Dead if You Don’t

65

Sunday 13 August

09.00–10.00

Ordinarily on a Sunday, the Brighton and Hove City Mortuary would be as silent as — the grave, Cleo Morey thought. But at 9.30 a.m. today it was a hive of activity. Since its expansion, the postmortem room consisted of two separate spaces divided by an arch, with a separate isolation room, where Florentina Shima had lain overnight.

Inside the isolation room now, Cleo stood with her assistant, Darren Wallace, dressed like everyone present in white boots, green scrubs, gloves, a surgical cloth hat and gauze mask. Crime Scene Photographer James Gartrell was in the room as well, meticulously videoing every stage of the postmortem being carried out by the Home Office pathologist. Outside the door stood Coroner’s Officer Michelle Websdale and DI Nigel ‘Joey’ Roissetter, from Surrey, who had been appointed the SIO on this suspicious death.

When this PM was finished, another Home Office postmortem, on the human remains recovered from the crusher site, would be carried out. But at the moment, Cleo had been told, a search was continuing there for further body parts, especially for the head and other limbs which were currently absent.

On a metal tray above Florentina Shima’s body, Theobald was carefully dissecting her brain. Her sternum had been removed and placed across her pubis. Her breasts and stomach, either side of the incision down her midriff, were clamped back, exposing her ribcage and intestines coiled beneath. On the wall in front was a chart for listing the weights of the brain, lungs, heart, liver, kidneys and spleen of each cadaver examined here.

Over the course of the next hour her brain was weighed, then placed in a white plastic bag, ready to be put inside her ribcage when Theobald was finished, so that when her body was finally released to an undertaker, she would be buried or cremated with all her organs.

Some while later, after dissecting her heart, lungs, liver and kidneys, occasionally bagging tiny samples for laboratory analysis, and taking blood, urine and vitreous samples for toxicology testing, he moved on to her intestines. After the first incision, Theobald made a rare comment.

‘Oh dear!’

Cleo moved closer, and watched him pull out, to her horror, something with the size and appearance of a chipolata sausage. He made a wider incision, which revealed more of the same. One was split open, spilling out a white powder, much of which had evidently been absorbed into the dead young woman’s body.

Condoms. Each containing a package of a drug. By the time Theobald had finished, Cleo had counted forty-nine. The Exhibits Officer present logged and secured them.

It appeared the initial suspicions had been correct, and that poor Florentina Shima was a drugs mule. Duped by someone totally unscrupulous into swallowing what was probably hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth, street value, of a drug — heroin or some variety of cocaine, Cleo judged from the colour. The one that had burst had, it would appear, given her a massive and fatal overdose.

Cleo had seen a similar thing, a couple of times before. Doing this job, she saw so much. She had to comfort so many people whose loved ones had been brought in here. Husbands, mothers, fathers, son, daughters, partners who had gone out to work in the morning and died in a car crash. Or had suddenly dropped dead from an aneurism. Or who had been stabbed to death in a pub fight. The last time a body had affected her so much was the Christmas before last. A sixteen-year-old had gone out on his moped to get a pizza for himself and his girlfriend, four days before Christmas. A van had made a sudden U-turn in front of him. She kept looking at him and thinking about what a terrible time this Christmas would be for his girlfriend and family. How crap death so often was for people.

She felt that now, staring down at this beautiful teenager who just the day before had had her whole life in front of her. The victim of some unscrupulous shitbag who had somehow conned her into this, with assurances of a large reward, perhaps a new life.

Who are you? What made you do this? How desperate were you to take this risk? What is your story?

She turned away and hurried back to her office to get a tissue.