Looking Good Dead

21

Professor Lars Johansson was a man who, in Grace’s opinion, looked more like an international banker than a scientist who had spent much of his life crawling through bat caves, swamps and hostile jungles around the globe in search of rare insects.

Over six foot tall, with smooth blond hair and suave good looks, attired in a three-piece chalk-striped suit, the Anglo-Swede exuded urbane charm and confidence. He sat at his large desk, in his cluttered office on the top floor of London’s Natural History Museum, with his half-moon tortoiseshell glasses perched on the end of his nose, surrounded by display cases and bell jars filled with rare specimens, a microscope, and a raft of medical implements, rulers and weights. The entire room could have come straight from the set of an Indiana Jones movie, Grace thought.

The two men had met and become friends a few years back at the International Homicide Investigators Association Convention, an event hosted in different US cities, which Grace attended annually. Ordinarily Grace would have sent one of his team to see Johansson, but he knew he’d get quicker answers by coming in person.

The entomologist removed the plastic bag containing the beetle from the buff-coloured police evidence bag. ‘It’s been swabbed, Roy?’ he asked in his cultured English accent.

‘Yes.’

‘So it is OK to take it out?’

‘Absolutely.’

Johansson carefully extracted the two-inch-long beetle with a pair of tweezers and laid it on his blotter pad. He studied it in silence for some moments with a large magnifying glass while Grace sipped gratefully on a mug of black coffee, thinking ruefully for a moment about the date with Cleo he had had to cancel tonight, in order to first be here and then get back to Sussex House for a late briefing of his team. He had been looking forward to it more than anything he could remember in a very long time and felt gutted he was not going to see her. But at least they had made a new date, for Saturday, just two days away. And the bonus was that that would give him time to buy some new gear.

‘It’s a good specimen, Roy,’ he said. ‘Very fine.’

‘What can you tell me about it?’

‘Where exactly did you find this?’

Grace explained, and the entomologist, to his credit, barely raised an eyebrow.

‘That would fit,’ he said. ‘Very sick but very apt.’

‘Fit?’ Grace asked.

‘It is an appropriate location – for reasons that will become clear to you.’ He gave a wry smile.

‘I’m all ears.’

‘Do you want the full Year Two university biology class lecture on this little fellow? Or the short summary.’

‘Just the simpleton download – I’ll have to pass it on to some people who are even bigger numbskulls than myself.’

The entomologist smiled. ‘His name is Copris lunaris, and he’s about average length – they are normally fifteen to twenty-five millimetres. He’s indigenous to southern Europe and North Africa.’

‘Are they found here at all?’

‘Not outside a zoo.’

Grace frowned, thinking about the ramifications of this.

The Professor continued: ‘It was considered a sacred creature by the ancient Egyptians, and is also known as a dung beetle or Scarab.’

Now Grace understood. ‘Dung beetle?’

‘Exactly. The best known are the subspecies called dung-rollers. They use their head and front legs to scrape up the dung and shape it into a ball, then they roll it along until they find a suitable place to bury it, so it can mature and break down.’

‘Sounds delicious,’ Grace said.

‘I think I prefer Swedish meatballs.’

Grace thought for a moment. ‘So putting this beetle up the woman’s rectum has some significance.’

‘It would seem a warped one, but yes.’

A siren whupped past in the street below. ‘I think it’s a fair assumption that we’re dealing with someone who has a different value set to you and me,’ Grace said with a grimace. ‘What exactly is the connection with the ancient Egyptians, Lars?’

‘I’ll print it out for you; it’s really quite fascinating.’

‘Will it help me find my killer?’

‘He’s clearly someone who knows about symbolism. I would think it is important for you to understand as much about this as possible. You haven’t been to Egypt, Roy?’

‘No.’

The Professor was starting to look quite animated. ‘If you go to Luxor, the Valley of the Kings or any of the temples, you’ll see scarabs carved everywhere; they were a fundamental part of Upper and Lower Egyptian culture. And of course they were significant in funeral rites.’

Grace sipped some more of his coffee, running through in his mind all he had to do this evening, while the Professor worked on his keyboard for a few moments.

Twenty minutes ago DC Emma-Jane Boutwood had phoned to tell him the DNA results were in and there was no match on the database. No more body parts had yet been found. One more of the missing women had been eliminated in the past hour. DNA from the rest had been couriered up to the lab and hopefully – for the police, at any rate – there would be a match. If not they would have to immediately widen their search.

Suddenly, a printer spat a sheet of paper out inches from where he was sitting, startling him.

‘Funeral rites?’

‘Yes.’

‘What was the significance of these beetles in funeral rites, Lars?’

‘They’d be put in the tombs to ensure eternal resurrection.’

Grace thought about it for some moments. Were they dealing with a religious fanatic? A game player? Clearly it was someone intelligent – cultured enough to have read up on ancient Egypt – the placing of this particular beetle in the woman’s rectum was no random act. ‘Where would someone get hold of a scarab beetle in England?’ he asked. ‘Only in a zoo?’

‘No, there are a few importers of tropical insects who would deal in them. I don’t doubt they are available on the internet as well.’

Grace made a mental note to have someone list and visit every tropical insect supplier in the UK and do a trawl on the Web.

The entomologist returned the beetle to the evidence bag. ‘Is there anything else I can help you with on this, Roy?’

‘I’m sure there will be. I can’t think of anything more at the moment. And I really appreciate your staying on late to see me.’

‘It’s not a problem.’ Lars Johansson nodded towards the window and the view out over Exhibition Road. ‘Turned out to be a fine evening. Are you heading back down to Sussex?’

Grace nodded.

‘Let me buy you a drink – one for the road?’

Grace glanced at his watch. The next fast train down to Brighton was in about forty minutes. He did not have time for a drink, but he sure felt in need of one. And as the Professor had been helpful to him so many times in the past, he thought it would be rude to decline. ‘Just a quick one,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll have to run.’

Which was why, thirty minutes later, at a street table outside a crowded pub, he found himself wondering just exactly what the hell was wrong with his life. He should have been out on a date tonight with one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. Instead he was drinking his second pint of warm beer, having first had a fifteen-minute lecture on the digestive system of the scarab beetle, and now a lengthy analysis from the increasingly maudlin Lars Johansson of all that was wrong with the man’s marriage.