Branson put the car in gear and drove on. A few minutes later they were driving downhill into the busy gyratory system, past a giant Sains-bury’s supermarket to their right and then a strategically placed undertaker’s. Then they turned sharp left in through wrought-iron gates attached to brick pillars bearing the small, unwelcome sign, brighton and hove city mortuary.

Grace had no doubt that there were worse places in the world, and in that respect he had led a sheltered life. But for him this place was about as bad as it got. He remembered an expression he had once heard, ‘the banality of evil’. And this was a banal place. It was a bland building with a grim aura, a long, single-storey structure with grey pebbledash rendering on the walls and a covered drive-in on one side high enough to take an ambulance.

The mortuary was a transit stop on the one-way journey to a grave or crematorium oven for those who had died suddenly, violently or inexplicably – or from some fast-onset disease like viral meningitis where a post-mortem might provide medical insights that could one day help the living. Normally he found himself shuddering involuntarily as he passed through these gates, but today was different.

Today he felt positively elated. Not because of the dead body he was coming to study, but because of the woman who worked here. His date for tonight.

But he wasn’t about to tell Glenn Branson that.

17

Tom carefully reversed his Audi out of the bay in the Gravytrain Distributing parking lot, nervous of hitting Ron Spacks’s Ferrari, then stuck his phone into the hands-free cradle and dialled Kellie, deep in thought.

That image of the woman being butchered was chilling him, going round and round in his mind. It was a movie, must have been – there were hundreds of movies he had never seen – just a scene from a thriller. Or maybe a trailer for one. You could create all kinds of effects these days. It was a film.

It had to have been.

But he knew he was just trying to convince himself. The trashing of his computer, the threatening email? He shivered as if a dark cloud had slipped across his soul. Just what the hell had he really seen on Tuesday night?

Then he heard Kellie’s voice, a tad more cheery now.

‘Hiya,’ she said.

‘Darling?’ he said. ‘Sorry about that, I was with a very difficult customer.’

‘No, it’s OK, it’s probably just me. It’s just – you know – it was spooky.’

As he drove along past a row of factory and warehouse units, another plane was coming in to land, and he raised his voice above the din. ‘Tell me exactly what happened.’

‘It was just a phone call. The man asked if this was the Bryce residence, then if I was Mrs Kellie Bryce, and when I told him I was, he hung up.’

‘You know what it is?’ Tom said. ‘It’s probably one of those con men. I read about them in the paper the other day – there’s a whole ring operating. They call up people pretending to be from their bank, saying it’s a security check; they get them to confirm a whole load of stuff about their house, their passwords, then their bank details and credit cards. It could have been one of those interrupted in mid-flow.’

‘Maybe.’ She did not sound any more convinced than he felt. ‘He had a strange accent.’

‘What kind of an accent?’

‘Sort of European, not English.’

‘And he didn’t say anything else at all?’

‘No.’

‘Are you expecting any deliveries?’

There was an awkward silence. ‘Not exactly.’

Shit. She had bought something. ‘What do you mean not exactly, darling?’

‘The bidding hasn’t closed.’

Tom didn’t even want to know what today’s extravaganza might be. ‘Listen, I’ll try to get home early. I have to go into town and collect my laptop – it’s being fixed again.’

‘Still wrong?’

‘Yes, some glitch that won’t go away. How’s the weather?’

‘Brightening up.’

‘Maybe if I get down in time we could have a barbecue with the kids?’

Her response was strange, almost evasive, he thought as he pulled out onto the main road, looking for the signs to London at a roundabout a short distance ahead. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Well, OK, maybe.’

All the way, on the slow crawl along the M4 bottleneck, thanks to John Prescott’s cursed bus lane (for which many times Tom could have boiled the Deputy PM’s testicles in oil), he was trying to work out all the reasons someone might have made that call and then hung up. And the most likely was a delivery driver who got cut off. Simple as that. Nothing to get worried about.

Except he did worry, because he loved Kellie and Max and Jessica just so damned much.

His parents had been killed in a car smash in fog on the M1, when he was twenty, and his only sibling, his brother Zack, five years younger than him, who had never really got over it, was a dope-head dropout living in Bondi Beach in Sydney, doing odd jobs and a bit of surfing. Apart from Zack and a maternal uncle who lived in Melbourne who he had not seen since he was ten – and who hadn’t bothered to come to his parents’ funeral – Kellie, Max and Jessica were all the family he had, and that made them even more precious still.

Just as the motorway ended and became Cromwell Road, his phone rang. No number showed in the caller display.

Tom pressed the button to answer it. ‘Hello?’

A male voice with a strong eastern European accent asked, ‘Is that Tom Bryce speaking?’

Guardedly he said, ‘It is, yes.’

Then the man hung up.

18

The remains of the dead woman lay on a steel trolley in the sterile post-mortem room, bagged in translucent plastic like frozen produce from a supermarket.

The torso was wrapped in one sheet; the two legs and the hand that had been recovered from the field of rape were each parcelled separately. The hand was in a small bag, and there was a separate bag tied over each of the feet – this was done to protect any fibres or skin or soil particles that might be lodged under the nails. Then one large sheet had been wrapped around everything.

It was this outer plastic sheet that Dr Frazer Theobald was very carefully removing, painstakingly checking for anything, however microscopic, that might have fallen from the dead woman’s skin or hair, which could have come from her killer.

Grace had been to this place more times than he cared to remember. The first time had been some twenty years back, when he was a rookie cop attending his first post-mortem. He could still recall it vividly, seeing a sixty-year-old man who had fallen off a ladder, laid out stark naked, devoid of all human dignity with two tags bearing his name – one buff and one green – hanging from his big toe.

When the mortician had cut around the back of the scalp, just beneath the hairline, then had peeled it forward so that it hung down over the face, exposing the skull, and the pathologist, wielding a rotary bandsaw, began to grind into the top of the skull, Grace had done what more than a few rookie cops do, which was to turn a horrible shade of green, stagger out to the toilet and throw up.

He didn’t throw up any more, but the whole place still weirded him every time he came here. In part it was the reek of Trigene disinfectant that you carried away with you, in every pore of your skin, for hours after you had left the building; in part the diffused light that came in through the opaque windows, giving this room an ethereal quality. And then there was always the sense that the mortuary was a depot, a repository, a brutal halfway house between dying and resting in peace.

Bodies were kept here until the cause of death was ascertained, and in some cases until they had been formally identified, then they would be released to an undertaker under the directions of relatives. Occasionally bodies were never identified. There was one, of an elderly man, in a fridge in the back storage room, which had been there for nearly a year. He had been found dead on a park bench, but no one had claimed him.