Not Dead Enough

21

When Roy Grace hung up he walked back into the post-mortem room in a daze. Cleo made eye contact, as if she had picked up a vibe that something was wrong. He signalled back lamely that all was fine.

His stomach felt as if wet cement was revolving inside it. He could barely focus his eyes on the scene unfolding in front of him, as Nadiuska De Sancha dissected Katie Bishop’s neck with a scalpel, layer of tissue by layer, looking for signs of internal bruising.

He did not want to be here right now. He wanted to be in a room on his own, sitting somewhere quiet, where he could think.

About Sandy.

Munich.

Was it possible?

Sandy, his wife, had disappeared off the face of the earth just over nine years ago, on the day of his thirtieth birthday. He could remember it vividly, as if it was yesterday.

Birthdays had always been very special days for them both. She had woken him with a tray on which was a tiny cake with a single candle, a glass of champagne and a very rude birthday card. He’d opened the presents she had given him, then they had made love.

He’d left the house later than usual, at nine fifteen, promising to be home early, to go out for a celebratory meal with Dick and Lesley Pope. But when he had arrived home almost two hours later than he had planned, because of problems with a murder case he had been investigating, there was no sign of Sandy.

At first he’d thought she was angry with him for being so late and was making a protest. The house was tidy, her car and handbag were gone, and there was nothing to suggest a struggle.

For years he had searched everywhere. Tried every possible avenue, distributed her photograph, through Interpol, around the world. And he had been to mediums – still went to them, every time he heard of a credible new one. But nothing. Not one of them had picked up anything to do with her. It was as if she had been teleported off the planet. Not one sign, not a single sighting by anyone.

Until this phone call now.

From Dick Pope. Saying he and Lesley had been on a boating lake in a beer garden in Munich. The Seehaus in the Englischer Garten. They had been out in a rowing boat, and both of them could have sworn they saw Sandy, sitting among the crowds at a table, singing away as a Bavarian band played.

Dick said they had rowed straight over to the edge of the lake, shouting to her. He’d scrambled out of the boat and run towards her, but she had gone. Melted away into the crowd. He said that he couldn’t be sure, of course. That neither he nor Lesley could be completely sure.

After all, it was nine years since they had seen Sandy. And Munich, in summer, like anywhere else, had countless dozens of attractive women with long, blonde hair. But, Dick had assured him, both he and Lesley thought the resemblance was uncanny. And the woman had stared at them, with what looked like clear recognition. So why had she left her table and fled?

Leaving three-quarters of a large glass of beer behind.

And the people sitting near her claimed never to have seen her before.

Sandy liked a glass of beer on a hot day. One of the million, billion, trillion, gazillion things Roy Grace had loved about her was her appetites in life. For food, wine, beer. And sex. Unlike so many women he had dated before her, Sandy was different. She went for everything. He had always put that down to the fact that she was not 100 percent British. Her grandmother, a great character, whom he had met – and really liked – many times before she had died, had been German. A Jewish refugee who had got out in 1938. Their family home had been in a small village in the countryside near Munich.

Jesus. The thought struck him now for the first time.

Could Sandy have gone back to her roots?

She had often talked about going to visit. She had even tried to persuade her grandmother to go with her, and show her where they had lived, but for the elderly lady the memories were too painful. One day, Grace had promised Sandy, they would go there together.

A sharp crunch, followed by a snap, brought him back to the present moment.

Katie Bishop’s breasts were inverted, beneath peeled-back flaps of skin, the ribs, muscles and organs of her midriff now exposed. The heart, lungs, kidneys and liver were all glistening. With her heart no longer pumping, only a trickle of blood slid, sluggishly, into the concave metal table on which she lay.

Nadiuska, holding what looked like a pair of gardening shears, began cutting through the dead woman’s ribs. Each grisly, bone-crunching snap brought Grace, and all the other observers in this room, to a strange kind of focused silence. It didn’t matter how many post-mortems you had attended, nothing prepared you for this sound, this awful reality. This was someone who had once been a living, breathing, loving human being reduced to the status of meat on a butcher’s hook.

And for the very first time in his career, it was more than Grace could take. With all kinds of confusion about Sandy swirling in his mind, he stepped back, as far away from the table as he could get without actually leaving the room.

He tried to focus his thoughts. This woman had been killed by someone, almost certainly murdered. She deserved more than a distracted cop, fixated on a possible sighting of his long-gone wife. For the moment he had to try and push the phone call from Dick Pope to the back of his mind and concentrate on the business here.

He thought about her husband, Brian. The way he had behaved in the witness interview room. Something had not felt right. And then he realized what, in his tired, addled state, he had totally forgotten to do.

Something that he had recently learned that would tell him, very convincingly, whether Brian Bishop had been telling the truth or not.