blood draining from his head. His stomach was boiling in shock and revulsion.
