by Peter James
Nadiuska De Sancha, the pathologist, and the two technicians wore heavy-duty green aprons over green pyjamas, rubber gloves and white gumboots. The rest of the people in the room were in protective green gowns and overshoes. Katie Bishop’s body was wrapped in white plastic sheeting, with a plastic bag secured by elastic bands over her hands and feet, to protect any evidence that might be trapped under her nails. At the moment, the pathologist was unwrapping the sheeting, scrutinizing it for any hairs, fibres, skin cells or any other matter, however small, that might turn out to have belonged to her assailant, which she might have missed when examining Katie’s body in her bedroom.
Then she turned away to dictate into her machine. Twenty years or so older than Cleo, Nadiuska was, in her own way, an equally striking-looking woman. Handsome and dignified, she had high cheekbones, clear green eyes that could be deadly serious one moment and sparkling with humour the next, beneath fiery red hair, at this moment pinned up neatly. She had an aristocratic bearing, befitting someone who was, reputedly, the daughter of a Russian duke, and wore a pair of small, heavy-rimmed glasses of the kind favoured by media intellectuals. She put the dictating machine back down near the sink and returned to the corpse, slowly unbagging Katie’s right hand.
When Katie’s body was, finally, completely naked, and she had taken and logged scrapings from under all the nails, Nadiuska turned her attention to the marks on the dead woman’s neck. After some minutes of examining them with a magnifying glass, she then studied her eyes before addressing Grace.
‘Roy, this is a superficial knife wound, with a ligature mark over the same place. Take a close look at the sclera – the whites of the eyes. You’ll see the haemorrhaging.’ She spoke in a voice just slightly tinged with a guttural mid-European inflection.
The Detective Superintendent, in his rustling green gown and clumsy overshoes, took a step closer to Katie Bishop and peered through the magnifying glass, first at her right eye, then at her left. Nadiuska was right. In the whites of each eye he could clearly see several bloodshot spots, each the size of a pinprick. As soon as he had seen enough he retreated a couple of paces.
Derek Gavin stepped forward and photographed each eye with a macro-lens.
‘The pressure on the veins in the neck was enough to compress them, but not the arteries,’ Nadiuska explained, more loudly now, as if for the benefit of both Roy and everyone else in the room. ‘The haemorrhaging is a good indication of strangulation or asphyxiation. What is strange is that there are no marks on her body – you would have thought if she had resisted her assailant there would be scratches or bruises, wouldn’t you? It would be normal.’
She was right. Grace had been thinking the same thing. ‘So it could be someone she knew? A sex game gone wrong?’ he asked.
‘With the knife wound?’ Glenn Branson chipped in dubiously.
‘I agree,’ Nadiuska said. ‘That doesn’t fit, necessarily.’
‘Good point,’ Grace conceded, startled at how he could have missed something so obvious – and putting it down to his tired brain.
Then the pathologist finally started the dissection. With a scalpel in one gloved hand, she lifted Katie’s tangled hair up and made an incision all the way around the back of the scalp, then peeled it forward, hair still attached, so that it hung down, inside out, over the dead woman’s face like a hideous, featureless mask. Then Darren, the assistant technician, walked across with the rotary band saw.
Grace braced himself, and caught the look in Glenn Branson’s eyes. This was one of the moments he most disliked – this and the cutting open of the stomach, which invariably released a smell that could send you retching. Darren clicked the start button and the machine whined, its sharp teeth spinning. Then that grinding sound that hit the pit of his stomach, and every nerve in his body, as the teeth tore into the top edge of Katie’s skull bone.
It was so bad, so particularly bad at this moment with his queasy stomach and pounding hangover, that Grace wanted to retreat into a corner and jam his fingers in his ears. But of course he couldn’t. He had to stick it out, as the young mortuary technician steadily worked the saw all the way round, bone fragments flying like sawdust, until finally he had finished. Then he lifted the skull cap clear, like a teapot lid, exposing the glistening brain beneath.
People always referred to it as grey matter. But to Grace, who had seen plenty, they were never actually grey – more a creamy brown colour. They turned grey later. Nadiuska stepped forward and he watched her studying the brain for some moments. Then Darren handed her a thin-bladed boning knife, a Sabatier that could have come from a kitchen cabinet. She dug inside the skull cavity, cutting the sinews and the optical nerves, then lifted the brain clear, like a trophy, and handed it to Cleo.
She carried it over to the scales, weighed it and chalked up the amount on the wall-mounted list: 1.6kg.
Nadiuska glanced at it. ‘Normal for her height, weight and age,’ she said.
Darren now placed a metal tray over Katie’s ankles, its legs standing on the table either side of her legs. Taking a long-bladed butcher’s knife, the pathologist prodded the brain in a number of places with her fingers, peering at it closely. Then, with the knife, she cut a thin slice off one end, as if she were carving a Sunday joint.
At that moment Grace’s mobile rang.
He stepped away to answer it. ‘Roy Grace,’ he said.
It was Linda Buckley again. ‘Hello, Roy,’ she said. ‘Brian Bishop’s just come back. I’ve phoned and called off the alert for him.’
‘Where the hell was he?’
‘He said he just went out for some air.’
Walking out of the room, into the corridor, Grace said, ‘Like hell he did. Get on to the CCTV team – see what they’ve picked up around that hotel in the last few hours.’
‘I will do, right away. When will you be ready for me to bring him down for the viewing?’
‘Be a while yet. A good three or four hours – I’ll call you.’
As he hung up, his phone immediately rang again. He didn’t recognize the number – a long string of digits starting with 49 that suggested it was from somewhere overseas. He answered it.
‘Roy!’ said a voice he instantly knew. It was his old friend and colleague Dick Pope. Once Dick and his wife, Lesley, had been his best friends. But Dick had been transferred to Hastings and since they had moved over there, Grace hadn’t seen so much of them.
‘Dick! Good to hear from you – where are you?’
There was a sudden hesitation in his friend’s voice. ‘Roy, we’re in Munich. We’re on a motoring holiday. Checking out the Bavarian beer!’
‘Sounds good to me!’ Grace said, uneasy at the hesitation, as if there was something his friend was holding back from saying.
‘Roy – look – this may be nothing. I don’t want to cause you any – you know, upset or anything. But Lesley and I think we may have just seen Sandy.’
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18
Skunk’s phone was ringing again. He woke, shivering and sweating at the same time. Jesus, it was hot in here. His clothes – the ragged T-shirt and undershorts he was sleeping in – and his bedding were sodden. Water was guttering off him.
Breeep-breeep-breeeep.
From somewhere in the fetid darkness down towards the rear of the camper, the Scouse voice shouted out, ‘Fokking thing. Turn the fokking thing off, for Chrissake, ’fore I throw it out the fokking window.’
It wasn’t the phone he had stolen last night, he realized suddenly. It was his pay-as-you-go phone. His business phone! Where in hell was it?
He stood up hurriedly and shouted back, ‘You don’t like it, get the fuck out of my van!’
Then he looked on the floor, found his shell-suit bottoms, dug his hands in the pocket and pulled the small green mobile out. ‘Yeah?’ he answered.
The next moment he was looking around for a pen and a scrap of paper. He had both in his top, wherever the hell that was. Then he realized he had been sleeping
on it, using it as a sort of pillow. He pulled out a thin, crappy ballpoint with a cracked stem, and a torn, damp sheet of lined paper, and put it down on the work surface. With a hand shaking so much he could barely write, he managed to take down the details in spiky scrawl, and then hung up.
A good one. Money. Moolah! Mucho!
And his bowels felt OK today. None of the agonizing gripes followed by diarrhoea that had been plaguing him for days – not yet, at any rate. His mouth was parched; he was desperate for some water. Feeling light-headed and giddy, he made his way to the sink, then, steadying himself on the work surface, he turned on the tap. But it was already on, the contents of the water tank all run out. Shite.
‘Who left the fucking tap on all night? Hey? Who?’ he yelled.
‘Chill out, man!’ a voice replied.
‘I’ll fucking chill you out!’ He pulled open the curtains again, blinking at the sudden intrusion of the blinding, early-afternoon sunlight. Outside he saw a woman in the park, holding the hand of a toddler on a tricycle. A mangy-looking dog was running around, sniffing the scorched grass where a circus big-top had been until a couple of days ago. Then he looked along the camper. A third crashed-out body he hadn’t noticed before, stirred. Nothing he could do about either of them now, just hope the fuck they’d be gone when he came back. They usually were.
Then he heard an almost rhythmic squeak-squeak-squeak, and saw Al, his hamster, with his busted paw all bound up in a splint by the vet, still spinning the shiny chromium treadmill, his whiskers twitching away. ‘Man, don’t you ever get tired?’ he said, putting his face up close to the bars of the cage – but not too close – Al had bitten him once. Actually, twice.
He had first found the creature abandoned in its cage, which had been tossed by some callous bastard into a roadside skip. He had seen its paw was busted and tried to lift it out, and been bitten for his troubles. Then another time he had tried to stroke it through the bars and it had bitten him again. Yet other days he could open the cage door and it would scamper into the palm of his hand, and sit there happily, for an hour or more, only shitting on it occasionally.
He pulled on the grey Adidas shell-suit bottoms and hooded top, which he had stolen from the ASDA superstore at the Marina, and the brand-new blue and white Asics trainers he had tried on and run out with from a shop in Kemp Town, and grabbed a Waitrose carrier bag containing his tools, into which he dropped the mobile phone from the car he had stolen yesterday. He opened the door of the camper, shouted, ‘I want you all fucking gone when I come back,’ and stepped out into the searing, cloudless heat of The Level, the long, narrow strip of parkland in the centre of Brighton and Hove. The city that he jokingly – but not that jokingly – called his office.
Written on the damp sheet of paper he carried, safely folded and tucked into his zipped breast pocket, were an order, a delivery address and an agreed payment. A no-brainer. Suddenly, despite the shakes, life was looking up. He could make enough money today to last him an entire week.
He could even afford to play hardball in negotiations on the sale of the mobile phone.
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19
My father is crying today. I’ve never seen him cry before. I’ve seen him drunk and angry, which is how he is most of the time, drunk and angry, slapping my mother or me, or punching one of us in the face, or maybe both of us depending on his mood. Sometimes he kicks the dog because it’s my dog and he doesn’t like dogs. The only person he doesn’t punch or slap or kick is Annie, my sister, who is ten. He does other things to her instead. We hear her crying out when he is in her room. And crying, sometimes, after he has left her room.
But today he is crying. My father. All twenty-two of his pigeons are dead. Including two that he has had for fifteen years. And his four Birmingham Rollers that could fly upside-down and do other kinds of aerobatics.
I gave them one large shot of insulin each from his diabetic kit. Those pigeons were his life. It is strange that he could love these noisy, smelly birds so much, yet hate us all. I never understood how they could have given us children to him and my mother in the first place. Sometimes there are as many as eight of us here. The others come and go. Just my sister and I are the constant ones. We suffer along with our mother.
But today, for once, he is suffering. He is hurting really badly.
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20
Sophie’s ciabatta sat on her desk, going cold and making its paper wrapper soggy. She had no appetite. The copy of Harpers & Queen lay on her desk unopened.
She liked to ogle the dreamy clothes on the almost insanely beautiful models, the pictures of stunning resorts she sometimes dreamed that Brian might whisk her off to, and she loved to trawl through the diary photographs of the rich and famous, some of whom she recognized from film premieres she had attended for her company, or from a distance when she had walked along the Croisette or crashed parties at the Cannes Film Festival. It was a lifestyle so far from her own modest, rural upbringing.
She had never particularly sought glamour when she came to London to do a secretarial course – and she certainly had not found it when she’d got her first job with a firm of bailiffs, carrying out work seizing goods from the homes of people who had run into debt. She found the company cruel and much of its work heartbreaking. When she had decided to make a change, and began trawling the ads in the Evening Standard newspaper, she had never imagined that she would land up in quite such a different world as she was in now.
But at this moment her world had, suddenly, gone completely out of kilter. She was trying to get her head around the totally bizarre conversation she had just had with Brian on her mobile a short while ago, outside the caf�when he’d told her his wife was dead and had denied that he had come over to her last night – or rather, early this morning – and made love to her.
The office phone rang.
‘Blinding Light Productions,’ she answered, half hoping it was Brian, her voice devoid of its usual enthusiasm.
But it was someone wanting to speak to the Head of Business and Legal Affairs, Adam Davies. She put them through. Then she returned to her thoughts.
OK, Brian was strange. In the six months since she had met him, when they had sat next to each other at a conference on tax incentives for investors in film financing, which she had been asked to attend by her bosses, she still felt she only knew just a very small part of him. He was an intensely private person and she found it hard to get him to talk about himself. She didn’t really understand what he did, or, more importantly, what it was he wanted from life – and from her.
He was kind and generous, and great company. And, she had only very recently discovered, the most amazing lover! Yet there was a part of him that he kept in a compartment from which she was excluded.
A part of him that could deny, absolutely, that he had come to her flat in the early hours of today.
She was desperate to know what had happened to his wife. The poor, darling man must be distraught. Deranged with grief. Denial. Was the answer as simple as that?
She wanted to hold him, to comfort him, to let him pour it all out to her. In her mind a plan was forming. It was vague – she was so shaken up she could not think it through properly – but it was better than just sitting here, not knowing, helpless.
Both the owners of the company, Tony Watts and James Samson, were away on their summer holidays. The office was quiet, no one would be that bothered if she left early today. At three o’clock she told Cristian and Adam that she wasn’t feeling that good, and they both suggested she went home.
Thanking them, she left the building, took the tube to Victoria, and made straight for the platform for Brighton.
As she boarded the train and settled into a seat in the stiflingly hot compartment, she was unaware of the shell-suited man, in the hoodie and dark glasses, who was entering the carriage directly behind hers. He gripped the red plastic bag containing his purchase from the Private Shop, and was quietly mouthing to himself the words of
an old Louis Armstrong song, ‘We Have All the Time in the World’, which were being fed into his ears by his iPod.
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21
When Roy Grace hung up he walked back into the post-mortem room in a daze. Cleo made eye contact, as if she had picked up a vibe that something was wrong. He signalled back lamely that all was fine.
His stomach felt as if wet cement was revolving inside it. He could barely focus his eyes on the scene unfolding in front of him, as Nadiuska De Sancha dissected Katie Bishop’s neck with a scalpel, layer of tissue by layer, looking for signs of internal bruising.
He did not want to be here right now. He wanted to be in a room on his own, sitting somewhere quiet, where he could think.
About Sandy.
Munich.
Was it possible?
Sandy, his wife, had disappeared off the face of the earth just over nine years ago, on the day of his thirtieth birthday. He could remember it vividly, as if it was yesterday.
Birthdays had always been very special days for them both. She had woken him with a tray on which was a tiny cake with a single candle, a glass of champagne and a very rude birthday card. He’d opened the presents she had given him, then they had made love.
He’d left the house later than usual, at nine fifteen, promising to be home early, to go out for a celebratory meal with Dick and Lesley Pope. But when he had arrived home almost two hours later than he had planned, because of problems with a murder case he had been investigating, there was no sign of Sandy.
