He remembered how much she loved the sea view from his own flat and he figured she would be close to the sea now. And almost certainly have some kind of a view of it. Which had made it a simple measuring job to identify the group of streets in which she must be residing. All he’d had to do was patrol around them, disguised, in the hope that she would appear. And that had happened within three days. He had spotted her going into a newsagent on Eastern Road, then followed her back to her front door.
It had been tempting to grab her then and there, but too risky. There were people around. All she had to do was shout, and game over. That was the problem. That was the advantage she had over him. And she knew it.
The rain was coming down even harder now, drumming noisily, reverberating all around him. On a day like this it would have been nice to have room service, he thought. But hey, you couldn’t have everything! Not, at any rate, without a little patience.
He used to go fishing with his dad when he was a kid. Like him, his dad had always been into gizmos. He’d bought one of the earliest electronic floats. The first strike from a fish, pulling the float under, would trigger a short, high-pitched beep from the little transmitter on the ground beside their folding chairs.
It was similar to the beep he heard now from his interceptor system, as he flipped through the pages of the Daily Mail, a distinct, sharp, high-pitched beep. Followed by another.
The bitch was making a phone call.
40
The automated voice said, ‘Thank you for calling Global Express. Please press any key to continue. Thank you. To check the status of a delivery, please press 1. To request a collection, press 2. If you are an account customer requesting a collection, press 3. If you are a new customer requesting a collection, press 4. For all other enquiries, press 5.’
Abby pressed 4.
‘For deliveries within the UK, please press 1. For overseas deliveries, press 2.’
She pressed 1.
There was a brief silence. She hated these automated systems. Then she heard a couple of clicks, followed by a young, male voice.
‘Global Express. Jonathan speaking. How can I help you?’
Jonathan sounded like he’d be better suited helping young men into trousers in a gents’ outfitters.
‘Hi, Jonathan,’ she said. ‘I have a package I need delivered.’
‘No problem at all. Would that be letter size? Parcel size? Larger than that?’
‘An A4 envelope about an inch thick,’ she said.
‘No problem at all,’ Jonathan assured her. ‘And where would that be going?’
‘To an address just outside Brighton,’ she said.
‘No problem at all. And where would we be picking up from?’
‘From Brighton,’ Abby said. ‘Well, Kemp Town, actually.’
‘No problem at all.’
‘How soon can you collect?’ she asked.
‘In your area – one moment – we will collect between 4 and 7.’
‘Not before?’
‘No problem at all, but that would be an extra charge.’
She thought quickly. If the weather remained like this it would be fairly dark by about 5 o’clock. Would that be an advantage or a disadvantage?
‘Will you be sending a bike or a van?’ she asked.
‘For overnight it will be a van,’ Jonathan replied.
A revised plan was forming in her mind. ‘Is it possible you could ask them not to come before 5.30?’
‘Not to come before 5.30? Let me just check.’
There were some moments of silence. She was trying hard to think this through. So many variables. Then there was a click and Jonathan was back with her.
‘No problem at all.’
41
Oh yes, what a great place to be – not – on a Monday morning this was, thought Detective Senior Sergeant George Fletcher. It was bad enough to have a blinding hangover on a Monday morning. But being here, in the Forensic Pathology department of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, greatly compounded it. And he hated all this bullshit newspeak. It was the city morgue, for God’s sake. It was the place where dead bodies got even more dead. It was the last place before the cemetery where you’d ever have your name on the guest check-in register.
And at this moment he was being assaulted by a grinding, whining sound that shook every atom in his body as he stood in the cramped CT room, watching the body of Unidentified Female pass slowly through the doughnut-shaped hoop of the CT scanner.
She had not been touched since being removed from the boot of the car yesterday, bagged and brought here, where she had been stored in a fridge overnight. The smell was unpleasant. A cloying stink of drains and a sharp, sour odour that reminded George of pond weed. He not only had to fight the pounding noise in his brain, but the heavings inside his stomach. The woman’s skin had a soapy, bloated look, with large areas of black marbling. Her hair, which had probably been blonde and was still fair, was matted and had insects, bits of paper and what looked like a small bit of felt in it. It was hard to make out the features of her face as part of it had either rotted or been nibbled away. The pathologist put her age, as a guesstimate, at mid-thirties.
George was dressed in a green gown over his white shirt, tie and suit trousers, and white rubber boots, like his colleague, DS Troy Burg, beside him. Thin, wiry-haired and with a prickly attitude, Barry Manx, the Senior Forensic Technician, operated the machine, and the pathologist stood running his eyes up and down the woman’s body, reading it like the pages of a book.
It was routine that all bodies admitted here for post-mortem were scanned, checking primarily for signs of any infectious disease, before they were opened up.
Unidentified Female’s flesh was missing in several places. Her lips had partially gone, as had one ear, and bones showed through the fingers of her left hand. Although she had been sealed in the boot of a car, plenty of aquatic wildlife had, nonetheless, managed to gain entry and had had a good time feasting on her remains.
George had had a good time yesterday with his wife, Janet, feasting on his cooking. A few months back he had enrolled on a cookery course at the technical college in Geelong. He’d prepared a meal last night of stir-fried Morton Bay Bugs, followed by garlic-marinated rib-eye beef, finishing with kiwi panacotta. And accompanied by-
He groaned, silently, at the memory.
Far too much Margaret River Zinfandel.
And now it was all coming back to bite him.
He could do with water now, and a strong black coffee, he thought, as he walked behind Burg down a shiny, spotless, windowless corridor.
The post-mortem room was not his favourite place. Not at any time of any day and least of all with a hangover. It was a cavernous arena which felt like a cross between an operating theatre and a factory floor. The ceiling was aluminium with massive air ducts and recessed lights, while a forest of booms swung out from the walls, containing spotlights and electrical sockets which could be directed over any part of a body under inspection. The floor was a deep blue, as if in an attempt to bring some cheer into the place, and along each side were work surfaces, trolleys of surgical instruments, red trash cans with yellow liners, and hoses.
Five thousand cadavers were processed here each year.
He slipped a couple of paracetamol capsules into his mouth, swallowing each one with difficulty with his own saliva. A forensic photographer was taking pictures of the corpse and a retired policeman George had known for years, who was now the Coroner’s Officer for this case, stood on the far side of the room, by a work table, leafing through the brief dossier that had been put together, including the photographs taken at the river yesterday.