The Forgotten Sea

by Beverley Harper

  Cursing regulations that prevented honest men like himself from using any means at their disposal to get a job done, Francois sat reading a medical journal while a nurse force-fed the reluctant Indian with bananas. The fibrous nature of the fruit worked just as well as any injection. By the end of the day fifty-seven condoms packed with heroin had been delivered into a bed pan. Another X-ray showed that the body-carrier had at last yielded his deadly load of contraband.

  All in all, yesterday had been a day and a half, certainly the busiest since he’d arrived to fill in for Satish. By the law of averages today should be quiet, but no, some silly little bitch washes up dead. Francois was taking it personally. He scrubbed his teeth as though they were guilty, then spat water and frothy paste at the sink, slapped a handful of water into his mouth, swilled until his jaws ached then tossed his head back and gargled briefly, very briefly, stopping before he gagged. A quick sluice of water over his face and the wake-up process was complete.

  Returning to the bedroom he checked the small travelling clock beside his bed. The police car would collect him in fifteen minutes. Shower or coffee? Not time for both. Opting for the latter he pulled on an old pair of shorts and a T-shirt, sliding his feet into well-worn canvas shoes before making his way heavily into the kitchen. Francois was twenty-two kilograms overweight. In moments of irritation, like this one, he took masochistic pleasure – or was it a self-pitying form of martyrdom, he didn’t know – in plodding. It was too early for the woman who did his cleaning to be there so he had to make his own coffee. He coaxed a humming sound from the electric kettle which worked only sporadically and chased ants from atop the sugar – which they invaded nightly like a living black scum – by banging the container a few times on the counter, then heaped three full teaspoons of instant coffee, something he hated, into a mug, followed it with two of sugar and splashed a generous amount of milk on top. A forage in the refrigerator produced a small wedge of cheese and an apple. He ate both, taking alternate bites at each. The kettle finally wheezed to boiling point. There’d be ants in the water. Francois had learned to ignore their tiny black bodies but he detested the way his coffee always tasted the same as the smell of crushed ants.

  His medical bag was at the hospital in Quatre Bornes. He could always send for it if needed. The patients of Francois Prost were never in a hurry. All he had to do at this stage was see if there was anything suspicious about the body – gunshot wounds, knife wounds, signs of a violent struggle. The police could do it just as well as he – any fool could. Francois had long ago given up complaining about being called to the scene where a body had been discovered. In a court of law, the judge and jury needed to know that a properly qualified officer had done his job. ‘Yes, Your Honour. In my professional opinion, given all the expensive degrees I’ve achieved, the corpse was as dead as a dodo. I could ascertain this easily, Your Honour, by the fact that it had stopped breathing. What a truly magnificent legal and medical mind I possess! I may go? Thank you, Your Honour. It has been a pleasure to waste four hours of my precious day in the interests of justice.’

  Francois cursed as the coffee scalded his mouth. He tipped some out and topped it up with cold water from the tap, remembering too late that he had been advised not to drink straight from the municipal supply. No time to change it now, a police car was turning into the driveway. He drank it down hastily, took a last bite of apple before throwing the core into the bin, grabbed a notebook and pencil off the dining room table and a white coat from the bedroom cupboard. He checked to see if his tape recorder was still in the pocket. It wasn’t. Francois then spent some time tracking it down.

  He’d left it on top of the refrigerator for some unremembered reason and, when he finally located it, was more than prepared to blame the cleaning woman. Ready at last, and thoroughly out of sorts, he let himself out of the house. Ignoring the disapproving look the sergeant gave his attire, he stomped towards the car.

  ‘Good morn . . .’ The sergeant attempted a salute but it was too early in the morning for him too.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Francois grumbled, getting into the back seat. A dog, one of the island’s quarter of a million strays, ambled towards the car. ‘Piss off,’ Francois muttered in perfect Parisian French. The dog obliged, lifting its leg and squirting warm, yellow urine against the front tyre. Finished, it turned to sniff its own body waste then kicked back on stiff hind legs, sand flying out and settling on the sergeant’s splendidly polished shoes.

  A foot lashed out, sending the stray a clear message. The dog trotted away, showing no sign of fear or resentment.

  The ride to the tiny bay on the west coast was undertaken in complete silence. Prost arrived one hour after sunrise and thirty minutes after the Tamarin police and entire local population – a surprising number considering there were only five cottages – had trampled away any evidence that might have existed. Francois surveyed the footprint-churned sand with a sardonic lift of an eyebrow before making his way to where the body lay, still uncovered, now well clear of the receding tide.

  ‘Morning.’ His greeting was directed towards one man – Detective Sham from police headquarters in the island’s capital, Port Louis – the only one Prost acknowledged as having even a modicum of understanding of forensic medicine. He stopped beside the dead girl, pulled the white laboratory coat over his shorts and T-shirt and looked down at the body with no outward show of emotion. ‘She been moved?’

  ‘No, sir.’ Detective Sham joined him next to the corpse.

  ‘Where’s the coastguard?’ Francois couldn’t have cared less where they were. He just wanted standard procedure to be observed.

  ‘Coming, sir. They ran out of petrol.’

  Francois’ lip curled but he said nothing. He hunkered down, then wished he hadn’t. His formidable stomach made such an exercise uncomfortable and he had to put his hands out to steady himself. ‘Four days,’ he guessed, going by the condition of her skin. He rose with difficulty, brushing sand off his hands. ‘Three days to pop up, maybe a day floating. I think we’ll find she surfaced the night before last.’

  Sham nodded. ‘That’s what I thought, sir.’

  ‘Had any reports of missing tourists?’

  ‘None, sir.’

  ‘Locals?’

  ‘A few. No-one matches this description.’

  Francois didn’t ask how he knew her description, seeing as how she was face down and hadn’t, according to Sham, been moved. He knew what the detective meant. Mauritius had a high incidence of suicide, mainly women, mainly Indian, mainly unrequited-love linked. This little blonde was Caucasian through and through. Good, Francois thought absently. Makes my job easier.

  Police were combing the beach in the hope that some means of identification might have washed onto the sand nearby. Others were questioning local residents. No-one, it seemed, knew who the girl might be. None of the fishermen could remember seeing a blonde in any of the boats over the past four or five days, or any other day for that matter.

  ‘Who found her?’ Prost barked.

  Sham propelled forward a frightened-looking teenager. ‘Sayad Asgarally.’

  ‘Did you touch anything?’

  ‘No, sir.’ The boy shook his head vehemently. He was in awe of the large, gruff pathologist.

  Prost let his gaze rest on the boy’s face for a long moment. Then he turned to Sham. ‘You got a statement?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Okay. Let him go.’ He looked back at the body. ‘Flip her over.’

  The girl was rolled onto her back. Two nearby policemen made audible noises when they saw the disfigured face. Detective Sham paled but was all professional interest. Prost’s eyes flicked down the length of the inert body. ‘Nothing obvious,’ he grunted.

  By the time the coastguard finally arrived, Francois had done about as much as he could at the scene. There were no obvious clues as to why the girl had died. She had not been reported missing, which was rather strange considering she’d been dead at least four
days. All he knew as of now was that she was very dead and that the cause of death left his options wide open – accidental, suicide or murder.

  ‘Get her to the morgue.’ He turned to leave but stopped and looked back at Sham. ‘And don’t let anyone go through the pockets.’

  ‘No, sir.’ Sham hunched his shoulders, offended. He knew his job.

  Prost made it to the morgue well before the body was delivered. On the way he’d stopped for some decent coffee and a croissant. Feeling marginally more cheerful, he entered the tiny post-mortem facility via the back entrance. As usual, a sign outside amused him. Patients are advised that mortuary services are free of charge. He’d questioned it with one of the staff when he first arrived.

  ‘Don’t you think that our clients are a little beyond caring by the time they reach us?’

  ‘It’s not for them, sir,’ he’d been told seriously. ‘Some staff members had a nice little sideline going. They were . . . ah . . . charging the relatives.’

  Bloody hell! Prost had thought, vaguely entertained. Never is humour blacker or are humans more base than in a morgue.

  The previous week, this fact had been graphically demonstrated. An Indian woman had been brought in to identify the body of her husband, the victim of a car crash. She had rushed to the cadaver, ranting and wailing, tearing at her clothes, tears streaming. She had struck at the dead man’s chest, crying, ‘Oh, my husband, my husband, why did you leave me?’ She had been joined by her son who was similarly afflicted, crying, ‘Oh, my father, I didn’t get to say goodbye. Why did you leave us?’

  Their grief had been impressive. An emotional outpouring of the utmost misery. Prost had been unmoved – he’d seen it all so many times before. All, that is, until the morgue attendant tiptoed to the woman and tapped her shoulder. ‘Excuse me, Madame,’ he’d said gently, pointing to a second corpse. ‘That is your husband over there.’

  Prost had left the room as quickly as he dared. The incongruity of the situation, and his reaction to it, an essential element in coping with his line of work. Most pathologists he’d met had developed a macabre sense of humour to help them deal with a fact they found impossible to escape – death had no dignity. The dead were at the mercy of the living. Pathologists were only human. Working with bodies required an escape valve, and humour, no matter how cruel, provided it. It relieved the certain knowledge that one day it would be their turn.

  The morgue consisted of two rooms. A workroom where the actual autopsies took place and an adjacent room where bodies were stored until funeral arrangements could be made. This morning, the acrid smell of carbolic and formaldehyde was strong, a lingering legacy of yesterday’s scrub-up to remove the stench of the last occupant’s decaying body. The autopsy area was small and basic. The sign on the door said Do Not Enter – Autopsy in Progress, which was bullshit and everyone knew it. More often than not, the room was empty. Traffic in and out ignored the warning, a fact which had, on occasions, called up the stomach contents of unsuspecting young police officers. But this was a fairly rare event.

  The slab was in the centre, a concrete monolith with a crude wooden block at one end, curved in the middle to accommodate a cadaver’s head. Benches around all four sides held a variety of instruments. A sink stood in one corner. When he’d first arrived, Francois had been mildly appalled by the basic nature of the room. He was used to larger, cleaner and more pleasant surroundings. Still, it was only for six weeks and he knew the patients didn’t mind.

  Normally a corpse remained in a refrigerated state until identified. Once grieving and shocked relatives had viewed a body, the autopsy could proceed without the pathologist’s work being hampered by a need to bear in mind that the sight of a loved one scalped, cut and cranked open, not to mention missing various bits, would prove distressing. However, refrigeration space in the room next door was limited. A bus accident three days ago had filled it to capacity – some of the victims were still not identified. Which left Prost no option but to carry out the autopsy and hope it wouldn’t be too long before the dead girl’s identity was known.

  So, little one, what are you going to tell us? he thought, when the body was finally delivered. What secrets do you hide and how well do you hide them? This was the part of his job he enjoyed. An anonymous corpse was, if you knew where to look, a mine of information.

  She lay face up. The puffy, peeling carcass of what had once been beauty. Blonde hair glued to her face. Tempted as he might have been to brush it back, Prost left it where it lay. The skin would come away with it, which might destroy a vital clue. Sand clung to her skin and clothing, fine white grains firmly fixed to the stickiness of sea water. For now, it would have to stay there. Prost would gently clean only those areas from which he needed a specimen. Later, when he’d finished, she could be washed down to remove the worst of it.

  He assembled his instruments – scalpels, scissors, probes, forceps, a saw with an oscillating blade which cut hard tissue and bone, and a good old-fashioned dessertspoon. As in morgues the world over, the tools of his trade were largely discards from the operating theatre. Scalpels and scissors were blunt and the points of the forceps didn’t quite meet. Frustrating as this undoubtedly was, Prost was so used to the inconvenience that he probably would not know what to do with new equipment. Satisfied he had everything ready, Prost stood flexing his fingers over the girl’s body.

  Her clothing was drying out, stiffening from immersion in salt water. Francois placed scissors around the band of her bleached khaki shorts and, using brute force rather than any cutting edge, hacked through, not stopping, but continuing down one leg, across the crotch and then up the other side so that the garment could be peeled aside. Lacy white panties followed and he allowed a moment to admire the good quality of them. Not short of money, he thought, removing her shoes. Nike runners. Also expensive. White ankle socks peeled off, taking a little skin with them. She wore a white tank top and over that a pale pink lightweight cardigan. He cut through the front of the tank top, rolled the girl on her side and removed it and the cardigan at the same time.

  Each garment was carefully placed aside. ‘Jeet!’ he bellowed. The assistant appeared, a cigarette dangling between his lips. ‘Put that damned thing out and come here,’ Francois snapped. He was not really irritated, simply in work mode.

  Jeet knew this. Grinding the cigarette into the floor, he quietly went about his job. Each item of clothing went into a separate bag and was carefully labelled, but not before Francois noted the labels. The shorts were Wrangler, the knickers Christian Dior, Nike socks and shoes, the top bore a label he didn’t recognise but it looked exclusive and the cardigan was by Pringle. Impressive, unless you knew, as Prost knew, that all these brands were made, under licence, in Mauritius. The girl did not necessarily have to be well travelled to buy them. She simply needed to belong to the top five per cent of Mauritian society to be able to afford them. The pockets of her shorts were empty, save for one boiled sweet of a pale blue colour wrapped in cellophane.

  ‘I want that sweet analysed,’ Francois ordered.

  Jeet nodded and placed it in its own container, made some scribbles on a label and put it slightly apart from the clothing.

  Francois picked up the girl’s hands, one at a time. No rings. No ridge, paler skin or any other sign she had worn any. No necklace. Small gold stud earrings which he carefully removed and handed to Jeet. Knowing the current trend for placing decoration on the most obscure parts of the body, he checked nostrils, lips, belly button, nipples and the lips of her vulva for signs of piercing but found nothing. She had a tiny tattoo of a bear just below the bikini line. Why bother? he thought sourly, wondering at a mentality that desired defacement of the human body but, at the same time, opted to keep it hidden. A faint brown birthmark, shaped loosely like the map of Africa, was on her left arm, just below the elbow. Jeet wrote all this down as Francois dictated and then, at the impatient snapping of fingers from the preoccupied pathologist, picked up a camera and photographed both
the tattoo and the birthmark. The faded, jaded grey of the girl’s one remaining eye had once been brilliant blue. Her obviously trimmed pubic hair was a golden colour so he assumed the blonde of her head was natural. Appendix scar – quite old.

  Turning her on one side, Prost found marks, rather like those of a carpet burn, in the small of her back. Taking a scalpel, he scratched gently at the surface. The skin, sodden after so long immersed in the sea, came away easily. Faint bruising showed underneath. He frowned, studying the area, and bent nearer. Not carpet burn. He handed Jeet the small sample of skin to place in a formalin solution for later histological examination. It might bear a closer look.

  His sharp eyes travelled over every inch of her body. The legs and feet were blemish free, save for what appeared to be a few mosquito bites. Francois was, by nature, a suspicious individual. He also had a tidy mind. He hated loose ends and detested mysteries. So he examined each bite closely until satisfied that they had been caused either by mosquitoes or sandflies. There was no evidence for it as yet but something made him suspect that this girl had been murdered.

  Suicides generally meant hysterical enquiries from members of the family. Likewise accidental death. If she was a tourist, perhaps no-one had missed her. But tourists tended to come to Mauritius either with a group, or at the very least, with one other person. A romantic tropical island is not the place to be on your own. Someone would have reported her missing. The fact that they had not was odd, to say the least.

  Murder – now that was different. A crime of passion is normally cut and dried but premeditated murder is often the result of preparation, cunning and intelligent smoke-screening. It was amazing how often a perfectly normal person, with friends, family and work colleagues, could go missing for days, even weeks, before it dawns on anyone that no-one has seen that person for a suspiciously long time. An intelligent, cold-blooded murderer relies on this fact, even makes use of such events as planned holidays to account for the victim’s long absence.