Dead Tomorrow (7 page)

Ten to five. Jim Wilkinson’s retirement party started at seven, over on the far side of Worthing. He had planned to go home and change, then collect Cleo. Now, by the time he finished here, depending on what he found, and on how much examination the pathologist would want to do in situ, he would be lucky to make the party at all. The one blessing was that they had been allocated Nadiuska De Sancha, the quicker – and more fun – of the two specialist Home Office pathologists they worked with most regularly.

On the far side of the harbour he saw a large fishing boat, its navigation lights on, chug away from its berth. The water was almost black.

He heard doors open and slam behind him, then a chirpy voice said, ‘Cor, you’re going to cop it from the missus if you’re late. Wouldn’t want to be in your shoes, Roy!’

He turned to see Walter Hordern, a tall, dapper man, who was always smartly and discreetly attired in a dark suit, white shirt and black tie. 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 the scene of their death and dealing with the considerable paperwork that was required for each one. Despite the gravitas of his job, Walter had a mischievous sense of humour and loved nothing better than to wind Roy up.

‘Why’s that, Walter?’

‘She’s gone and spent a bleedin’ fortune at the hairdresser’s today – for the party tonight. She’ll be well miffed if you blow it out.’

‘I’m not blowing it out.’

Walter pointedly looked at his own watch. Then raised his eyes dubiously.

‘If necessary I’ll put you in charge of the sodding investigation, Walter.’

The man shook his head. ‘Na, I only like dealing with stiffs. You never get any lip from a stiff. Good as gold, they are.’

Grace grinned. ‘Darren here?’

Darren was Cleo’s assistant in the mortuary.

Walter jerked a thumb at the van. ‘He’s in there, on the dog-and-bone, having a barney with his girlfriend.’ He shrugged, then rolled his eyes. ‘That’s wimmin for you.’

Grace nodded, texting his:

Ship not here yet. Going to be late. Better meet u there. XXX

Just as he stuck his phone back in his pocket, it beeped twice sharply. He pulled it back out and looked at the display. It was a reply from Cleo:

Don’t be 2 late. I have something to tell you.

He frowned, unsettled by the tone of the message, and by the fact that there was no ‘
X
’ on the end. Stepping out of earshot of Walter and DI Mantle, who had just climbed out of the car, he called Cleo’s number. She answered immediately.

‘Can’t talk,’ she said curtly. ‘Got a family just arrived for an identification.’

‘What is it you have to tell me?’ he said, aware his voice sounded anxious.

‘I want to tell you face to face, not over the phone. Later, OK?’ She hung up.

Shit. He stared at the phone for a moment, even more worried now, then put it back in his pocket.

He did not like the way she had sounded at all.

Simona learned to inhale Aurolac vapour from a plastic bag. A small bottle of the metallic paint, which she was able to steal easily from any paint store, would last for several days. It was Romeo who had taught her how to steal, and how to blow into the bag to get the paint to mix with air, then suck it in, blow it back into the bag again and inhale it again.

When she inhaled, the hunger pangs went.

When she inhaled, life in her home became tolerable. The home she had lived in for as far back as she could, or rather
wanted
to remember. The home she entered by scrambling through a gap in the broken concrete pavement and clambering down a metal ladder beneath the busy, unmade road, into the underground cavity that had been bored out for inspection and maintenance of the steam pipe. The pipe, thirteen feet in diameter, was part of the communal central-heating network that fed most of the buildings in the city. It made the space down here snug and dry in winter, but intolerably hot during the spring months until it was turned off.

And in a tiny part of this space, a tight recess between the pipe and the wall, she had made her home. It was marked out by an old duvet she had found, discarded, on a rubbish tip, and Gogu, who had been with her as far back as she could remember. Gogu was a beige, shapeless, mangy strip of fake fur that she slept with, pressed to her face, every night. Beyond the clothes she wore and Gogu, she had no possessions at all.

There were five of them, six including the baby, who lived here permanently. From time to time others came and stayed for a while, then moved on. The place was lit with candles, and music played throughout the days and nights when they had batteries. Western pop music that sometimes brought Simona joy and sometimes demented her, because it was always loud and rarely stopped. They argued about it constantly, but always it played. Beyoncé was singing at the moment and she liked Beyoncé. Liked the way she looked. One day, she dreamed, she would look like Beyoncé, sing like Beyoncé. One day she would live in a house.

Romeo told her she was beautiful, that one day she would be rich and famous.

The baby was crying again and there was a faint stink of shit. Valeria’s eight-month-old son, Antonio. Valeria, with all their help, had managed to keep him hidden from the authorities, who would have taken him from her.

Valeria, who was much older than the rest of them, had been pretty once, but her face at twenty-eight, haggard and heavily lined from this life, was now the face of an old woman. She had long, straight brown hair and eyes that had once been sultry but were now dead, and was dressed brightly, an emerald puffa over a ragged, turquoise, yellow and pink jogging suit, and red plastic sandals – scavenged, like most of their clothes, from bins in the better parts of the city, or accepted eagerly from hand-out centres.

She rocked her baby, who was wrapped up in an old, fur-lined suede coat, in her arms. The damn child’s crying was worse than the constant music. Simona knew that the baby cried because he was hungry. They were all hungry, almost all of the time. They ate what they stole, or what they bought with the money they begged, or got from the old newspapers they occasionally sold, or from the wallets and purses they sometimes pickpocketed from tourists, or from selling the mobile phones and cameras they just grabbed from them.

Romeo, with his big blue eyes like saucers, his cute, innocent face, his short black hair brushed forward and his withered hand, was a fast runner. Fast as hell! He did not know how old he was. Maybe fourteen, he thought. Or perhaps thirteen. Simona did not know how old she was either. The stuff had not started to happen yet, the stuff that Valeria told her about. So Simona reckoned she was twelve or thirteen.

She did not really care. All she wanted was for these people, her family, to be pleased with her. And they were pleased every time she and Romeo returned with food or money or, best of all, both. And, sometimes, batteries. Returned to the rank smells of sulphur and dry dust and unwashed bodies and baby shit, which were the smells she knew best in the world.

Somewhere in a confused haze that was her past, she remembered bells. Bells hanging from a coat, or perhaps a jacket, worn by a tall man with a big stick. She had to approach this man and remove his wallet without making the bells ring. If just one bell tinkled, he whacked her on the back with the stick. Not just one whack, but five, sometimes ten; sometimes she lost count. Usually she passed out before he had finished.

But now she was good. She and Romeo made a good team. She and Romeo and the dog. The brown dog that had become their friend and lived under a collapsed fence on the edge of the street above them. Herself in her blue sleeveless puffa over a ragged, multicoloured jogging suit, woollen hat and trainers, Romeo in his hooded top, jeans and trainers too, and the dog, which they had named Artur.

Romeo had taught her what kind of tourists were best. Elderly couples. They would approach them as a trio, she, Romeo and the dog on a length of rope. Romeo would hold out his withered hand. If the tourists recoiled in revulsion and waved them away, by the time they were gone, she would have the man’s wallet in her puffa pocket. If the man dug in his pockets to find them some change, by the time Romeo accepted it, she would have the woman’s purse safely out her handbag and in her own pocket. Or if the people were sitting in a café, they might just grab their phone or camera from the table and run.

The music changed. Rihanna was singing now.

She liked Rihanna.

The baby fell silent.

Today had been a bad day. No tourists. No money. Just a small amount of bread to share around.

Simona curled her lips around the neck of the plastic bag, exhaled, then inhaled, hard.

Relief. The relief always came.

But never any hope.

A quarter to six, and for the third time today, Lynn was sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, this time the consultant gastroenterologist’s. A bay window looked out on to the quiet Hove street. It was dark outside, the street lights on. She felt dark inside too. Dark and cold and afraid. The waiting room with its tired old furniture, similar to Dr Hunter’s, did nothing to lift her gloom, and the lighting was too dim. A tinny sound of music leaked from the headset plugged into Caitlin’s ears.

Then Caitlin stood up suddenly and began staggering around, as if she had been drinking, scratching her hands furiously. Lynn had spent all afternoon with her and knew she had drunk nothing. It was a symptom of her disease.

‘Sit down, darling,’ she said, alarmed.

‘I’m kind of tired,’ Caitlin said. ‘Do we have to wait?’

‘It’s very important that we see the specialist today.’

‘Yeah, well, look, right, I’m quite important too, OK?’ She gave a wry smile.

Lynn smiled. ‘You are the most important thing in the world,’ she said. ‘How are you feeling, apart from tired?’

Caitlin stopped and looked down at one of the magazines on the table, Sussex Life. She breathed deeply in silence for some moments, then she said, ‘I’m scared, Mummy.’

Lynn stood up and put an arm around her, and unusually Caitlin did not shrink and pull away. Instead she nestled against her mother’s body, took her hand and gripped it hard.

Caitlin had grown several inches in the last year and Lynn still had not got used to having to look upwards at her face. She had clearly inherited her father’s height genes, and her thin, gangly frame looked more like some kind of bendy doll than ever today, albeit a very beautiful one.

She was dressed in the careless style she always favoured, a grungy grey and rust-coloured knitted top over a T-shirt, with a necklace of small stones on a thin leather loop, jeans with frayed bottoms and old trainers, unlaced. Additionally, in deference to the cold, and perhaps to conceal her swollen, pregnant-looking belly, Lynn guessed, her camel-coloured duffel coat that looked like it had come from a charity shop.

Caitlin’s short, spiky, jet-black hair protruded above the Aztec patterned band that covered much of her head and her piercings gave her a vaguely Gothic look. She had a stud in the centre of her chin, a tongue stud and one ring through her left eyebrow. Out of sight at the moment, but which the specialist would no doubt expose when he examined her, were the ring on her right nipple, the one through her belly button and the one in the front of her vagina, the insertion of which she had coyly confessed to her mother, in one of their rare moments of closeness, had been
rather embarrassing.

This truly had turned into the day from hell, Lynn thought. Since leaving Dr Hunter’s surgery this morning, then returning with Caitlin this afternoon, her whole life seemed to have been upended, as if it had gone through a seismic shift.

And now her phone was ringing. She pulled it out of her handbag and looked at the display. It was Mal.

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Where are you?’

‘Just coming through the lock at Shoreham. We’ve had a shitty day – dredged up a corpse. But tell me about Caitlin.’

She filled him in on her consultations with Dr Hunter, all the time eyeing Caitlin, who was still pacing around the waiting room, which was about a third of the size of Dr Hunter’s. She was now picking up and putting down one magazine after the other with great urgency, as if she needed to read all of them but could not decide where to begin.

‘I’ll actually know more in about an hour. We’ve just come from Dr Hunter straight to the specialist. Are you going to be in range for a while?’

‘At least four hours,’ he said. ‘Might be longer.’

‘OK.’

Dr Granger’s secretary appeared. A matronly woman in her fifties, with her hair in a tight bun, she had a distancing smile on her face. ‘Dr Granger will see you both now.’

‘I’ll call you back,’ Lynn said.

Unlike Ross Hunter’s spacious surgery, Dr Granger’s consulting room was a cramped space, on the first floor, with barely enough room for the two chairs in front of his small desk. Angled so that they could be clearly seen by all his patients were framed photographs of a perfect, smiling consultant’s wife and three equally perfect, smiling children.

Dr Granger was a tall man in his forties, with a big nose and a thinning thatch of hair, dressed in a pinstriped suit, with a crisp shirt and a neat tie. There was a slight aloofness about him, which made Lynn think he could as easily have passed for a barrister as a doctor.

‘Please sit down,’ he said, opening a brown folder, inside which Lynn could see a letter from Ross Hunter. He then sat down himself, reading it.

Lynn took and gently squeezed Caitlin’s hand, and her daughter made no effort to remove it. Dr Granger was making her feel uncomfortable. She didn’t like his coldness, or the over-the-top display of family photos. They seemed to give out a message that read, I am OK and you are not. What I have to say will make no difference to my life. I will go home tonight and have dinner and watch TV and then perhaps tell my wife I want sex with her, and you – well, tough… you will wake up tomorrow in your private hell, and I will wake up as I do every morning, full of the joys of spring and with my happy children.