But flies performed a service as well. They helped clear dead things away: birds, rabbits, kangaroos and humans too. They were some of Mother Nature’s little helpers. They just happened to have lousy table manners, such as vomiting on their food before eating it. All in all, they didn’t make great dinner guests, Lisa decided.
Perspiration from the heat was running down her face. MJ stood with one arm around her, the other holding a water bottle which they were sharing. Lisa had her arm around his waist, fingers tucked into his waistband, feeling the sweat in his damp T-shirt. Flies liked to drink human sweat, that was another nugget he had given her. Sweat didn’t have much protein in it, but it contained minerals they needed. Human sweat was the fly world equivalent of Perrier, or Badoit, or whatever bottled water floated your particular boat.
The river just ahead of where the hawser had entered became a sudden mass of whirlpools. It looked like it was boiling. Bubbles burst on the surface, turning to foam. The taller, more panicky officer kept shouting out instructions, which seemed unnecessary to Lisa, as everyone seemed to know what they needed to do. In his early forties, she guessed, he had brush-cut hair and an aquiline nose. Both he and his younger colleague wore regulation open-throat shirts with epaulettes and a woven Victoria Police shield on one sleeve, navy blue trousers and stout shoes. The flies were enjoying them too.
Lisa watched the rear end of a dark green saloon car breaking the surface, water tumbling off it, which she could hear above the roar of the winch and the bellow of the truck engine. She read the number plate, OPH 010, and the legend that was written beneath it: VICTORIA ON THE MOVE.
How long had it been down there?
She wasn’t an expert on cars, but she knew a little about them. Enough to recognize that this was an older-model Ford Falcon, a good five or maybe even ten years old. Soon the rear windscreen appeared, then the roof. The paintwork was shiny from the water, but all the chrome had rusted. The tyres were almost flat, flapping on the arid, sandy soil as the car was hauled backwards up the steep slope. Water poured out from the empty interior through the door sills and the wheel arches.
It was an eerie sight, she thought.
After several minutes, the Falcon was finally up on the level ground, sitting motionless on its rims, tyres like black paunches. The hawser was slack now, with the tow-truck driver on his knees under the tailgate, unhooking it. The grinding sound of the winch had stopped and the tow-truck engine was silenced. There was just the steady splashing of the water pouring from the vehicle.
The two cops walked around it, peering warily in through the windows. The tall, panicky one had his gun hand on his gun butt, as if he expected someone to jump out of the car at any moment and challenge him. The shorter one saluted away some more flies. The bowerbird yoo-hooed again in the new silence.
Then the taller cop pressed the boot release button. Nothing happened. He tried again, exerting leverage on the lid at the same time. It lifted a few inches with a sharp screech of protest from its rusted hinges. Then he raised it all the way up.
And took a step back, in shock, as he smelled what was inside before he even saw her.
‘Oh, strewth,’ he said, turning away and gagging.
29
Grey was the default colour of death, Roy Grace thought. Grey bones. Grey ash when you were cremated. Grey tombstones. Grey X-rayed dental records. Grey mortuary walls. Whether you rotted away in a coffin or in a storm drain, all that was eventually left of you would be grey.
Grey bones lying on a grey steel post-mortem table. Being probed by grey steel instruments. Even the light in here was grey, strangely diffused ethereal light that seeped in through the large opaque windows. Ghosts were grey too. Grey ladies, grey men. There were plenty of them in the post-mortem room of the Brighton and Hove City Mortuary. The ghosts of thousands of unfortunate people whose remains had ended up here, inside this grim bungalow with its grey, pebbledash-rendered walls, residing behind one of its grey steel freezer locker doors before their penultimate journey to an undertaker’s premises, then burial or cremation.
He shuddered. He couldn’t help it. Despite the fact that he minded coming here less these days, because the woman he loved was in charge, it still gave him the creeps.
Gave him the creeps to see the skeleton, with its artificial fingernails and fronds of winter wheat-coloured hair still attached to the skull.
And it gave him the creeps to see all the green-gowned figures in the room. Frazer Theobald, Joan Major, Barry Heath – the latest addition to the team of Coroner’s Officers for the area, a short, neatly dressed, poker-faced man, recently retired from the police force, whose grim job it was to attend not only all murder scenes but also sudden-death scenes, such as traffic accident fatalities and suicides, and then the post-mortems. There was also the SOCO photographer, recording every step of the process. Plus Darren, Cleo’s assistant, a sharp, good-looking and pleasant-natured lad of twenty with fashionably spiky black hair, who had started life as a butcher’s apprentice. And Christopher Ghent, the tall, studious forensic odontist, who was occupied taking soft-clay impressions of the skeleton’s teeth.
And finally Cleo. She hadn’t been on duty, but had decided that, as he was working, she might as well too.
Sometimes Roy found it hard to believe that he really was dating this goddess.
He watched her now, tall and leggy and almost impossibly beautiful in her green gown and white wellies, long blonde hair clipped up, moving around this room, her room, her domain, with such ease and grace, sensitive but at the same time impervious to all its horrors.
But all the time he was wondering if, in some terrible irony, he was witnessing the woman he loved laying out the remains of the woman he had once loved.
The room smelled strongly of disinfectant. It was furnished with two steel post-mortem tables, one fixed and the other, on which the remains of the woman now lay, on castors. There was a blue hydraulic hoist by a row of fridges with floor-to-ceiling doors. The walls were tiled in grey and a drainage gully ran all the way around. Along one wall was a row of sinks, with a coiled yellow hose. Along another were 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 the cabinet was a wall chart listing the name of the deceased, with columns for the weight of their 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 afternoon, as it always did during a post-mortem by a Home Office pathologist.
‘There are four fillings,’ Christopher Ghent said, to no one in particular. ‘Three white composite and one gold inlay. An all-porcelain bridge from upper right six to four, not cheap. No amalgams. All high-quality stuff.’
Grace listened, trying to remember what dental work Sandy had had. She had been fastidious about her teeth. But the description was too technical for him.
Joan Major was unpacking, from a large case, a series of plaster of Paris models. They sat there on square black plastic plinths like broken archaeological fragments from an important dig. He had seen them before, but he always found it hard to get his head around the subtle differences they illustrated.
When Christopher Ghent finished reciting his dental analysis, Joan began to explain how each model showed the comparison of different stages of bone development. She concluded by stating that the remains were female, around thirty years old, give or take three years.