'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.
