by Peter James
‘Yeah.’ He nodded pensively. ‘Me and Marlon, we’ve bonded. We’re like soulmates.’
‘Really? Well, don’t get too close to him.’
Marlon was the goldfish Grace had won at a fairground nine years ago and the fish was still going strong. It was a surly, antisocial creature that had eaten every companion he’d bought for it. Although the six-foot two-inch detective sergeant was probably beyond even that greedy creature’s appetite, he decided. Then he quickly glanced back at the screen, noting a sudden update on the cars broken into in Tidy Street. Two youths had been arrested breaking into a car directly beneath a CCTV camera around the corner, in Trafalgar Street.
Good, he thought with some relief. Except they would probably be released on bail and be back on the streets again tonight.
‘Any developments in the Branson household?’
A few months ago, in an attempt to salvage his marriage, Branson had bought his wife, Ari, an expensive horse for eventing, using compensation he had received for an injury. But that turned out to have resulted in little more than a brief truce in a terminally hostile relationship.
‘Any more horses?’
‘I went over last night to see the kids. She told me I’ll be getting a letter from her solicitor.’ Branson shrugged.
‘A divorce lawyer?’
He nodded glumly.
Grace’s sadness for his friend was only slightly tempered by the realization that this meant Branson would be lodging at his house for a considerable time to come – and he did not have the heart to throw him out.
‘Maybe we could have a drink tonight and chat?’ Branson asked.
Much though he loved this man, Grace responded with a less than enthusiastic, ‘Yup, sure.’ His chats with Glenn about Ari had become interminable, always going over and over the same ground. The reality was that Glenn’s wife not only no longer loved him, but didn’t even like him. Privately, Grace thought she was the kind of woman who would never be satisfied with what she had in any relationship, but each time he tried to tell his friend that, Glenn responded defensively, as if he still believed there was a solution, however elusive.
‘Actually, tell you what, mate,’ Grace said, ‘are you busy this morning?’
‘Yeah – but nothing that can’t wait a few hours. Why?’
‘Got a body hauled up by a dredger yesterday. I put DI Mantle in charge, but she’s on a course up in Bramshill Police College today and tomorrow. Thought you might like to come to the postmortem.’
Branson’s eyes widened as he shook his head in mock disbelief. ‘Boy, you really know how to treat someone when they’re down, don’t you! You’re going to cheer me up by taking me to see a floater having a post-mortem, on a wet November morning. Man, that’s guaranteed to be a laugh a minute.’
‘Yep, well, it might do you good to see someone worse off than yourself.’
‘Thanks a lot.’
‘Besides, Nadiuska’s performing it.’
Quite apart from her professional skills and her cheery personality, Nadiuska De Sancha, the forty-eight-year-old Home Office pathologist, was a striking-looking woman. A statuesque redhead with Russian aristocratic blood, she looked a good decade younger than her years and, despite being happily married to an eminent plastic surgeon, enjoyed flirting and had a wicked sense of humour. Grace had never encountered any officer in the Sussex Police Force who did not fancy her.
‘Ah!’ Branson said, perking up suddenly. ‘You didn’t tell me that bit!’
‘Not that you are so shallow it would have made any difference to your decision.’
‘You’re my boss. I do whatever you tell me.’
‘Really? I’ve never noticed.’
25
Sergeant Tania Whitlock shivered as a cold draught blew steadily in through the window beside her desk. The right side of her face felt as if it was turning to ice. She sipped some hot coffee and glanced at her watch. Ten past eleven. The day was already almost half gone and the piles of reports and forms on her desk that she had to fill in were still alarmingly high. Outside a steady drizzle fell from grey skies.
The window gave her a view across the grass runway and parking area of Shoreham Airport, the oldest civil airport in the world. Built in 1910, on the western extremity of Brighton and Hove, it was now mostly used by private aircraft and flying schools. Some years ago an industrial estate had been developed on land at the edge of the airport, and it was in one of these buildings, a converted warehouse, that the Specialist Search Unit of Sussex Police was based.
Tania had barely heard the drone of an aero engine all morning. Hardly any planes or helicopters had taken off or landed. It seemed that this weather didn’t inspire anyone to go anywhere, and the low cloud ceiling discouraged inexperienced pilots with only visual flight rating.
Please let it continue to be a quiet day, she thought, then turned her attention back to her current task. It was a standard statement form for the Coroner, with space for diagrams, detailing how members of her team had dived last Friday, in Brighton Marina, to recover the body of a yachtsman who had missed his footing, apparently drunk, according to witnesses, and fallen off his gangplank with an outboard motor strapped to his back.
Twenty-nine years old, the sergeant was short and slim, with an alert, attractive face and long dark hair. Wrapped up at this moment in a blue fleece jacket for warmth, over her uniform blue T-shirt, baggy blue trousers and work boots, she looked fragile and delicate. No one meeting her for the first time would have guessed that for the previous five years before her posting here, she had been a member of Brighton and Hove Police’s elite Local Support Team, the frontline police officers who carried out raids and arrests, dealt with public disorder and any other situation where violence was anticipated.
The Specialist Search Unit comprised nine police officers. One, Steve Hargrave, had been a professional deep-sea diver before joining the force. The others had trained at the Police Dive School in Newcastle. One member of the team was an ex-Marine, another a former traffic cop – and a legend in the force because he had once booked his own father for not wearing a seat belt. Tania, the only female, headed the unit, which had, by anyone’s definition, the grimmest task in the entire Sussex Police Force.
Their role was to recover dead bodies and human remains, and to search for evidence in locations which were considered beyond the abilities or too hazardous or too grim for regular police officers. Most of their work involved finding victims underwater – in canals, rivers, lakes, wells, the sea – but their remit had no limits. Among the previous twelve months’ highlights – or lowlights, depending on perspective – her team had recovered forty-seven separate body parts from a particularly horrific car smash, in which six people had died, and the incinerated remains of four people from a light aircraft crash. Partially obscuring the view of parked private planes from her window was a trailer, in police livery, containing sufficient body bags to cope with a wide-bodied-airliner disaster.
Humour helped to keep the unit sane, and every member had a nickname. Hers was Smurf, because she was small and turned blue underwater. Of all the people she had worked with since joining the police, ten years ago, this team was just the greatest. She liked and respected each of her colleagues, and the feeling was mutual.
The building in which they operated housed their diving equipment, including a large Zeppelin inflatable capable of carrying the entire team, a drying room and their lorry, which was equipped with everything from climbing to tunnelling apparatus. They were on permanent standby, 24/7.
Most of the space in Tania’s small, cluttered office was filled with filing cabinets, on the front of one of which was a massive yellow radiation-warning sticker. A whiteboard above her desk listed in blue and turquoise marker pen all immediate priorities. Beside it hung a calendar and a photograph of her four-year-old niece, Maddie. Her laptop, plastic lunch box, lamp, phone and piles of files and forms took up most of the space on her desk.
During the wint
er months it was permanently freezing cold in here, which was why she had her fleece jacket on. Despite the asthmatic wheezing of the blower heater at her feet, her fingers were so cold she was finding it hard to grip her ballpoint pen. It would feel warmer at the bottom of the English Channel, she thought.
She turned the page of the dive log, then made more notes on the form. Suddenly her phone rang, distracting her, and she answered it a little absently.
‘Sergeant Whitlock.’
Almost instantly she switched to full attention. It was Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, from HQ CID, and it was unlikely that he would be calling for a chat about the weather.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘How’s things?’
‘Fine, Roy,’ she said, transmitting more enthusiasm than she actually felt today.
‘Did I hear a rumour that you got married not long ago?’
‘In the summer,’ she said.
‘He’s a lucky guy!’
‘Thank you, Roy! I hope someone tells him! So – what can I do for you?’
‘I’m at Brighton mortuary – we’re doing a Home Office PM on a young male hauled up yesterday by the dredger, Arco Dee, about ten miles south of Shoreham Harbour.’
‘I know the Arco Dee – it operates mostly out of Shoreham and Newhaven.’
‘Yes. I think I’m going to need you guys to take a look and see if there’s anything else down there.’
‘What information can you give me?’
‘We have a pretty good fix on the position where they found it. The body was wrapped in plastic and weighted down. It could be a burial at sea, but I’m not sure about that.’
‘Presumably the Arco Dee hauled it up from a designated dredge area?’ she said, starting to make notes on her pad.
‘Yes.’
‘There’s a specific charted area for burials at sea. It’s possible a body could drift from there in the currents, but unlikely if it was a professional burial. Want me to come over?’
‘If you wouldn’t mind?’
‘I’ll be there in half an hour.’
‘Thanks.’
As she hung up, she grimaced. She’d been planning to leave early today to get home to cook her husband, Rob, a special meal tonight. He loved Thai food and she’d stopped and bought everything she needed on the way in – including some fresh prawns and a very plump sea bass. Rob, a pilot with British Airways long haul, was home tonight before going away again for nine days. By the sound of it, her plans had just headed out the window.
Her door opened and Steve Hargrave, nicknamed Gonzo, peered in. ‘Just wondered if you were busy, chief, or if you had a couple of minutes for a chat.’
She gave him an acidic smile that could have dissolved a steel girder in less time than it took for him to register her displeasure.
Raising a finger as he started retreating, he said, ‘Not a good moment, right?’
She continued smiling.
26
Who are you? Roy Grace wondered, staring down at the naked body of Unknown Male, who was laid out on his back on the stainless-steel table in the centre of the post-mortem room, beneath the cold glare of the overhead lights. Someone’s child. Maybe someone’s brother too. Who loves you? Who will be devastated by your death?
It was strange, he thought. This place used to give him the creeps every time he came here. But that had all changed when Cleo Morey arrived as the new Senior Anatomical Pathology Technician. Now he came here eagerly, at any opportunity. Even in her blue gown, green plastic apron and white rubber boots, Cleo still looked incredibly sexy.
Maybe he was just perverse, or perhaps it was true what they said about love blinding you.
It struck him that mortuaries shared something in common with lawyers’ offices. Not many people, other than their staff, came to mortuaries because they were happy. If you were an overnight guest here, it meant you were pretty seriously dead. If you were a visitor, it meant that someone you knew and loved had just died, suddenly, unexpectedly and quite often brutally.
Housed in a long, low, grey pebbledash-rendered bungalow, just off the Lewes Road gyratory system and adjoining the beautiful, hillside setting of Woodvale Cemetery, Brighton and Hove City Mortuary consisted of a covered receiving bay, an office, a multi-faith chapel, a glass-sided viewing room, two storage areas, recently refurbished with wider fridges to accommodate the increasing trend of obese cadavers, an isolation room for suspected deaths from AIDS and other contagious diseases, and the main post-mortem room, where they were now.
On the far side of the wall he heard the whine of an angle-grinder. Building work was going on to extend the mortuary.
The greyness of the day outside was grimly matched by the atmosphere in here. Grey light diffused through the opaque windows. Grey tiled walls. Brown and grey speckled tiles on the floor that were a close match to the colour of a dead human brain. Apart from the blue surgical gowns worn by everyone in here, and the green plastic aprons of the mortuary staff and the pathologist, the only colour in the whole room was the bright pink disinfectant in the upended plastic dispenser by the washbasin.
The post-mortem room reeked, permanently and unpleasantly, of Jeyes Fluid and Trigene disinfectant – sometimes compounded by the stomach-churning, freshly unblocked-drain stench that came from opened-up cadavers.
As always with a Home Office post-mortem, the room was crowded. In addition to himself, Nadiuska and Cleo, there were Darren Wallace, the Assistant Mortuary Technician, a young man of twenty-one who had started life as a butcher’s apprentice; Michael Forman, a serious, intense man in his mid-thirties, who was the Coroner’s Officer; James Gartrell, the burly forensic photographer; and a queasy-looking Glenn Branson, who was standing some distance back. Grace had observed several times in the past that, despite the Detective Sergeant’s big, tough frame, he always had a problem at post-mortems.
Unknown Male’s flesh was a waxy off-white. It was the colour Roy Grace had long associated with bodies in which the life forces had ceased, but on which decomposition had not yet begun to present, to the naked eye at least, its hideous processes. The winter weather and the cold of the seawater would have helped to delay the onset, but it was clear that Unknown Male had not been dead for long.
Nadiuska De Sancha, her red hair clipped up, tortoiseshell glasses perched on her finely sculpted nose, estimated that death had probably occurred four or five days ago – but she was not able to get closer than that. Nor was she able to establish, for the moment at any rate, the precise cause of death, largely on account of the fact that Unknown Male was short of most of his vital organs.
He was a good-looking young man, with close-cropped, downy black hair, a Roman nose and brown eyes that were fixed open. His body was lean and bony – but from undernourishment rather than exercise, Grace judged from the lack of muscle tone. His genitals were modestly covered by the fleshy triangle of skin from his sternum, which had been removed and placed there by Nadiuska, as if to afford him some dignity in death. The flesh of his chest and stomach, either side of the massive incision running down his midriff, was clamped back, revealing a startlingly hollow ribcage, with the intestines, like shiny, translucent rope, coiled beneath.
On the wall to their left was a chart for listing the weight of the brain, lungs, heart, liver, kidneys and spleen of each cadaver examined in here. There was a dash against each item, except for the brain, the only vital organ the cadaver still possessed, and very likely to be the only one that would go to his grave with him.
The pathologist removed his bladder, laid it on the metal dissecting tray, which was on raised legs above the cadaver’s thighs, then made one sharp incision to open it. She carefully bottled and sealed samples of the fluid that poured out, for tests.
‘What’s your assessment so far?’ Grace asked her.
‘Well,’ she said, in her exquisite broken English, ‘the cause of death is not absolute at this moment, Roy. There’s no petechial haemorrhaging to indicate suffocation or drowning, and with
the absence of his lungs I can’t say for sure at this point if he was dead prior to immersion. But I think we can surmise, from the fact that his organs were removed, that was pretty likely.’
‘Not many surgeons operate underwater,’ Michael Forman quipped.
‘I don’t have much to go on from the stomach contents,’ she continued. ‘Most of it has been dissolved by the digestion process, although that slows post-mortem. But there are some particles of what looks like chicken, potato and broccoli – so that indicates he was capable of eating a proper meal in the hours preceding death. That is not really consistent with his absence of organs.’
‘In what way?’ Grace asked, conscious of the inquisitive eyes of the Coroner’s Officer and Glenn Branson.
‘Well,’ she said, and waved her scalpel down his opened midriff. ‘This is the kind of incision a surgeon would make if he was harvesting organs from a donor. All the internal organs have been surgically excised, by someone experienced. Consistent with this is the fact that the blood vessels have all been tied off with sutures before being cut through to remove the organs.’ She pointed. ‘The perinephric fat that would have been around the kidneys – the suet, if you are a cook – has been opened with a blade.’
Grace reminded himself not to eat suet for a long time to come.
‘So,’ Nadiuska continued, ‘all this would indicate that he was an organ donor. Now, what directs me even more towards this possibility is the presence of these external indications of medical intervention.’ She pointed again. ‘A needle mark in the back of the hand.’ She gestured at the neck. ‘A puncture mark.’ Then she pointed at the right elbow. ‘Another puncture mark in the antecubital fosse. These are consistent with the insertion of cannulae for drips and drugs.’
Then, taking a small torch, she gently levered open the dead man’s mouth with her gloved fingers and shone the beam in. ‘If you look closely you can see reddening and ulceration to the inside of the windpipe, just below the voice box, which would have been caused by the balloon inflated on the end of the endotracheal ventilator tube.’
