The Scent of Death

Chapter 1

Most people assume they’d know the scent of death. That decay has a distinctive, readily identifiable odour, a foul reek of the grave.

They’re wrong.

Decay is a complicated process. For a once-living organism to become skeletonized, reduced to dry bone and minerals, it first has to undergo an intricate biochemical journey. While some of the gases created are offensive to human senses, they’re only part of the olfactory menu. Decomposing flesh can produce hundreds of volatile organic compounds, each with its own characteristics. Many of them — particularly those created during the mid-stages of a body’s dissolution, those of putrefaction and bloat — possess an undeniable stench. Dimethyl trisulphide, for instance, is reminiscent of rotting cabbage. Butyric acid and trimethylamine have the respective bouquets of vomit and old fish. Another substance, indole, carries the stink of faecal matter.

Yet in lower concentrations indole has a delicate, floral scent that’s prized by perfume manufacturers. Hexanal, a gas produced in both the early and later stages of decay, resembles freshly cut grass, while butanol is redolent of fallen leaves.

The aroma of decomposition can encompass all these notes, as complex as a fine wine. And, because death is nothing if not full of surprises, in some circumstances it can announce itself in a different manner entirely.

Sometimes in a way you’d least expect.

‘Watch your footing, Dr Hunter,’ Whelan warned from ahead of me. ‘You step off the boards and you’ll be through the ceiling.’

He didn’t need to remind me. I ducked under a low beam, careful where I was putting my feet. The cavernous loft was like an oven. The day’s heat had been trapped under the slate roof, and the mask I wore made it hard to breathe. The elasticated hood of my protective coveralls cut into my face, and my hands felt slick and hot inside the skin-tight nitrile gloves. I tried again to wipe the sweat from my eyes, succeeding only in smearing it.

The old hospital’s loft was huge. It extended off in all directions, disappearing into darkness beyond the glare of the temporary lighting. A walkway of aluminium stepping plates had been laid down, bending and flexing under our combined weight as we clattered over them.

I hoped the joists underneath weren’t rotten.

‘You know this part of London?’ Whelan asked over his shoulder. The detective inspector’s accent put his roots far north of where we were now, nearer the Tyne than the Thames. He was a thick-set man in his forties, and when he’d met me earlier the wiry grey hair and beard had been damp and sweat-flattened. Now his face was all but hidden under the mask and white coveralls.

‘Not really.’

‘No, it’s not the sort of area you come to without good cause. Not even then, if you can help it.’ He stooped to pass under a sloping roof timber. ‘Mind your head.’

I followed his example. Even with the stepping plates, moving around in the loft was hard going. Thick wooden beams criss-crossed overhead, waiting to crack the skull of anyone who didn’t crouch low enough, while old pipework snaked across the joists at ankle height, ready to snag a carelessly placed foot. Every now and then, apparently at random, blackened brick chimney stacks rose up to block a direct route, forcing the stepping plates to detour around them.

I brushed away a cobweb that stroked my face. Clogged with dirt, they hung from the rough roof timbers like ragged theatre swags. The dust covered everything in the loft, turning the once-yellow insulation between the joists into a filthy brown mat. Motes of it swirled in the air, glinting in the bright lighting. My eyes already felt gritty, and I could taste it in my mouth despite the mask.

I ducked as a quick movement, more sensed than seen, seemed to flit overhead in the shadows. But when I looked all I could see was darkness. Chalking it up to imagination, I concentrated on watching where I put my feet.

Up ahead, a circle of lights marked our destination. Under their glare a cluster of white-clad figures stood on a wider island of stepping plates set around a chimney stack. A murmur of conversation drifted from them, muffled by their masks. A Scenes of Crime Officer was taking photographs of something that lay at their feet.

Whelan stopped just short of the group. ‘Ma’am? The forensic anthropologist’s here.’

One of the group turned towards me. What little of her face was visible above the mask was flushed and shiny from sweat. In the baggy white coveralls it would have been hard to say if she was man or woman if I hadn’t already known, but this wasn’t the first time we’d worked together. As I went over I saw they were standing around an object wrapped in plastic tarpaulin, like a rolled-up carpet. One end of the plastic had been partially undone.

Gazing out from it, toffee-coloured skin drawn taut over cheekbones and hollow eye sockets, was a mummified face.

Distracted, I didn’t notice the low roof beam until I banged my head on it, hard enough to jar my teeth.

‘Careful,’ Whelan said.

I rubbed my head, more embarrassed than hurt. Good start. A half-dozen faces regarded me over masks, unimpressed. Only the woman Whelan had addressed seemed amused, eyes crinkled with a smile hidden by her mask.

‘Welcome to St Jude’s,’ DCI Sharon Ward said.

Twelve hours earlier I’d woken from a nightmare. I’d bolted upright in bed, not sure where I was, my hand automatically going to my stomach, feeling for the expected stickiness of blood. But the skin was dry, unmarked except for the trace of a long-healed scar.

‘Are you OK?’

Rachel was propped up on an elbow, a hand resting against my chest in concern. Daylight filtered through the heavy curtains, revealing a room that was only now taking on recognizable lines.

I nodded as my breathing slowed. ‘Sorry.’

‘Another bad dream?’

I flashed to gouts of dark blood and a knife blade glinting in the sun. ‘Not too bad. Did I wake you up?’

‘Me and everyone else.’ She smiled at my expression. ‘I’m joking. You were just thrashing around, no one would have heard. Was it the same one?’

‘I can’t remember. What time is it?’

‘Just after seven. I was going to get up and make coffee.’

The vestiges of the nightmare still clung to me like a cold sweat as I swung my legs from the bed. ‘It’s OK, I’ll make it.’

Pulling on some clothes, I went out and softly closed the bedroom door behind me. Once I was alone in the hallway my smile faded. I took a deep breath, trying to shake off the after-effects of the dream. It wasn’t real, I reminded myself.

Not this time.

The house was quiet, suspended in the early-morning hush that precedes a new day. The heavy chunk of a clock punctuated the silence as I padded down to the kitchen. The thick pile of the hall carpet gave way to slate tiles, pleasantly cool under my bare feet. Although the air held some of the previous day’s warmth, the stone walls of the old house rebuffed even the heat of the Indian summer we’d been enjoying.

I filled the percolator and set it on the Aga before running myself a glass of water. I drank it at the window, looking out over the orchard to green fields. The sun was already shining from an unlikely blue sky. Sheep grazed in the distance, and a small wood stood off to one side, the leaves on the trees already shading red. They hadn’t started to fall yet, but it wouldn’t be long. The scene was like a photograph on a gift-shop calendar, where nothing bad could ever happen.

I’d thought that about other places, too.

Jason had described his and Anja’s second home as a cottage. Compared to their main house in London, an enormous villa in Belsize Park, it might have been, but that didn’t do it justice. Built of warm Cotswold stone, it was a rambling old place with a thatched roof that could have graced the cover of a homes-and-gardens magazine. It stood on the outskirts of a pretty village whose pub boasted a Michelin star, and where Range Rovers, Mercedes and BMWs crowded the narrow main street every weekend.

When Jason and Anja had invited us over for a long weekend I’d been concerned there might be some awkwardness. They’d been my closest friends, before my wife and daughter had died in a car accident. I’d met Kara at one of their parties, and they’d been godparents to Alice, just as I’d been to their daughter, Mia. I’d been relieved at how well the two of them had hit it off with Rachel, but the occasional drink or dinner was different to spending days in each other’s company. Rachel and I had only met earlier that year, during a traumatic murder investigation in the Essex coastal marshes. I’d worried that taking her to stay with friends from my old life would seem strange, that my shared history with Jason and Anja might make her feel excluded.

But everything had been fine. If every now and then I still felt an odd sense of dislocation, a disquieting overlay of my old life over the new, it didn’t last. The weekend had been spent walking across Cotswolds fields and woodland, taking our time over pub lunches and long, lazy evenings. By any standards, it had been an idyllic few days.

Except for the nightmare.

The coffee had started to bubble behind me, filling the kitchen with its aroma. I took the percolator off the Aga and was pouring two mugs when I heard the stairs creak as someone came down. From the heavy tread I didn’t have to look around to know it was Jason.

‘Morning,’ he said, looking bleary and rumpled as he shambled into the kitchen. ‘You’re up early.’

‘Thought I’d make some coffee. Hope that was OK.’

‘So long as there’s a cup for me.’

He sank down on to a stool at the kitchen island, making a half-hearted attempt to adjust the towelling bathrobe around his heavy-set frame before losing interest. A pelt of dark chest hair sprouted from it, creeping up his throat to stop at his shaving line. The stubbled face and thinning hair above it seemed to belong to a different body.

He accepted the coffee I handed him with an appreciative grunt. We’d known each other since we were students at medical school, back in the days before my life had been thrown on to a different track. Instead of medicine, I’d chosen an often-turbulent career as a forensic anthropologist, while Jason had become a successful orthopaedic surgeon who could afford a second home in the Cotswolds. He’d never been a morning person even when he was younger, and the additional years hadn’t changed that. Neither had the wine he’d drunk the night before.

He took a drink of coffee and grimaced. ‘Don’t suppose you’ve got any tips for a hangover?’

‘Don’t drink so much.’

‘That is so funny.’ He took a more cautious sip from his mug. ‘What time are you and Rachel heading off?’

‘Not till this afternoon.’

I’d driven us over from London in my ‘new’ car, a second-hand but reliable 4x4, and we didn’t have to get back until that evening. But the reminder that the weekend was almost over — and the thought of the next day — left a hollow feeling in my chest.

‘When’s Rachel’s flight tomorrow?’ Jason asked, as though reading my mind.

‘Late morning.’

He studied me. ‘You OK?’

‘Sure.’

‘It’s only for a few months. It’ll be fine.’

‘I know.’

He considered me for a moment, then decided not to pursue it. With a wince, he went to a wall cupboard and took out a box of paracetamol. His meaty fingers deftly popped two tablets from the foil strip.

‘Jesus, my bloody head,’ he said, opening a bottle of mineral water from the fridge. He washed down the tablets and gave me a sour glance. ‘Don’t start.’

‘I didn’t say a word.’

‘You don’t have to.’ He waved a hand at me. ‘Go on, get it off your chest.’

‘What’s the point? I can’t tell you anything you don’t already know.’

Even when we were students Jason had always been a man of large appetites. Now, though, he’d reached an age when excess had started to take its toll. Always heavily built, he’d put on weight, and his features were developing a puffiness that matched his unhealthy colour. But we’d only recently picked up the friendship again after a gap of several years, and I hadn’t felt able to broach the subject as I would once have done. I was glad he’d brought it up himself.

‘There’s a lot of pressure at work.’ He shrugged, staring out through the window. ‘Budget cuts, waiting times. It’s a mess. Sometimes I think you did the right thing, getting out when you did.’

I made a point of looking around the beautifully equipped kitchen. ‘You didn’t do too badly.’

‘You know what I mean. Anyway, bottom line is I might have been pushing things a bit, but it isn’t like I’ve got a cocaine habit or anything.’

‘I’m sure your patients are thankful for that.’

‘At least mine aren’t dead.’

The comeback seemed to restore his humour. Rubbing his stomach, he headed for the fridge.

‘Fancy a bacon sandwich?’

Rachel and I left after lunch. Jason cooked a Sunday roast, a sizzling rib of beef that he tended lovingly, and Anja had made a meringue for dessert. She insisted we take some back with us, along with thick slices of roast meat.

‘It’ll save you having to shop,’ she insisted when I tried to decline. ‘I know what you’re like, David. As soon as Rachel’s left you’ll either forget or make do with whatever’s in your fridge. You can’t just live on omelettes, you know.’

‘I don’t live on omelettes,’ I said, sounding unconvincing even to myself.

Anja smiled serenely. ‘Then you won’t mind taking something extra, will you?’

Rachel and I were quiet on the drive back to London. It was a glorious evening, the Cotswolds fields green and golden, the trees beginning to take on russet hues as autumn approached. But the spectre of her departure the next day shared the car with us, tainting any enjoyment.

‘It’s only for three months,’ Rachel said abruptly, as though continuing an unspoken dialogue. ‘And Greece isn’t far.’

‘I know.’

It was far enough, but I knew what she meant. That summer she’d let pass a chance to return to her career as a marine biologist in Australia. She’d stayed to be with me, so I was hardly going to complain about a temporary research post in an Aegean marine reserve.

‘It’s only a four-hour flight. You could still come out and stay.’

‘Rachel, it’s all right. Really.’ We’d already agreed it would be better if she settled into her new job without distractions. ‘It’s your work, you have to go. We’ll see each other in a few weeks.’

‘I know. I just hate this part.’

So did I. I suspected that was why Jason and Anja — probably more Anja — had asked us over for the weekend, to take our minds off Rachel’s departure.

There was no avoiding it now, though. She went through the limited choice of music I kept in the car. ‘How about this? Jimmy Smith’s The Cat?’

‘Perhaps something else.’

Rachel gave up on my music collection and turned on the radio instead. The background murmur of a programme on alpaca farming replaced the silence for the rest of the trip. The fields gave way to suburban sprawl and then the built-up concrete and brick of the city. I resisted the automatic instinct to head for my old flat in East London. I hadn’t lived there for most of the summer, but it still seemed strange to be going somewhere else.

The road I turned on to was tree-lined and quiet. Driving past the white Georgian houses set in wooded gardens, I headed for the jarringly modern apartments that rose above them. Built in the 1970s, Ballard Court was all angles and concrete, a ten-storey complex whose smoked-glass windows reflected a muted version of the evening sky. I’d been told it was an important example of brutalist architecture, and I could believe it. There was certainly something brutal about it.

I stopped at the gates and entered the passcode into the keypad. As we waited for the gates to open I stared unenthusiastically up at the tiered balconies until I realized Rachel was looking at me.

‘What?’

‘Nothing,’ she said, but her mouth was curved in a half-smile.

Once through the gates, I waited again for the electric door to the underground car park to open and pulled into my allotted space. I’d already received a terse letter from the management committee after inadvertently parking in the wrong spot, warning me that such infringements wouldn’t be tolerated.

Ballard Court had a lot of rules.

We took the lift up to the fifth floor. There was a reception desk and concierge on duty in the main entrance, but as only residents had passes for the car park the lifts bypassed that and went straight to the apartments. Its doors slid open to reveal a wide landing around which were set well-spaced, numbered teak doors. It reminded me of a hotel, an impression fostered by the faint scent of peppermint that always seemed to gather there.

Our footsteps rang on the marble floor as we crossed to the apartment. I pushed open the heavy door to let Rachel in first, leaving it to slowly swing shut behind us with a soft click. A carpeted hallway led to the vast kitchen, where an arched opening gave on to an open-plan dining room and lounge. The same sound-deadening carpet as in the hall ran through there as well, perfectly complementing the kitchen’s terracotta tiles. Abstract paintings hung on the walls, and the mocha-coloured leather sofa was deep enough to drown in. It was, by any standards, a beautiful apartment, and a far cry from the modest ground-floor flat where I’d been living before.

I hated it.

It had been Jason who’d set it up. Another consultant at his hospital was moving to Canada for six months and didn’t want to leave his home standing empty. He preferred not to let it out through an agent and since I was — grudgingly — looking to move out of my old place, Jason suggested we’d be doing each other a favour. The rent was ridiculously low, and although he denied it I suspected Jason might have something to do with that as well. Even then I’d been reluctant, until Rachel weighed in. It wasn’t safe to stay in my old flat, she’d argued, green eyes angry. I’d been attacked and almost died there once: was I really going to ignore police advice and risk my life out of some sort of stubborn pride?

She had a point.

A few years before, a woman called Grace Strachan had stabbed and left me for dead on my own doorstep. A violent psychotic who blamed me for the death of her brother, Grace had disappeared afterwards and not been seen since. It had taken a long time for the scars to heal — especially the psychological ones — but I’d gradually let myself believe the danger had passed. It was hard to imagine how someone so unstable could avoid capture for so long, not without help. I’d begun to think she must be dead, or at the very least out of the country. Somewhere she could no longer pose a threat.

Then, while I’d been working on a murder investigation in Essex earlier this year, the police had found her fingerprint after an attempted break-in at my flat. There was no way of knowing how long the print had been there, and it was possible it had simply been missed after her knife attack. But it was also possible that Grace had returned to finish what she’d started.

Even then I’d been reluctant to leave. I didn’t have any particular attachment to the flat itself — Grace’s attempt on my life and a failed past relationship were the two defining memories from my time there — but if I moved out I wanted it to be on my own terms. This felt too much like running away.

In the end, what persuaded me wasn’t any advice from the police, or even a belated sense of self-preservation. It was that Rachel often stayed at the flat as well.

It wasn’t just my life I was risking.

So I’d moved into Ballard Court, an address where I wasn’t listed, and whose security systems, electric gates and underground car parking met with the approval of Rachel and the police. If Grace Strachan was back, if she’d somehow got wind of my survival, she’d have a hard time even finding out where I was, let alone getting within arm’s reach.

Since that initial fingerprint, though, there had been no further sign of her. To begin with the police had kept surveillance on my empty flat: empty because I wasn’t about to sell it or let it out if there was a chance it was being targeted. But as the weeks went by the patrols had been scaled down. By now I’d become convinced the whole thing was a false alarm, and made up my mind to move back once my tenancy in the secure but soulless Ballard Court had ended. I’d yet to break the news to Rachel, reasoning that there’d be time for that later. I wasn’t going to spoil our last night together.

As it turned out, someone else did.

My phone rang as we were preparing dinner, both of us determinedly trying to act as though she weren’t leaving the next morning. The evening sun gilded the windows, casting long shadows and reminding us that the summer was over. I glanced at Rachel. I wasn’t expecting any calls, and couldn’t think of anyone who might be phoning on a Sunday evening. She raised an eyebrow but said nothing as I picked up. The name on the display was Sharon Ward.

I turned back to Rachel. ‘It’s work. I don’t have to answer it.’

Her smile crinkled the corners of her eyes, but as she turned away there was a look in them I couldn’t read.

‘Yes, you do,’ she said.