Grace wondered sometimes, in his darker moments, if that might happen to him one day. He had no wife, no kids, no parents – just his sister, and if he outlived her? But he never dwelt on that too much – he had enough problems just with living – although he did think about death a lot. Particularly in here. Sometimes, staring at a body on a trolley or at the freezer locker doors, a chill would seep deep through his veins as he wondered how many ghosts this building contained.
Cleo Morey, the Chief Mortician or Senior Pathology Technician, to give her her formal title, helped Dr Theobald lift the large outer sheet away and then carefully folded it for storage; it would be sent to a forensics laboratory if the body yielded no clues. Grace let his eyes linger on her for some moments. Even in her working clothes she looked strikingly beautiful, he thought, a view shared by everyone who met her.
Then the Home Office pathologist unwrapped the torso and began the laborious task of measuring and recording the dimensions of each of the thirty-four stab wounds.
The flesh looked paler than yesterday, and although much of it, including the dead woman’s breasts, was lacerated into strips of crimson pulp, he could see the first signs of marbling starting to occur.
The room was dominated by two steel post-mortem tables, one fixed, the other, on which the remains of the woman lay, on castors. There was a blue hydraulic hoist and a row of fridges with floor-to-ceiling doors. The walls were tiled in grey and a drain gully ran all the way round. 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 display cabinet filled with instruments, some packs of Duracell batteries and grisly souvenirs that no one else wanted – mostly pacemakers – removed from victims.
Next to this was a wallchart itemizing the name of the deceased, with columns for the weights of each brain, lungs, heart, liver, kidneys and spleen. All that was written on it so far was anon. woman.
It was a sizeable room but it felt crowded this morning. In addition to the Home Office pathologist and the Chief Mortician, there was Darren, the Assistant Mortician, a sharp, good-looking and pleasant-natured lad of twenty with fashionably spiky black hair, Joe Tindall, the senior SOCO officer, who was photographing the ruler in position on each stab wound, Glenn Branson and himself.
The visitors wore protective green gowns with white cuffs and either plastic overshoes or white wellington boots. The pathologist and the two morticians wore blue pyjamas and heavy-duty green aprons, and the pathologist had a mask hanging loosely below his chin. Grace looked at Cleo Morey, caught her eye, then the brief but very definite grin she gave him, and his nerves jangled.
He felt like an excited kid. And it was wrong, it was unprofessional – every ounce of his concentration should be on this case right now – but he couldn’t help it. Cleo Morey was distracting him and that was a fact.
They had already been out on a date just a few days ago. Well, it had been a date of sorts – a quick drink in a pub which got cut even shorter by a phone call calling him urgently back to work.
God, she was gorgeous, he thought. And however many times he saw her, he could never quite square this young, leggy woman in her late twenties with her long blonde hair, English-rose face and quick brain, with working in this place, doing one of the grimmest jobs in the world. With her looks she could have been a model or an actress, and with her brains she could probably have had any career she set her mind to – and she had chosen this. Long hours on call day and night. At a moment’s notice she would get summoned to a riverbank, to a burned-out warehouse, to a shallow woodland grave to recover a body. To prepare the body for the pathologist to carry out the post-mortem, then to reassemble it as well as possible, no matter how burned or decomposed, for identification by relatives, and to offer them some succour, some glimpse of hope that their loved one’s death had not been quite as bad as the body indicated.
As he watched Dr Theobald press a ruler against the fifth stab wound, right above the young woman’s belly button, he did not envy Cleo her task on this one. With luck, identification would be done by DNA, he thought; no parent should ever have to see this sight. Yet, he knew only too well just how important it was to some people to see for themselves. Often, despite all efforts to dissuade them, loved ones would insist on a viewing, just to see them one more time, to say goodbye.
Closure.
Something he’d never had. And that helped him to understand the need for it. Without closure you had no hope of moving on. Which was why he’d been stuck in a state of limbo since Sandy’s disappearance. There was a hot young medium coming to Brighton tomorrow, performing to just a small audience at a holistic health centre, and Grace had bought a ticket. It would probably turn out to be another blank, he knew, but the British and international police had exhausted every conventional avenue.
Cleo shot him a glance, a warm, definitely flirty glance. Careful to check first that Branson wasn’t watching, he shot her back a wink.
Christ, you are so gorgeous! he thought, heavy-hearted and feeling so damned guilty about Sandy. It was as if still, after all these years, he was being unfaithful to her by dating another woman.
His mobile phone beeped, signalling a text message. He pulled it from his inside pocket and glanced at the display. It was from DC Nicholl back at the Major Incident Suite.
Teresa Wallington eliminated.
Immediately Grace sidled up to Branson and motioned him over to the rear of the room. ‘I think you need to work on your hunch technique,’ Grace said to him. Then he held up the phone for his colleague to read the message.
‘Shit. I had a feeling – like I really had a feeling about this,’ the Detective Sergeant said. He looked so despondent Grace felt sorry for him.
Giving him a pat of encouragement, he said, ‘Glenn, in the movie Se7en Morgan Freeman had a hunch that didn’t turn out quite right either.’
Glancing sideways at him, Branson said, ‘Are you implying this is some trait common to black cops?’
‘Nah, he’s an actor.’ Grace eyed Cleo again, watching her streaked blonde hair swinging, incongruously pretty, against the green apron strap around her neck. ‘Maybe it’s just common to big, bald gorillas.’ He gave him another friendly pat.
Then he dialled Nick from the landline phone on the work surface beside him. The new digital phones the police were being issued with scrambled all conversations, but at present their conventional mobile phones were simple to eavesdrop on, so he avoided using them on anything sensitive.
‘She got cold feet about the wedding,’ Nick Nicholl explained. ‘Did a runner. Now she’s come back very contrite.’
‘Sweet,’ Grace said sarcastically. ‘I’ll tell Glenn. He loves a good weepie with a happy ending.’
Silence down the phone. DC Nick Nicholl possessed a good brain but a sense of humour bypass.
They ran through the remaining shortlist of missing women who fitted the description, and Grace told Nicholl to make sure the police had something that DNA could be extracted from, from each of the four women. Nicholl updated him on the state of the continuing inch-by-inch grid search of the area surrounding where the body had been found, for the girl’s head and left hand. Privately, Grace did not expect them to turn up. The hand possibly, because a dog or a fox might have run off with it. But he doubted they would ever find the head.
He made another quick call, to check on the progress of the trial of Suresh Hossain – a case which had become very personal to him. It was a difficult case; the Crown Prosecution Service had made some blunders, and he hadn’t handled it as well as he should have done. He’d been stupid in taking a piece of evidence, a shoe belonging to the murdered man, to a medium. The defence counsel had found out about it and humiliated him in court.