Moments later, Cleo Morey opened it, smiling warmly. No matter how many times he saw her, he could never quite get used to the incongruity of this immensely attractive young woman, in her late twenties, with long blonde hair, dressed in a green surgical gown, with a heavy-duty green apron over the top and white Wellington boots. With her looks she could have been a model, or an actress, and with her brains she could have probably had any career she set her mind to - and she chose this. Booking in cadavers, preparing them for post-mortems, cleaning up afterwards - and trying to offer crumbs of comfort to the families of the bereaved, invariably in
shock, who came to identify the bodies. And for much of the time she worked alone here.
The smell hit Roy immediately, the way it always did, that sickly sweet reek of disinfectant that permeated the whole place and made something squirm in his guts.
They took a left off the narrow entrance hall into the undertaker's office, which doubled as reception. It was a small room with a blower heater on the floor, pink Artexed walls, a pink carpet, an L-shaped row of visitor chairs, and a small metal desk on which sat three telephones, a stack of small brown envelopes printed with the words 'personal effects', and a large green and red ledger bearing the legend 'mortuary register' in gold block lettering.
There was a light box on one wall, as well as a row of framed 'public health and hygiene' certificates, and a larger one from the 'british institute of embalmers', with Cleo Morey's name inscribed beneath. On another wall was a closed-circuit television camera, which showed, in a continual jerky sequence, views of the front, back, then each side of the building, then a close-up on the entrance.
'Cup of tea, Roy?'
Her clear bright blue eyes engaged with his for just a fraction longer than was necessary for the question. Smiling eyes. Incredibly warm eyes.
'I'd love a cup of tea.'
'English breakfast, Earl Grey, Darjeeling, China, camomile, peppermint, green leaf?'
'I thought this was the mortuary, not Starbucks,' he said.
She grinned. 'We also have coffee. 'Espresso, latte, Colombian, mocha--'
He raised a hand. 'Builder's tea, perfect.'
'Full fat milk, semi-skimmed, with lemon--'
He raised both his hands. 'Whatever milk you have open. Joe not here yet?'
He had asked Joe Tindall, from SOCO, to attend.
'Not yet, do you want to wait until he gets here?'
'Yes, we should.'
She flicked a switch on the kettle and disappeared into the locker room opposite. As the kettle began burbling, she returned with a
green gown, blue overshoes, a face mask and white latex gloves, which she handed to him.
While he pulled them on, she made his tea for him and opened a tin containing digestive biscuits. He took one and munched it. 'So you've been here on your own all week? Doesn't it get you down? No conversation?'
'I'm always busy - we've had ten admissions this week. Eastbourne was going to send over someone from their mortuary, but they got too busy as well. Must be something about the last week in May'
Grace pulled the band of the mask over his head, then let the mask hang loose below his chin; the young men had not been dead long enough to smell too bad, in his experience. 'You've had the families of all the four young men up?'
She nodded. 'And has the guy who was missing, the groom, turned up yet?'
'I've just come from the wedding/ Grace said.
'I thought you were looking a bit smart for a Saturday, Roy' She grinned. 'So at least that's resolved itself?'
'No,' he replied. 'That's why I'm here.'
She raised her eyebrows but didn't comment. 'Anything in particular you want to see? I can get you copies of the pathologist's reports to the Coroner's office.'
'What I want to start with when Joe gets here,' he replied, 'are their fingernails.'
48
Followed by Joe Tindall, who was tugging on his gloves, Grace followed Cleo along the hard, speckled floor, watching her streaked blonde hair swinging against the neck of her green gown, past the glass window of the sealed infection chamber, into the main postmortem room.
It was dominated by two steel tables, one fixed, one wheeled, a blue hydraulic hoist and a row of fridges with floor-to-ceiling doors. The walls were tiled in grey and the whole room was surrounded by a drain gulley. Along one wall was a row of sinks and a coiled yellow hose. Along another was a wide work surface, a metal cutting board and a glass-fronted cabinet filled with instruments and some packs of Duracell batteries. Next to the cabinet was a chart itemizing the name of each deceased, with columns for the weights of their brain, lungs, heart, liver, kidneys and spleen. A man's name, Adrian Penny, with his grim recordings was written in blue chinagraph pen.
Seeing what Grace was looking at, she said cheerfully, 'A motorcyclist we did a PM on yesterday. Overtook a lorry and didn't notice a steel girder sticking out the side - sliced the poor sod's head clean off at the neck.
'How the hell do you remain sane?' he asked.
Grinning, she replied, 'Who said I'm sane?'
'I don't know how you do your job.'
'It's not the dead who harm people, Roy, it's the living.'
'Good point,' he said. He wondered what her views were about ghosts. But this was not the time to ask.
The room felt cold. There was a hum from the refrigeration system, and a sharp clicking sound from overhead, from one fluorescent light that hadn't come on properly. 'Any preference who you want to see first?'
'No, I'd like to see all of them.'
Cleo marched up to the door marked '4' and pulled it open. As
she did so there was a blast of icy air, but it wasn't the cold that instantly sent a chill through Grace. It was the sight of the human form beneath the white plastic sheets on each of the four tiers of metal trays on rollers.
The mortician wheeled the hoist up close, cranked it up, then pulled the top tray out onto it and closed the fridge door. Then she pulled back the sheet to reveal a fleshy white male, with lank hair, his body and waxy white face covered in bruises and lacerations, his eyes wide open, conveying shock even in their glassy stillness, his penis shrivelled and limp lying in a thick clump of pubic hairs like some hibernating rodent. Grace looked at the buff tag tied around his big toe. The name read 'Robert Houlihan'.
Grace's eyes went straight to the young man's hands. They were big, coarse hands, with very grimy nails. 'You have all their clothes here?'
'Yes.'
'Good.' Grace asked Tindall to take scrapings from the nails. The SOCO officer selected a sharp tool from the instrument rack, asked Cleo for a specimen bag, then carefully scraped part of the dirt from each of the nails into the bag, labelled and sealed it.
The hands of the next body, Luke Gearing, were badly mangled from the accident, but apart from blood under them, the nails, bitten to the quick, were reasonably clean. There was no grime on Josh Walker's hands either. But Peter Waring's were filthy. Tindall took scrapings from his nails, and bagged them.
Next he and Grace carefully examined all their clothes. There was mud on all their shoes, and plenty of traces of it on Robert Houlihan and Peter Waring's clothes. Tindall bagged all of these items separately. 'Are you going back to the lab now with these?' Grace asked him.
'I was planning to go home - be quite nice to see it before the weekend is over and have a life - or some pretence of one.'
'I hate to do this to you, Joe, but I really need you to start work on these now.'
'Great! You want me to cancel my U2 concert tickets for tonight, which I paid fifty fucking quid each for, stand my date up and haul my sleeping bag out of the office cupboard?'
'U2 - she really is young, isn't she?'