Not Dead Yet

62

There were two levels of post-mortem carried out in the Brighton and Hove City Mortuary, as in all other mortuaries throughout the country. The standard one was for victims of accidents, sudden deaths, or when people had died more than fourteen days since they had last seen their doctor and cause of death was uncertain.

With the bodies prepared in advance by Cleo and her assistants, the actual post-mortem itself, carried out by one of a rota of local pathologists, took about half an hour, with further analysis of fluids carried out later in the labs. But for suspicious deaths, a specialist Home Office pathologist would be called in, and the post-mortem would last many hours.

Brighton and Hove City Mortuary processed an average of 850 bodies a year, the vast majority being standard post-mortems. These were carried out in the mornings, and by mid-afternoon, most days, work was finished for the mortuary staff – unless they were called out to recover a body.

A few weeks ago, Cleo had collapsed at work, suffering internal bleeding and had been rushed into hospital. The consultant gynaecologist had kept her in for several days, and then released her with strict instructions that she was to do no heavy lifting and to take a rest at some point during every working day. Grace knew she was ignoring both of these edicts and he was increasingly worried. When she had collapsed previously, she had been lucky that her assistant, Darren, had been there to drive her straight to hospital. But she was often alone in the mortuary and he worried what might happen if she collapsed again when she was the only person there. So he made a point of phoning her around 3.30 p.m. every afternoon to check she was okay, and again just before the evening briefing, to check she was fine at home.

He was truly terrified of losing her. Perhaps, he reflected, it was because after Sandy had gone he had believed he would never be happy again. And always Sandy’s shadow was present. Some days he was convinced that she was dead. But more often, he believed she was still alive. What would happen, he sometimes pondered, if she were to turn up again now? If she had some completely rational explanation for her disappearance? One scenario he played over often was that she had been kidnapped for this past decade and finally escaped. How would she feel to find him married with a child?

How would he feel, if he saw her?

He tried not to dwell on that, to push it from his mind. Sandy was in the past. Ten years ago, in almost another life. He would be forty years old very soon. He had to move on. All the legal processes for having Sandy declared legally dead were under way, with advertisements placed here and in Germany, where there had been a reported but unsubstantiated sighting by a police officer friend, who had been on holiday in Munich. As soon as the ink was dry on the formalities, he and Cleo would marry. He longed for that day.

Cleo sounded tired this afternoon, and he put the phone down at the end of the call, worried. God, there seemed to be so much that could go wrong with pregnancy – and they never told you that at the outset. His joy and excitement that she was carrying their child was tempered by his fears of what might happen to Cleo, and the awesome burden of responsibility of bringing a human being into this world.

What the hell do I know about the world and about life? Am I a fit and wise enough person to teach a child anything?

Every villain he had ever locked up had been a baby once. Any human life could take so many twists and turns. Like the face staring at him now from the photograph in the court file he was working on. A grossly overweight American, in his early sixties, with little piggy eyes and a ponytail, who made big money from selling videos of people being murdered to order – and who had shot Glenn Branson with a handgun while resisting arrest. He despised this man with all his heart and soul, which was why he was putting so much work into the trial documents, to make sure there was absolutely no chance the creep got off on any technical flaws that a brief could find in the prosecution’s case.

What kind of a baby had Carl Venner been? What kind of upbringing? Did he have parents who loved and nurtured him and had high hopes for him? How did you stop a child turning rotten? Maybe you couldn’t, but at least you could try. Giving a child a stable upbringing had to be the starting point. So many of the villains in this city came from broken homes, lone parents who either could not cope, or had long since given up caring. Or parents who sexually abused them. But he knew that wasn’t always the answer. There was always going to be an element of lottery about it, too.

And an enormity. Sometimes the sense of responsibility rose up and almost overwhelmed him. There were so many books to read on pregnancy, on the baby’s first months, those vital early years. And always the fear that the baby might have something seriously wrong. You never knew. Tests gave you some reassurance, but they couldn’t tell you everything. He just hoped their child would be healthy. They would do their very best to be good parents.

He looked down again at Venner’s face. What did your father think about you, in those months before you were born? Was he around? Did he even know your mother was pregnant? Is he alive? If he is, do you think he’s proud of you? Proud of having fathered a revolting monster who traded in pornography and murder for profit?

How would he feel if he had a son who did that? Would he be angry? Would he feel he had failed as a parent? Would he write him off as evil, beyond redemption?

‘Evil’ was a word that always bothered him. It was an easy word to apply to terrible things human beings did to one other. Roy had no doubt in his mind that there were some people, like Venner, who did things that were totally and utterly evil for financial gain, just to line his pockets and his fat gut and to put a Breitling watch on his fat wrist. But many others who did bad things were victims of poor parenting or fractured society or religious zeal. That wasn’t to say you could forgive them for their crimes, but if you could understand what led them to commit them, then you were at least doing something to try to make the world a better place.

That was Roy Grace’s own personal philosophy. He believed that everyone who was born into a decent life had one price to pay for that. No one person was ever going to change the world, but all of us should try to ensure we leave the world a slightly better place than when we came into it. That, above all else, was what he strove to do with his life.