Dead Simple (23 page)

‘That’s why I’m here,’ Grace said calmly.

‘You should be out, trying to find Michael, not hanging around, freeloading here.’

‘Mark!’ Ashley cautioned.

‘Fuck it,’ Mark said, brushing her aside, and eyeballing Grace again. ‘What the fuck are you doing about this situation?’

Angered by his attitude, but remaining calm, Grace said, ‘My team are doing everything they can.’

‘Doesn’t much look like it to me. Should you be drinking on duty?’

‘It’s mineral water.’

Mark squinted at Grace’s glass.

Standing up and joining them, Ashley said, ‘Why don’t you circulate, Mark?’

Grace clocked the edge in her voice. Something very definitely did not feel right but he couldn’t place quite what.

Then Mark Warren jabbed him in the chest. ‘You know your problem? You don’t give a fuck, do you?’

‘Why do you think that?’

Mark Warren gave him an asinine grin, raising his voice. ‘Come on. You don’t like rich people, do you? We can go fuck ourselves, can’t we? You’re too busy looking at speed cameras, trapping motorists. Why should you give a fuck about some poor rich sod who’s the victim of some prank that’s gone wrong, hey? When you could be out earning a fat bonus from trapping motorists?’

Grace deliberately lowered his voice, almost to a whisper, which he knew would force Mark Warren to lower his voice, also. ‘Mr Warren, I don’t have any connection with the Traffic Division. I’m here to try to help you.’

Mark leaned closer, straining to hear him. ‘Sorry, I missed that. What did you say?’

Still speaking deliberately quietly, Grace said, ‘When I was at Police Training College we had to do a parade and be inspected. I’d buffed my belt buckles to a shine like a mirror. The Chief made me take the belt off and held up the back for everyone to see. I hadn’t polished that at all and I felt ashamed. It taught me a lesson — it’s not just what you can see that matters.’ He gave Mark a quizzical look.

‘What exshacktly ish that meant to mean?’

‘I’ll leave you to think about that, Mr Warren — next time you have your BMW washed.’

Grace turned and walked away.

Back in his car, with the rain pattering down on the windscreen, Grace was deep in thought. So deep, it was several moments before he even noticed the parking ticket tucked under the wiper.

Bastards.

He climbed out of the car, grabbed the ticket and tore it from its cellophane wrapping. Thirty-quid fine for being five minutes over the time on his voucher — and no chance of putting it through expenses. The Chief had clamped down firmly on that.

Hope you appreciate this, Mr Branson, having your nice weekend break in Solihull
. He grimaced, tossing the ticket into the passenger footwell in disgust. Then he turned his mind back to Mark Warren. Then back five years to the fortnight’s course in forensic psychology he had done at the FBI training centre in Quantico in the USA. It had not been enough to make him an expert, but it had taught him the value of his instincts, and it had taught him how to read certain aspects of body language.

And Mark Warren’s body language was all wrong.

Mark Warren had lost four close friends. His business partner was missing, maybe dead. Very likely dead. He ought to be in shock, numb, bewildered. Not angry. It was too soon for anger.

And he had noticed the reaction to his remark about the car wash. He had touched a nerve there very definitely.

I don’t know what you are up to, Mr Mark Warren, but I’m making it my business to find out.

He picked up his phone, dialled a number, listened to it ringing. On a Saturday afternoon he was expecting to get the answering machine, but instead he got a human voice. Female. Soft and warm. Impossible for anyone to guess from her voice what she did for a living.

‘Brighton and Hove City Mortuary,’ she said.

‘Cleo, it’s Roy Grace.’

‘Wotcher, Roy, how you doing?’ Cleo Morey’s ordinarily quite posh voice was suddenly impish.

Involuntarily, Grace found himself flirting with her over the phone. ‘Yes, OK. I’m impressed you’re working on a Saturday afternoon.’

‘The dead don’t know what day of the week it is.’ She hesitated. ‘Don’t ’spose the living care much, either. Most of them anyhow,’ she added as an afterthought.

‘
Most
of them?’

‘Seems to me most living people don’t really know what day of the week it is — they give the impression they do, but they don’t really. Don’t you think?’

‘This is heavy philosophy for a wet Saturday afternoon,’ Grace said.

‘Well I’m doing my Open University degree in philosophy, so I’ve got to practise my arguments on someone — and I don’t get much response from the lot in here.’

Grace grinned. ‘So how are you?’

‘OK.’

‘You sound a bit — low.’

‘Never felt better, Roy. I’m tired, that’s all. Been here on my own all week — short-staffed — Doug’s on holiday.’

‘Those lads who were killed on Tuesday night — are they still in the mortuary?’

‘They’re here. And so is Josh Walker.’

The one who died afterwards, in hospital?’

‘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 & hove 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.

‘I thought you were looking a bit smart for a Saturday, Roy.’ She grinned. ‘So at least that’s resolved itself?’

‘No,’ he replied. ‘That’s why I’m here.’

She raised her eyebrows but didn’t comment. ‘Anything in particular you want to see? I can get you copies of the pathologist’s reports to the Coroner’s office.’

‘What I want to start with when Joe gets here,’ he replied, ‘are their fingernails.’

Followed by Joe Tindall, who was tugging on his gloves, Grace followed Cleo along the hard, speckled floor, watching her streaked blonde hair swinging against the neck of her green gown, past the glass window of the sealed infection chamber, into the main post-mortem room.

It was dominated by two steel tables, one fixed, one wheeled, a blue hydraulic hoist and a row of fridges with floor-to-ceiling doors. The walls were tiled in grey and the whole room was surrounded by a drain gulley. Along one wall was a row of sinks and a coiled yellow hose. Along another was a wide work surface, a metal cutting board and a glass-fronted cabinet filled with instruments and some packs of Duracell batteries. Next to the cabinet was a chart itemizing the name of each deceased, with columns for the weights of their brain, lungs, heart, liver, kidneys and spleen. A man’s name, Adrian Penny, with his grim recordings was written in blue chinagraph pen.

Seeing what Grace was looking at, she said cheerfully, ‘A motorcyclist we did a PM on yesterday. Overtook a lorry and didn’t notice a steel girder sticking out the side — sliced the poor sod’s head clean off at the neck.

‘How the hell do you remain sane?’ he asked.

Grinning, she replied, ‘Who said I’m sane?’

‘I don’t know how you do your job.’

‘It’s not the dead who harm people, Roy, it’s the living.’

‘Good point,’ he said. He wondered what her views were about ghosts. But this was not the time to ask.

The room felt cold. There was a hum from the refrigeration system, and a sharp clicking sound from overhead, from one fluorescent light that hadn’t come on properly. ‘Any preference who you want to see first?’

‘No, I’d like to see all of them.’

Cleo marched up to the door marked ‘4’ and pulled it open. As she did so there was a blast of icy air, but it wasn’t the cold that instantly sent a chill through Grace. It was the sight of the human form beneath the white plastic sheets on each of the four tiers of metal trays on rollers.

The mortician wheeled the hoist up close, cranked it up, then pulled the top tray out onto it and closed the fridge door. Then she pulled back the sheet to reveal a fleshy white male, with lank hair, his body and waxy white face covered in bruises and lacerations, his eyes wide open, conveying shock even in their glassy stillness, his penis shrivelled and limp lying in a thick clump of pubic hairs like some hibernating rodent. Grace looked at the buff tag tied around his big toe. The name read ‘Robert Houlihan’.

Grace’s eyes went straight to the young man’s hands. They were big, coarse hands, with very grimy nails. ‘You have all their clothes here?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’ Grace asked Tindall to take scrapings from the nails.

The SOCO officer selected a sharp tool from the instrument rack, asked Cleo for a specimen bag, then carefully scraped part of the dirt from each of the nails into the bag, labelled and sealed it.

The hands of the next body, Luke Gearing, were badly mangled from the accident, but apart from blood under them, the nails, bitten to the quick, were reasonably clean. There was no grime on Josh Walker’s hands either. But Peter Waring’s were filthy. Tindall took scrapings from his nails, and bagged them.