Not Dead Enough

But she wasn’t looking at the sun. She was looking at a log that was rolling over and over in the surf. A log with long tendrils of seaweed attached to one end, trailing from it. An even bigger breaker roared, and the log was sucked back. And for one brief, fleeting instant, as the log rolled, she saw a face. Arms and legs. And realized that it wasn’t seaweed on the end of it. It was human hair.

She screamed.

Ben broke free of her hand and ran into the water, towards it. A breaker hit his knees, showering spray over his body and face, spattering the lenses of his sunglasses, blurring his vision. The body rolled again, a naked woman with her face partially eaten away, her skin the colour of tallow wax. She was being pulled back, away from Ben, reclaimed by the ocean as if she had merely been presented for a brief inspection.

The young man lunged forward, water up to his thighs now, drenched completely as another breaker exploded around him, and grabbed an arm by the wrist, then pulled hard. The skin felt cold and slimy, reptilian. He shuddered but hung on resolutely. She seemed only slightly built, but with the pull of the ocean against him she felt as heavy as lead. He pulled back, locked in a grim tug-of-war. ‘Tam!’ he shouted. ‘Call someone for help! Dial 999 on yer mob!’

Then suddenly, still gripping the wrist hard, he was falling. He landed flat on his back in the mud, as deafening surf from another breaker roared and sucked and gurgled over his face and around him. And there was another sound in his ears now, a dull, ragged whine, getting louder, more intense, more piercing.

It was Tamara. Standing rigid, her eyes bulging in shock, mouth open, the scream coming from deep within her.

Ben hadn’t yet fully realized that the arm he was holding had torn clean away from the rest of the body.

52

Cleo’s phone was ringing. Her home line. She eased herself forward on her sofa so she could read the caller display. It was Grace’s mobile number.

She let it ring. Waited. Four rings. Five. Six. Then her voicemail kicked in and the ringing stopped. Must have been the fourth – maybe even the fifth – call from him today on this line. Plus all the ones on her mobile.

She was being childish not answering it, she knew, and sooner or later she was going to have to respond; but she was still not sure what she wanted to say to him.

Heavy-hearted, she picked up her wine glass and saw, to her slight surprise, that it was empty. Again. She picked up the bottle of Chilean Sauvignon Blanc and saw, to her even bigger surprise, there were no more than a couple of inches left. ‘Shit,’ she said, pouring it. It barely covered the bottom of her large glass.

She was on duty this weekend, which meant she shouldn’t drink much, if anything at all, since she could be called out at any time of day or night. But today she felt badly in need of alcohol. It had been a shit day. A really shit day. After her row with Roy, and a totally sleepless remains of the night following it, she’d been called out to the mortuary at ten in the morning to receive the body of a six-year-old girl who had been hit by a car.

She’d become hardened to most things in the eight years she had been in this profession, but not to the bodies of children. They got her every time. There seemed to be a different kind of grief that people had for a child, deeper somehow than for the most loved adult, as if it was incomprehensible that a child could be torn from anyone’s life. She hated seeing the undertaker bringing in a tiny coffin and she hated doing those post-mortems. This little girl’s would be on Monday – making it a great Monday morning to look forward to.

Then, this afternoon, she’d had to go to a grim flat in a run-down terraced house near Hove station and recover the body of an elderly lady which had been there for a good month, at least, in the opinion of her colleague Walter Hordern, judging from the condition of the body and the level of infestation of flies and larvae.

Walter had gone with her, driving the coroner’s van. A dapper, courteous man in his mid-forties, he was always smartly attired in the business clothes of someone who worked in a City office. His official role was chief of Brighton and Hove cemeteries, but his duties also included spending a part of his time helping in the process of collecting bodies from their scene of death and dealing with the considerable paperwork that was required for each one.

Walter and Darren had recently taken to challenging each other on how close they could get in estimating the time of death. It was an inexact science, subject to weather conditions and a raft of other factors, and one that got harder the longer it took to retrieve the body. Counting the stages of the life cycle of certain insects was one, unpleasant, very rough guide. And Walter Hordern had been boning up on that on a forensic medical site he had found on the internet.

Then, just a couple of hours ago she’d had a distraught phone call from her sister, Charlie, of whom she was hugely fond, saying she had just been dumped by her boyfriend of over six months. At twenty-seven, Charlie was two and a half years younger than she was. Pretty and tempestuous, she always went for the wrong men.

Like herself, she realized, more sadly than bitterly. Thirty in October. Her best friend, Millie – Mad Millie, she used to be called when they were teenage rebels at Roedean School – had now settled into landed life with a former naval officer who’d made a fortune in the conference business, and was expecting her second child. Cleo was a godmother to the first, Jessica, as well as to two other children of old schoolfriends. It was starting to feel