Not Dead Enough

52

Cleo’s phone was ringing. Her home line. She eased herself forward on her sofa so she could read the caller display. It was Grace’s mobile number.

She let it ring. Waited. Four rings. Five. Six. Then her voicemail kicked in and the ringing stopped. Must have been the fourth – maybe even the fifth – call from him today on this line. Plus all the ones on her mobile.

She was being childish not answering it, she knew, and sooner or later she was going to have to respond; but she was still not sure what she wanted to say to him.

Heavy-hearted, she picked up her wine glass and saw, to her slight surprise, that it was empty. Again. She picked up the bottle of Chilean Sauvignon Blanc and saw, to her even bigger surprise, there were no more than a couple of inches left. ‘Shit,’ she said, pouring it. It barely covered the bottom of her large glass.

She was on duty this weekend, which meant she shouldn’t drink much, if anything at all, since she could be called out at any time of day or night. But today she felt badly in need of alcohol. It had been a shit day. A really shit day. After her row with Roy, and a totally sleepless remains of the night following it, she’d been called out to the mortuary at ten in the morning to receive the body of a six-year-old girl who had been hit by a car.

She’d become hardened to most things in the eight years she had been in this profession, but not to the bodies of children. They got her every time. There seemed to be a different kind of grief that people had for a child, deeper somehow than for the most loved adult, as if it was incomprehensible that a child could be torn from anyone’s life. She hated seeing the undertaker bringing in a tiny coffin and she hated doing those post-mortems. This little girl’s would be on Monday – making it a great Monday morning to look forward to.

Then, this afternoon, she’d had to go to a grim flat in a run-down terraced house near Hove station and recover the body of an elderly lady which had been there for a good month, at least, in the opinion of her colleague Walter Hordern, judging from the condition of the body and the level of infestation of flies and larvae.

Walter had gone with her, driving the coroner’s van. A dapper, courteous man in his mid-forties, he was always smartly attired in the business clothes of someone who worked in a City office. His official role was chief of Brighton and Hove cemeteries, but his duties also included spending a part of his time helping in the process of collecting bodies from their scene of death and dealing with the considerable paperwork that was required for each one.

Walter and Darren had recently taken to challenging each other on how close they could get in estimating the time of death. It was an inexact science, subject to weather conditions and a raft of other factors, and one that got harder the longer it took to retrieve the body. Counting the stages of the life cycle of certain insects was one, unpleasant, very rough guide. And Walter Hordern had been boning up on that on a forensic medical site he had found on the internet.

Then, just a couple of hours ago she’d had a distraught phone call from her sister, Charlie, of whom she was hugely fond, saying she had just been dumped by her boyfriend of over six months. At twenty-seven, Charlie was two and a half years younger than she was. Pretty and tempestuous, she always went for the wrong men.

Like herself, she realized, more sadly than bitterly. Thirty in October. Her best friend, Millie – Mad Millie, she used to be called when they were teenage rebels at Roedean School – had now settled into landed life with a former naval officer who’d made a fortune in the conference business, and was expecting her second child. Cleo was a godmother to the first, Jessica, as well as to two other children of old schoolfriends. It was starting to feel as if this was her destiny in life. The godmother with the strange job who wasn’t capable of doing anything normal, not even holding down a normal relationship.

Like Richard, the barrister she’d fallen madly in love with after he had come to the mortuary to view a body in a murder case he was defending. It wasn’t until after they’d got engaged, two years later, that he’d sprung the big surprise on her. He had found God. And that became a problem.

At first she’d thought it was something she could deal with. But after attending a number of charismatic church services in which people had fallen to the ground, struck with the Holy Spirit, she had begun to realize she was never going to be able to connect with this. She had seen too much unfair death. Too many children. Too many bodies of young, lovely people, smashed up or, worse, incinerated in car accidents. Or dead from drug overdoses, deliberate or accidental. Or decent, middle-aged men and women who had died in their kitchens, falling off chairs or plugging in appliances. Or gentle elderly folk crushed by buses when crossing the road or struck down by heart attacks or strokes.

She watched the news avidly. Saw items about young women in African countries who had been gang-raped, then had knives inserted up their vaginas, or revolvers, which had then been fired. And, she was sorry, she had told Richard, she just could not buy into a loving God who let all this shit happen.

His response had been to take her hand and enjoin her to pray to God to help her understand His will.

When that hadn’t worked, Richard had stalked her fervently, relentlessly, bombarding her alternately with love and then hate.

Then Roy Grace, a man she had long considered a truly decent human being, as well as extremely attractive, had suddenly, this summer, become a part of her life. She even had, perhaps naïvely, started to believe that they were true soul mates. Until this morning, when she had realized that she was nothing more than a temporary substitute for a ghost. That was all she could ever be in this relationship.

All the sections of today’s Times and Guardian lay spread out on the sofa beside her, mostly unread. She kept trying to settle down to work on her Open University course, but was unable to concentrate. Nor could she get into her new book, a Margaret Atwood novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, which she had wanted to read for years and had finally bought this afternoon from her favourite bookshop in Hove, City Books. She had read and re-read the first page four times, but could not engage with the words.

Reluctantly, because she hated squandering time – and considered most television just that – she picked up the remote and began to surf through the Sky channels. She checked out the Discovery channel, hoping there was maybe a wildlife documentary, but some fossilized-looking professor was pontificating on the Earth’s strata. Interesting, but not tonight, Josephine.

Now her phone was ringing again. She looked at the caller display. The number was withheld. Almost certainly business. She answered it.

It was an operator at the police call centre in Brighton. A body had been washed up on the beach, near the West Pier. She was required to accompany it to the mortuary.

Hanging up, she did a quick calculation. When had she opened that bottle of wine? About six o’clock. Four and a half hours ago. Two units of alcohol would put the average woman at the limit for driving. A bottle of wine contained six average units. You burned off one per hour. She should be OK to drive, just about.

Five minutes later she left her house, walked up the street and unlocked the door of her MG sports car.

As she climbed in and fumbled with her seat belt, a figure emerged from the shadows of a shop doorway, just a short distance down the street, and took the few short steps to his own car. She started the MG, revved the engine and pulled into the street. The small black Toyota Prius, running on just its electric motor, glided silently through the darkness behind her.