Dead if You Don’t

39

Saturday 12 August

19.30–20.30

In Roy and Cleo’s isolated cottage close to the village of Henfield, a few miles north of Brighton, Bruno, home from the match having been dropped off by Peter Allen, was upstairs in his room, pounding away on his drums. To Cleo’s relief he had the acoustic pads on and the sound was tolerable.

Noah, now thirteen months old, was sleeping in his cot in his room. Cleo, who ran the Brighton and Hove City Mortuary, was on-call this weekend. She was sitting on the sofa with their nanny, Kaitlynn Defilice, watching an episode of Celebrity Pointless, both of them munching their way through a gigantic bag of popcorn. Roy had called, sounding stressed, telling her he didn’t know when he would be home and not to expect him back until very late, if at all tonight. She knew the score when there was any major crime investigation, and even more so when it was the kidnap of a youngster.

She felt for the family of the teenager who had been taken, and one of the many things she admired about Roy was just how much he cared for all the victims and their families. In all probability, he would be working through the night and crash out for a few hours in his office. She was in for a long night, too, as she had been notified by a Coroner’s Officer that body parts had been found at a recycling depot at Shoreham Harbour and a Home Office pathologist was in attendance at the site. At some point during the evening she would be getting a phone call requesting her to attend to recover the parts to the mortuary. But with luck that would be much later, and she’d get to the end of the show, at least.

But just a few minutes later her work mobile phone rang.

‘Cleo Morey,’ she answered, doing a good job of masking her reluctance.

Although married to Roy Grace for nearly a year now, she had retained her maiden name, to avoid confusion at work.

‘Hi, Cleo.’ It was another Coroner’s Officer she had worked with on a number of occasions, Michelle Websdale, in mid-Sussex. ‘I wonder if you could help us out? They’re in the middle of a refurb at Crawley Mortuary, with half the fridges out of action and workmen in tomorrow, and we’ve a suspicious sudden death on our hands — a young woman who collapsed in the passport queue at Gatwick — both Coroners have agreed for the body to come to Brighton. The police have requested a Home Office pathologist to do the PM. Dr Theobald is the on-call one and he’s available tomorrow morning.’

Shit — actually, double-shit, Cleo thought. Ordinarily the victim of a sudden death at a weekend would be recovered to the mortuary and placed in a fridge to await a routine postmortem on Monday morning. But when it was suspicious, a Home Office PM would have to be carried out as soon as possible — as was the case now. A Home Office postmortem was a lengthy and more detailed process than a basic one, and Dr Frazer Theobald was the slowest and most pedantic of all of the pathologists — although to be fair to the man, the most thorough. It meant that she would be at the mortuary from 8 a.m. tomorrow and would be lucky to get home by mid-afternoon.

With Roy at work all tomorrow on the kidnap case, Noah and Bruno would be at home on their own with the nanny, when Cleo had planned to spend precious time with both of them. Because they were currently short-staffed at the mortuary, there was no one else she could call in. And she had no option but to agree, because Websdale had always been helpful to her.

‘Where is she, Michelle — in the medical centre?’

‘Yes — as she was brought there before she died, Dr Theobald doesn’t think there’s any forensic evidence to be taken from the scene, so he’s happy for her to be moved.’

Neither ambulance crews nor police officers would normally transport a dead body — their hands were full, round the clock, with the living. The onus of collecting the dead fell to the mortuary teams. Cleo, as the Senior Anatomical Pathology Technician for Brighton and Hove City Mortuary, was responsible for recovering bodies within the Brighton and Hove area — and occasionally beyond.

Sometimes, she found it a sad task. Entering a flat or a house where an elderly person had lived alone and lain dead for days — or even weeks — before the neighbours noticed something wrong. The post piling up. A horrible smell. Sometimes, the job could be gross and stomach-churning. Bodies washed up on the beach that had been partially eaten by fish and crustaceans. And on occasions, especially when it was young victims of road traffic collisions, it was heartbreaking. The one thing she always tried to do was to give every corpse some dignity. She treated all of them with respect, and when there was to be a viewing, took pride in doing their hair, applying make-up and trying to make them look as presentable as she could.

At least a sudden death at passport control would not be too stinky or visceral, she thought. Picking up the phone, she pressed the speed-dial button for her on-call colleague, Darren Wallace.

Despite the grim environment of the Brighton and Hove Mortuary, processing up to eight postmortems a day, Wallace, who had begun his working life as a butcher’s assistant, had retained an infectious enthusiasm for his job. ‘Hi, Cleo!’ he answered eagerly, as if he had been looking forward to her call. ‘What have we got?’

She told him and they arranged to meet at the mortuary in thirty minutes’ time, to drive the Coroner’s van to Gatwick for the recovery.

Cleo asked Kaitlynn to prepare a salad and take a lasagne from the freezer for Bruno, then got ready and hurried out to her car.