Not Dead Enough (29 page)

Just as quickly as she possibly could, holding her breath and forgetting about the call she was going to make, she hurried past her office and entered the small changing room. She pulled a fresh pair of green pyjamas off a hook, dug her feet into her white wellington boots, tore a fresh pair of latex gloves from a pack and wriggled her clammy hands into them. Then she put on a face mask; not that it was going to do much to reduce the smell, but it would help a little.

She turned right and walked down the short, grey-tiled corridor and into the receiving room, which adjoined the main post-mortem room, and switched the lights on. The dead woman had been booked in as Unknown Female, the name given to all unidentified women who fetched up here. Cleo always felt it was such a sad thing, to be dead and unidentified.

She was lying on a stainless-steel table, next to another three parked alongside each other, her severed arm placed between her legs, her hair hanging back, dead straight, with a tiny strand of green weed in it. Cleo strode up to her, flapping her hand sharply, sending a dozen bluebottles flying into the air and scudding around the room. Through the stench of decay, she could smell something else strongly as well. Salt. The tang of the sea. And suddenly, tenderly plucking the tendril of weed out of the woman’s hair, she wasn’t sure she wanted to meet her sister on the beach.

Then the back doorbell rang. The undertaker had arrived. She checked the image on the CCTV before opening the rear doors into the loading bay and helping the two casually dressed young men load the bodies, in their plastic body-bags, into the rear of the discreet brown van. They then drove off. She locked the bay doors carefully and returned to the receiving room.

From the cupboard in the corner she removed a white plastic body-bag and walked back to the body. She hated dealing with floaters. Their skin after a few weeks immersed had a ghostly, fatty-white colour and the texture seemed to change, so that it looked like slightly scaly pork. The terminology was adipocere. The first mortuary technician Cleo had worked under, who relished the macabre, told her with a gleam in his eye that it was also known as grave wax.

The woman’s lips, eyes, fingers, part of her cheeks, breasts, vagina and toes had been eaten away, by small fish or crabs. Her badly chewed breasts lay, wrinkled, splayed out to the right and left, with much of their inside tissue gone, along with every scrap of the poor creature’s dignity.

Who are you? she wondered, as she opened up the bag, laying it out under her, lifting her slightly but being careful in case her flesh tore.

When they’d examined her last night, along with two uniformed police officers, a detective inspector and a police surgeon, and Ronnie Pearson, the coroner’s officer, they had found no obvious signs to indicate she might have been murdered. There were no marks on her body, other than just the abrasions that might be expected for someone rolled along shingle by the surf, although she was in a considerable state of decomposition, and evidence might already have been lost. The coroner had been notified, and they had been authorized to recover the body to the mortuary for a post-mortem on Monday, for identification – most probably from dental records.

She was looking at her carefully again now, checking for a ligature mark around her neck that they might have missed, or an entry hole from a bullet, trying to see what she could learn about her. It was always hard to determine the age of someone who had been in the water a while. She could be anywhere from her mid-twenties to her forties, she guessed.

She could have been a drowned swimmer or someone who had gone overboard from a boat. A suicide victim, perhaps. Or even, as sometimes happened, a burial at sea that hadn’t been properly weighted down and had broken free, although it tended to be men more than women who were buried at sea. Or she could have been one of the thousands of people who just disappear every year. A misper.

Carefully she lifted away the severed arm and placed it on the empty stainless-steel table next to her body. Then, very gently, she began the process of rolling her over on to her stomach, to check her back. As she did so, she heard a faint click from inside the building.

She raised her head and listened for a moment. It sounded like the front door opening, or closing.

60

‘Sandy!’ he yelled. ‘SANDY!!!’

She was pulling away from him. Shit, she was running fast!

Wearing a plain white T-shirt, blue cycling shorts and trainers, clutching a small bag in her hand, the woman was racing along a path around the side of the lake. Grace followed her, dodging past a statue, and saw her weaving in between several children playing. She swerved around two Schnauzer dogs, each chasing the other. Back on to a path, past a smartly dressed woman on horseback and a whole crocodile of matronly women Nordic-walking in pairs.

Roy was now regretting his beer. Sweat was streaming down his face, stinging his eyes, semi-blinding him. Two roller-bladers were coming towards him. He swerved right. They swerved the same way. Left. They swerved the same way. He lunged right at the last minute, in desperation, his leg banging painfully into a small, free-standing bench, and fell flat on his face, the bench underneath him, digging into him.

‘T’schuldigen!’ One of the roller-bladers, a tall, teenage boy, was standing over him, looking concerned. The other knelt and held out a hand.

‘It’s OK,’ he gasped.

‘You are American?’

‘English.’

‘I am so sorry.’

‘I’m OK, fine, thanks. My fault. I—’ Shaken and feeling foolish, he took the boy’s hand and allowed himself to be hauled up. As soon as he was back on his feet, his eyes were hunting for Sandy.

‘You have cut your leg,’ the other said.

Grace barely gave it a glance. He saw there was a rip in his jeans on his left shin and blood was coming out, but he didn’t care. ‘Thank you – Danke,’ he said, looking ahead, to the left, to the right, in panic.

She had vanished.

The path ran straight on, for several hundred yards, through dense woodland and way in the distance opened on to a clearing. But there was also a right fork over a narrow, metal-railed bridge.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

He balled his hands in frustration. Think!

Which way had she gone? Which possible way?

He turned back to the two roller-bladers. ‘Excuse me, which is the nearest way to a road over there?’

Pointing at the bridge, one said, ‘Yah, this is the shortest way to the road. It is the only road.’

He thanked them, stumbled on for some yards, thinking, then forked right, weaving through a group of cyclists coming towards him over the bridge, and began to run faster, ignoring the stinging pain in his leg. Sandy would head for an exit, he figured. Crowds. He broke into a limping sprint, keeping off the crowded path, running along the grass beside it, shooting the occasional glance down at the ground ahead for benches, darting dogs, sunbathers, but mostly keeping his eyes fixed on the distance, looking desperately for a flash of blonde hair.

It was her! OK, he’d only caught part of her profile, and had not had a good look at her face, but it had been enough. It was Sandy. It had to be! And why the hell else would she have run off, if it wasn’t her?

He raced on, desperation numbing the pain. He could not have come so far, so damn far, just to let her slip from his grasp like this.

Where are you?

A brilliant ray of sunlight shone straight in his eye, like a flashlight beam, for an instant. A reflection off a bus moving along the road, no more than a hundred yards away. Then he saw another glint. It wasn’t sunlight this time.

He dodged around a jolly-looking group having their picture taken, just as the camera flashed, ran over a verge of ragged grass and reached an empty road with the woodland of the garden on either side and a bus pulled over. There was no sign of Sandy.

Then he saw her again, as the bus moved on, a hundred yards ahead of him, still running!

‘SANNDDDDDYYYYYY!’ he hollered.

She stopped in her tracks for a moment and stared in his direction, as if wondering whom he was shouting at.

Leaving her in no doubt, waving his arm frantically, he sprinted towards her, shouting, ‘Sandy! Sandy! Sandy!’

But she was already running again and vanished around a bend. Two mounted policemen appeared, coming towards him, and for a moment he wondered whether to ask them for help. Instead he sprinted on past them, conscious of their wary stares.

Then in the distance he could see the yellow wall of a building. She was running past a red stop light and a skip, over a bridge, past the building and a cluster of buses.

Then she stopped by a parked silver BMW and appeared to be searching in her bag for something – the key, he presumed.

And suddenly he was alongside her, gasping for air. ‘Sandy!’ he said elatedly.

She turned her head, panting hard, and said something to him in German.

And then, staring at her properly for the first time, he realized it wasn’t Sandy.

It wasn’t her at all.

His heart plunged like an elevator with a snapped cable. She had the same profile, uncannily the same, but her face was wider, flatter, much plainer. He couldn’t see her eyes, because they were behind dark shades, but he didn’t need to. It wasn’t Sandy’s mouth; this was a small, thin mouth. It wasn’t Sandy’s fine, silky skin; this face was pockmarked from childhood acne.

‘I’m – I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’

‘You are English?’ she said with a pleasant smile. ‘Can I help you?’

She had her key out now, hit the fob and the doors unlocked. She opened the driver’s door and rummaged around for something inside. He heard the jangle of coins.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I – I made a mistake. I mistook you – I thought you were someone I knew.’

‘I forgot the time!’ She patted the side of her head, indicating stupidity. ‘The police give you tickets very quickly here. Two hours only on the ticket!’

She pulled a handful of euros out of the door pocket.

‘Can I ask you a question, please? Ah – were you here – in the Englischer Garten – on Thursday? At about this time?’

She shrugged. ‘I think so. In this weather, I come often.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Last Thursday?’ she said.

‘Yes.’

She nodded. ‘Definitely. For sure.’

Grace thanked her and turned away. His clothes were clinging to his skin with perspiration. A ribbon of blood trailed across his right trainer. A short distance away he saw Marcel Kullen walking towards him. He felt totally crushed. He pulled out his mobile phone and raised it to his ear, as the woman walked across to the ticket-vending machine. But he wasn’t making a phone call. He was taking a photograph.

61

Cleo continued listening. She had very definitely heard a click.

Halting midway in her process of rolling the slender, fragile, grey cadaver over, she gently lowered her back down on to the stainless-steel table. ‘Hello?’ she called out, her voice muffled by her mask.

Then she stood still, listening, staring uneasily through the door at the silent grey tiles of the corridor. ‘Hello? Who’s that?’ she called out, louder, feeling a tightening in her throat. She lowered her mask, letting it hang by the tapes. ‘Hello?’

Silence. Just the faint hum of the fridges.

A slick of fear shot through her. Had she left the outside door open? Surely not, she never left it open. She tried to think clearly. The smell when she had opened the door – could she have left it open to let some fresh air in?

No way, she would not have been so stupid. She always closed the door; it self-locked. Of course she had closed it!

So why wasn’t the person out there replying?

And in her over-revving heart she already knew the answer to that. There were some weirdos around for whom mortuaries held a fascination. They’d had a number of break-ins in the past, but now the latest security systems had so far, for a good eighteen months, acted as an effective deterrent.

Suddenly she remembered the CCTV monitor on the wall and looked up at it. It was showing a static black and white image of the tarmac outside the door, and the flower bed and brick wall beyond. The tail lights and rear bumper of her car were just in frame.

Then she heard the distinct rustle of clothes out in the corridor.

Goosebumps broke out over her entire body. For an instant she froze, her brain spinning, trying to get traction. There was a phone on the shelf next to the cabinet, but she didn’t have time to get to it. She looked around frantically for a weapon that was in reach. For an instant she considered, absurdly, the severed arm of the cadaver. Fear tightened her skin; her scalp felt as if she were wearing a skullcap.

The rustling came closer. She saw a shadow moving along the tiles.

Then, suddenly, her fear turned to anger. Whoever the hell it was out there had no damn right to be here. She decided she was not going to be scared or intimidated by some sicko who got kicks out of breaking into the mortuary. Her mortuary.

In a few fast, determined strides, she reached the cabinet, slid the door open, noisily, and pulled out the largest of the Sabatier carving knives. Then, gripping it tightly by the handle, she ran at the opened doorway. And collided, with a scream of terror, with a tall figure in an orange T-shirt and lime-green shorts, who gripped her arms, pinning them to her sides. The knife clattered to the tiled floor.

62

Marcel Kullen pulled over to the kerb and pointed across the street. Roy Grace saw a large, beige-coloured store on the corner. It had book-lined windows and the interior was dark. Lights inside, hanging from stalks, were switched on, providing decoration rather than any illumination. They reminded Grace of glow-worms.

Elegant grey letters on the store front read The Munich Readery. Another announced Second-hand Books in English.

‘I just wanted to show you the shop. I am asking in this tomorrow,’ the German detective said.

Grace nodded. He had consumed two large beers, a bratwurst, sauerkraut and potatoes, and was feeling decidedly woozy. In fact, he was having a problem keeping his eyes open.

‘Sandy was a big reader, you told me?’

Was. The word jarred in Grace’s mind. He didn’t like people referring to Sandy in the past tense, as if she were dead. But he let it slide. He used that tense himself often enough, subconsciously. Feeling more energized suddenly, he said, ‘Yes, she’s a big reader, always has been. Crime, thrillers – all kinds of mystery novels. Biographies as well – she liked reading about women explorers in particular.’

Kullen put the car in gear and drove on. ‘What is it – you have this saying in England – Keep your pecker up?’

Grace patted his friend on the arm. ‘Good memory!’

‘So now us will go to the police headquarters. There they have the records for the missing persons. I have a friend, Sabine Thomas, the Polizeirat who is in charge of this department. She is coming in to meet us.’

‘Thank you,’ Grace said. ‘That’s kind of her, on a Sunday.’

His earlier optimism had deserted him and he was feeling flat, realizing again the enormity of what faced him here. He watched quiet streets, deserted shops, cars, pedestrians slide by. She could be anywhere. In a room behind any of these facades, in any of these cars, on any of these streets. And this was just one city. How many gazillion towns and cities in the world were there where she might be?

He found the button on his door and lowered his window. Sultry, humid air blew on his face. The foolishness he had felt earlier, as he had returned to the table after his fruitless chase, had gone, but now he felt lost.

Somehow, after Dick Pope’s call, he had felt that all he had to do was go to the Englischer Garten and he would find Sandy there. Waiting for him. As if somehow letting Dick and Lesley Pope see her had been her subtle way of getting the message to him.

How dumb was that?

‘If you like on the way to the office we can walk through Marienplatz. It is a small detour. We can go there to the Viktualienmarkt, the place I told you where I think an English person might go for food.’

‘Yes, thank you.’

‘Then you are come to my house and you meet my family.’

Grace smiled at him, wondering if the German had any idea just how much he envied him the apparent normality of his life. Then, suddenly, his mobile phone rang. Grace looked at the display.

Private number.

He let it ring a couple more times, hesitating. Probably work, and he wasn’t in the right mood to speak to anyone from work right now. But he was aware of his responsibilities. With a heavy heart, he pressed the green button.

‘Yo!’

It was Glenn Branson.

‘Wassup?’

‘Where are you?’

‘Munich.’

‘Munich? You’re still there?’

‘It’s only been a few hours.’

‘What the fuck are you doing there anyway?’

‘Trying to buy you a horse.’

There was a long silence. ‘A what?’ And then, ‘Oh, I get it. Very funny. Munich – shit, man. Ever see that movie Night Train to Munich?’

‘No.’

‘Directed by Carol Reed.’

‘Never saw it. This is not a good time to discuss movies.’

‘Yeah, well, you were watching The Third Man the other night. He directed that too.’

‘Is that what you phoned to tell me about?’

‘No.’ He was about to add something, when Kullen leaned across Grace, pointing at a rather unimpressive looking building.

‘Hold on a moment.’ Grace covered the mouthpiece.

‘The Bierkeller where Hitler was thrown out from, because he did not pay his bill!’ he said. ‘A rumour, you know!’

‘I’m just driving past Adolf Hitler’s watering hole,’ Grace informed Branson.

‘Yeah? Well, keep on driving past it. We have a problem.’

‘Tell me?’

‘It’s big. Massive. OK?’

‘I’m all ears.’

‘You sound pissed. Have you been drinking?’

‘No,’ Grace said, mentally sharpening himself up. ‘Tell me?’

‘We have another murder on our hands,’ the DS said. ‘Similarities with Katie Bishop.’

And suddenly Roy Grace was sitting bolt upright, fully alert. ‘What similarities?’

‘A young woman – name of Sophie Harrington. She’s been found dead with a gas mask on her face.’

Cold fingers crawled up Grace’s spine. ‘Shit. What else do you have?’

‘What else do you need? I’m telling you, man, you need to get your ass back here.’

‘You have DI Murphy. She can handle it.’

‘She’s your understudy,’ he said disparagingly.

‘If you want to call her that. So far as I’m concerned, she’s my deputy SIO.’

‘You know what they said about Greta Garbo’s understudy?’

Struggling to remember any movie he had ever seen the screen legend in, Grace replied testily, ‘No, what did they say?’

‘Greta Garbo’s understudy can do everything that Greta Garbo does, except for whatever it is that Greta Garbo does.’

‘Very flattering.’

‘You geddit?’

‘I geddit.’

‘In that case get your ass on the next plane back here. Alison Vosper thinks she has your scalp. I don’t give a toss about those politics, but I do give a toss about you. And we need you.’

‘Did you remember to feed Marlon?’ Grace asked.

‘Marlon?’

‘The goldfish.’

‘Oh, shit.’

63

Cleo tried to scream, but the sound stayed trapped in her throat. She struggled manically, trying to free her arms, the man’s face a blur to her unfocused eyes. She lashed out with her leg, kicking him in the shin.

Then she heard his voice.

‘Cleo!’

Quiet, plaintive. ‘Cleo! It’s me! It’s OK.’

Spiky black hair. A startled expression on his young, pleasant face. Dressed casually in an orange top and green shorts, headphones plugged into his ears.

‘Oh, shit.’ She stopped struggling, her mouth dropping open. ‘Darren!’

He released her arms very slowly, warily, as if not yet quite sure he could trust her not to stab him. ‘Are you all right, Cleo?’

Gulping down air, she felt as if her heart was trying to drill its way out of her chest. She stepped back, looking at her colleague, then at the knife on the floor, then back at his brown eyes. Numb. Too numb to say anything else for a moment.

‘You gave me such a shock.’ The words came out in a breathless, whispered rush.

Darren raised his hands and pulled out his earphones, letting them dangle by their white wires. Then he raised his hands again, in an attitude of surrender. He was trembling, she realized.

‘I’m sorry.’ She was still hyperventilating, her voice shaky. Then she smiled, trying to remedy the situation.

Still looking uncertain, he said, ‘Am I that scary?’

‘I – I heard the door,’ she said, starting to feel foolish now. ‘I called out and you didn’t reply. I thought you were an intruder. I – I was . . .’ she shook her head.

He dropped his hands, cupping his earpieces. ‘I was listening to some heavy music,’ he said. ‘I didn’t hear you.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

He reached down and rubbed his shin.

‘Did I hurt you?’

‘Actually, yes! But I’ll live.’ There was a nasty mark on his shin. ‘I suddenly remembered we’d left the body out. I thought, with this heat, it ought to go in a fridge. I called you, but there was no answer from your home or your mobile, so I decided to come in and do it.’

Feeling more normal now, Cleo apologized again.

He shrugged. ‘Don’t worry about it. But I never thought of working in a mortuary as being a contact sport.’

She laughed. ‘I’m so, so sorry. I’ve just had a shit twenty-four hours. I—’

‘Forget it. I’m OK.’

She looked at the red weal on his leg. ‘It was good of you, that you came in. Thank you.’

‘I’ll think twice next time,’ he said good-humouredly. ‘Maybe I should have stayed in my last job – it was a lot less violent.’

She grinned. In his previous job, she remembered, Darren had been a butcher’s apprentice. ‘It’s good of you to give up time on a Sunday,’ she said.

‘It got me out of a barbecue at my girlfriend’s parents,’ he said. ‘That’s the downside of this work. I can’t cope with barbecues since I started working here.’

‘That makes two of us.’

They were both thinking of burns victims. Usually their skin was blackened, crisp like pork crackling. Depending how long they had burned for, their flesh was sometimes grey and hard, sometimes raw and bloody liked seared, undercooked pork. Cleo had read once that cannibal tribes in central Africa called white man long pig. She understood exactly why. It was the reason many people who worked in mortuaries were uncomfortable at barbecues. Particularly when pork was involved.

Together they rolled the cadaver on to her stomach and examined her back for tattoos, birthmarks and bullet-entry wounds, but found nothing. With relief they finally eased her into a body-bag, zipped it up and slid it into fridge number 17. Tomorrow the process of identifying her would begin. The soft tissues from her fingers were gone, so there were no prints that could be taken. Her jaw was intact, so dental records could be checked. DNA was a longer shot – she would need to already be on a database to find a match. Her description and photographs and measurements would be sent to the Missing Persons Helpline, and Sussex police would contact friends and relatives of anyone who had been reported missing who fitted the description of this dead woman.

And in the morning the consultant pathologist, Dr Nigel Churchman, would conduct a post-mortem to establish the cause of death. If, during the course of this, he found anything suspicious, he would halt his work immediately, the coroner would be notified and a Home Office pathologist, either Nadiuska or Dr Theobald, would be called in to take over.

In the meantime, both Cleo and Darren had several hours remaining of a glorious August Sunday afternoon ahead of them

Darren left first, in his small red Nissan, heading for the barbecue he really could have done without. Cleo stood in the doorway, watching him drive off, unable to stop herself from envying him. He was young, full of enthusiasm, happy in his relationship with his girlfriend and in his job.

She was rapidly heading for the wrong side of thirty. Enjoying her career but worrying about it at the same time. She wanted to have children before she was too old. Yet each time she thought she had found Mr Right, he would spring something on her from left field. Roy was such a lovely man. But just when she thought everything was perfect, his missing wife popped up like a bloody jack-in-the-box.

She set the alarm, stepped outside and locked the front door, with just one thought in her mind – to get home and see if there was a message from Roy. Then, walking across the tarmac drive to her blue MG, she stopped dead in her tracks.

Somebody had slashed the black canvas roof open. All the way from the windscreen to the rear window.