Not Dead Enough

59

Dressed in just a crumpled white T-shirt, Cleo sat in her favourite place, on a rug on the floor, leaning back against the sofa. The Sunday papers were spread all around her and she was cradling a half-drunk mug of coffee that was steadily getting more tepid. Up above her, Fish was busily exploring her rectangular tank, as ever. Swimming slowly for a few moments, as if stalking some invisible prey, then suddenly darting at something, maybe a speck of food, or an imaginary enemy, or lover.

Despite the room being in the shade, and having all the windows open, the heat was unpleasantly sticky. Sky News was on television, but the sound was down low and she wasn’t really watching, it was just background. On the screen, a pall of black smoke was rising, people were sobbing, jerky images from a handheld camera showed a hysterical woman, dead bodies, stark buildings, the twisted, burning ball of metal that had been a car, a man covered in blood being carried off on a stretcher. Just another Sunday in Iraq.

Meanwhile, her own Sunday was ebbing away. It was half past twelve, a glorious day, and all she had done was get up and lie here, downstairs, in this shaded room, leafing through section after section of the papers until her eyes were too numb to read any more. And her brain was almost too numb to think. The place looked a tip, she needed to give it a good clean, but she had no enthusiasm, no energy. She stared down at her mobile phone, expecting to see a reply to the text she had sent Roy. Bloody man, she thought. But it was really herself she was cursing.

Then she picked up the phone and dialled her closest girlfriend, Millie.

A child answered. A long, drawn-out, faltering five-year-old voice saying, ‘Hello, this is Jessica, who is speaking please?’

‘Is your mummy there?’ Cleo asked her goddaughter.

‘Mummy’s quite busy at the moment,’ Jessica replied importantly.

‘Could you tell her it’s your Auntie Kilo?’ Kilo was what Millie had called her for as far back as she could remember. It had started because Millie was dyslexic.

‘Well, the thing is, you see, Auntie Kilo, she is in the kitchen because we have quite a lot of people coming to lunch today.’

Then a few moments later she heard Millie’s voice. ‘Hey, you! What’s up?’

Cleo told her about what had happened with Grace.

The thing she had always liked about Millie was that, however painful the truth might be to hear, Millie never minced words. ‘You’re a bloody idiot, K. What do you expect him to do? What would you do in that situation?’

‘He lied to me.’

‘All men lie. That’s how they operate. If you want a long-term relationship with a man, you’ve got to understand it’s going to be with a liar. It’s in their nature – it’s genetic, it’s a bloody Darwinian acquired characteristic for survival, OK? They tell you what they want you to hear.’

‘Great.’

‘Yep, well, it’s true. Women lie too, in different ways. I’ve lied about most of the orgasms Robert ever thinks I’ve had.’

‘Doesn’t seem much of a basis to build a relationship on, lies.’

‘I’m not saying it’s all lies – I’m saying if you are looking for perfection, K, you’re going to end up alone. The only guys who aren’t ever going to lie to you are the ones lying in the fridges in your mortuary.’

‘Shit!’ Cleo said suddenly.

‘What?’

‘It’s OK. You just reminded me of something I have to do.’

‘Listen, I have an invasion coming any minute – Robert’s got a bunch of clients coming to lunch! Can I call you back this evening?’

‘No probs.’

When she hung up she looked at her watch and realized she had been so wrapped up in her thoughts about Roy that she had completely forgotten to go to the mortuary. She and Darren had left the woman’s body they’d brought off the beach last night on a trolley, because all the fridges were full – one bank of them was out of commission, in the middle of being replaced. A local undertaker was due to collect two of the bodies at midday, and she was meant to let him in, and at the same time put the woman in one of the vacated fridges.

She hauled herself to her feet. There was a message on her answering machine from her sister, Charlie, who had phoned about ten o’clock. She knew exactly what it would be about. She would have to listen to Charlie’s blow-by-blow account of being dumped by her boyfriend. Maybe she could persuade her to meet somewhere in the sun, in a park or down on the seafront, for a late lunch after the mortuary? She dialled the number and, to her relief, Charlie agreed readily, suggesting a place she knew under the Arches.

Thirty minutes later, after crawling along in heavy traffic headed for the beaches, she drove in through the mortuary gates, relieved to see that the covered side entrance, where bodies were delivered and removed out of sight of the public, was empty – the undertaker had not yet arrived.

The car’s roof was down and her spirits were up, a fraction, thinking about something Roy Grace had said to her a few weeks ago, as she had driven him out to a country pub in this car. You know, on a warm evening, with the roof down like this and you beside me, it’s pretty hard to think there is much wrong with the world!

She parked the blue MG in its usual place, opposite the front door of the grey, pebbledash-rendered mortuary building, and then opened her bag to take out her phone and warn her sister she was going to be late. But her phone wasn’t in it.

‘Bugger!’ she said out loud.

How the hell could she have forgotten it? She never, ever, ever left home without it. Her Nokia was attached to her via an invisible umbilical cord.

Roy Grace, what the hell are you doing to my head?

She closed the roof of the car, even though she was only intending to be a few minutes, and locked it. Then, standing beneath the exterior CCTV camera, she inserted her key into the lock of the mortuary’s staff entrance and turned it.

One of the vehicles in that solid stream of traffic trickling along the Lewes Road gyratory system, on the far side of the mortuary’s wrought-iron gates, was a black Toyota Prius. Unlike most of the rest of the traffic, instead of continuing on down to the seafront, it made a left turn into the next street along from the mortuary, then cruised slowly up the steep hill, which was lined on both sides with small terraced houses, looking for a parking space. The Time Billionaire smiled. There was a space right ahead of him, just the right size. Waiting for him.

Then he sucked his hand again. The pain was getting worse; it was muzzing his head. It didn’t look good either. It had swollen more during the night.

‘Stupid little bitch!’ he shouted, in a sudden fit of rage.

Even though Cleo had been working in mortuaries for eight years, she was still not immune to the smells. The stench that hit her today, as she opened the door, almost physically knocked her backward. Like all mortuary staff, she had long ago trained herself to breathe through her mouth, but the reek of decaying meat – sour, caustic, fetid – hung heavy and cloying, as if weighed down by extra atoms, cloaking her like an invisible fog, swirling around her, seeping in through every pore in her skin.

Just as quickly as she possibly could, holding her breath and forgetting about the call she was going to make, she hurried past her office and entered the small changing room. She pulled a fresh pair of green pyjamas off a hook, dug her feet into her white wellington boots, tore a fresh pair of latex gloves from a pack and wriggled her clammy hands into them. Then she put on a face mask; not that it was going to do much to reduce the smell, but it would help a little.

She turned right and walked down the short, grey-tiled corridor and into the receiving room, which adjoined the main post-mortem room, and switched the lights on. The dead woman had been booked in as Unknown Female, the name given to all unidentified women who fetched up here. Cleo always felt it was such a sad thing, to be dead and unidentified.

She was lying on a stainless-steel table, next to another three parked alongside each other, her severed arm placed between her legs, her hair hanging back, dead straight, with a tiny strand of green weed in it. Cleo strode up to her, flapping her hand sharply, sending a dozen bluebottles flying into the air and scudding around the room. Through the stench of decay, she could smell something else strongly as well. Salt. The tang of the sea. And suddenly, tenderly plucking the tendril of weed out of the woman’s hair, she wasn’t sure she wanted to meet her sister on the beach.

Then the back doorbell rang. The undertaker had arrived. She checked the image on the CCTV before opening the rear doors into the loading bay and helping the two casually dressed young men load the bodies, in their plastic body-bags, into the rear of the discreet brown van. They then drove off. She locked the bay doors carefully and returned to the receiving room.

From the cupboard in the corner she removed a white plastic body-bag and walked back to the body. She hated dealing with floaters. Their skin after a few weeks immersed had a ghostly, fatty-white colour and the texture seemed to change, so that it looked like slightly scaly pork. The terminology was adipocere. The first mortuary technician Cleo had worked under, who relished the macabre, told her with a gleam in his eye that it was also known as grave wax.

The woman’s lips, eyes, fingers, part of her cheeks, breasts, vagina and toes had been eaten away, by small fish or crabs. Her badly chewed breasts lay, wrinkled, splayed out to the right and left, with much of their inside tissue gone, along with every scrap of the poor creature’s dignity.

Who are you? she wondered, as she opened up the bag, laying it out under her, lifting her slightly but being careful in case her flesh tore.

When they’d examined her last night, along with two uniformed police officers, a detective inspector and a police surgeon, and Ronnie Pearson, the coroner’s officer, they had found no obvious signs to indicate she might have been murdered. There were no marks on her body, other than just the abrasions that might be expected for someone rolled along shingle by the surf, although she was in a considerable state of decomposition, and evidence might already have been lost. The coroner had been notified, and they had been authorized to recover the body to the mortuary for a post-mortem on Monday, for identification – most probably from dental records.

She was looking at her carefully again now, checking for a ligature mark around her neck that they might have missed, or an entry hole from a bullet, trying to see what she could learn about her. It was always hard to determine the age of someone who had been in the water a while. She could be anywhere from her mid-twenties to her forties, she guessed.

She could have been a drowned swimmer or someone who had gone overboard from a boat. A suicide victim, perhaps. Or even, as sometimes happened, a burial at sea that hadn’t been properly weighted down and had broken free, although it tended to be men more than women who were buried at sea. Or she could have been one of the thousands of people who just disappear every year. A misper.

Carefully she lifted away the severed arm and placed it on the empty stainless-steel table next to her body. Then, very gently, she began the process of rolling her over on to her stomach, to check her back. As she did so, she heard a faint click from inside the building.

She raised her head and listened for a moment. It sounded like the front door opening, or closing.