You Are Dead

25

Friday 12 December

Deep in thought, Roy Grace drove around the Lewes Road gyratory system. It was coming up to 11.15 a.m., around eighteen hours since Logan Somerville had vanished. If she had been taken, as he feared, rather than simply gone of her own volition, then with each passing hour the chances of finding her alive diminished. That had long been his grim experience. But he was curious about why Glenn Branson wanted him to come over so urgently.

He turned left, in past the wrought-iron gates attached to brick pillars, and the sign in gold letters on a black background which said BRIGHTON AND HOVE CITY MORTUARY. He was confronted with death constantly in his work, and whilst crime scenes and deposition sites often yielded vital clues for enquiries, the mortuary — combined with the associated pathology and DNA labs — had become in many ways the crucible of murder investigations.

Whilst he preferred not to dwell too much on his own mortality, this place always made him think of it. Not many people, other than tragic suicide victims, actually expected to end up here. And he wondered just how many of those, even, had really wanted to be spending the night in a cold refrigerator, rather than in their beds. He’d interviewed a number of survivors from suicide attempts over the years, and a high percentage of them had told him, and colleagues, that they were grateful to have failed and to still be alive.

This was something that had been backed up by a recent conversation he’d had with a police sergeant who was a regular crew member of the police helicopter. Part of her duty was to do a weekly check, while flying along near the bottom of Beachy Head. The beauty spot, a chalk headland a few miles to the east of Brighton, had a dark side to it. With its 531-foot sheer drop onto rocks at the edge of the English Channel, it was a notorious suicide spot, claiming victims most weeks of the year, and vied with California’s Golden Gate Bridge and Japan’s Aokigahara Woods for the dubious status of the world’s most popular suicide destination. There was a permanently manned chaplaincy post there to help try to talk desperate people around.

The sergeant had told him that a significant number of victims they recovered from the bottom of the cliffs had chalk under their fingernails — indicating, horrifically, that they must have changed their minds on the way down.

Every sudden death that Roy Grace encountered, whether an accident, suicide or murder, affected him. Death was something that everyone liked to believe happened to other people. Other, less fortunate people. Not many people set out to become victims, and this place haunted him with its sadness.

He and Sandy had had no children. If he had died during the time they had been together, Sandy would have coped fine. She was a strong person. Cleo would cope, too, if anything ever happened to him; her family were comfortably off and, additionally, he’d made life assurance provisions for her and for Noah. But the recent birth of his son had made him think about his death in a way that he never had before. Cleo would always be a brilliant mother to Noah, but as a young, very beautiful woman, she would almost certainly marry again one day — and that person would then become Noah’s father.

A total stranger.

It was an odd thought to be having, he knew, but now that he was a father, he valued life more than ever before. He wanted to be around for his son. To be a good father to him, the way his own father, Jack Grace, had been there for him, to try to help prepare him for the world out there. A world that was rich and beautiful, but constantly lay in the shadow of evil.

Even though he had some good associations with the mortuary — it was where he had met Cleo, after all — the place still made him deeply uneasy, as it did most people who came here, and that included police officers. The gates here were always open, 24/7. Always ready to receive the newly dead and, like the skeletal remains of the as yet unknown woman at the Lagoon, sometimes the long-term dead.

Roy Grace always felt that the blandness of the exterior of the building, which looked like a suburban bungalow, added a curiously stark contrast to the grim tasks that were performed inside it. It was a long, single-storey structure with grey pebbledash rendering on the walls, overlooked by a row of houses, and with a covered drive-in on one side deep enough to accommodate an ambulance or a large van. On the other side was a huge opaque window, and a small, very domestic-looking front door.

He drove past a line of cars parked against a flint wall at the rear, and halted in the visitors’ parking area. Then he walked around to the front door and rang the bell. It was answered by Darren Wallace, in Cleo’s absence, the Acting Senior Anatomical Pathology Technician. He was in his early twenties, with fashionably spiky dark hair, and dressed in blue scrubs, with a green plastic apron and white boots. He greeted the Detective Superintendent and led him through into the changing room.

As he gowned up, Roy wrinkled his nose, trying not to breathe in the all-too-familiar smell of the place, a combination of Jeyes Fluid, Trigene disinfectant and decaying human bodies. A smell that stayed with you long after you left. As did the feeling of cold from the chilled air. Then he went through into the post-mortem room itself, and all the smells became stronger — and the air even colder.

The room was divided into two working areas separated by an open archway, the walls lined with grey tiles and with stark overhead lighting. There was a wide, tall fridge, with a row of numbered doors accessing it; behind each of them, four bodies could be stacked one above the other. The spaces that were occupied were indicated by a buff handwritten tag jammed in the metal frame holder on the door. Accommodation here was stark and functional, Grace thought, it didn’t matter whether you were a billionaire or a homeless person, you’d be rubbing shoulders — or at least body bags — in the void behind these doors for however long it took for the Coroner to release you. He shuddered, trying not to think about it. It didn’t matter, did it, if you were dead? You’d vacated your body, it was just an empty shell, a husk.

Wasn’t it?

That was how he’d felt seeing his dad’s body, years back, laid out in a funeral parlour.

There were six stainless-steel post-mortem tables in the two areas, and scales with whiteboard charts on the walls above them, labelled NAME, BRAIN, LUNGS, HEART, LIVER, KIDNEYS, SPLEEN. The weights of each of the organs would be marked up here during a post-mortem — except in the rare cases, such as the one now, where there was nothing left of them.

Three of the steel tables were bare and gleaming. On another two, bodies were laid out beneath white plastic sheeting, the foot of one visible, a buff tag hanging off the big toe. Out of curiosity, as he walked past, Grace read the name, ‘Bob Tanner’, and wondered What was his story?

Then he nodded a greeting at the others in the room, similarly gowned, who were gathered around a table on which lay a grubby-looking skeleton, some parts of it held together by desiccated sinewy tissue, the remainder laid out separately like a painstakingly partially completed puzzle.

It was the skull that drew his eyes. Small, with a full set of immaculately shaped teeth — if badly in need of some whitening. A white ruler had been placed across the left cheekbone by James Gartrell, who was standing by the skull, taking a set of photographs. Near him stood the tall figure of Philip Keay, talking into a hand-held dictating machine, and beside him was Glenn Branson, having a conversation with Deborah Morrison, the Assistant Technician. Lucy Sibun was studying one of the leg bones, and making notes.

Nadiuska De Sancha was bending over the skeleton, carefully probing with a thin steel instrument. A striking-looking woman in her early fifties, the pathologist had high cheekbones and clear green eyes that could be deadly serious one moment and sparkling with humour the next, beneath fiery red hair, which at this moment was pinned up, neatly. She had an aristocratic bearing, befitting someone who was, reputedly, the daughter of a Russian duke, and always wore a pair of small, heavy-rimmed glasses that gave her a distinctly studious appearance. She turned and greeted Roy Grace with a friendly smile.

‘Thanks for coming over, Roy, there are a couple of things that Glenn felt you ought to see.’ She replaced her tool with a pair of tweezers from a tray of instruments, walked over to the skull and studied it for some moments. Then she pinched something that was almost invisible, at first, and raised the tweezers above the skull.

Grace followed her over, and saw for himself: it was a single strand of brown hair, about eighteen inches long.

‘This might be helpful in establishing her identity,’ she said. ‘It’s one of the few remaining strands of hair left on her scalp, but from its length it would indicate that at the time of her death she had a full head of brown hair this length.’

Grace stared at it. His thoughts went to the photographs he had seen of Logan Somerville, who had similarly long brown hair. So, he remembered, had Emma Johnson, who had disappeared from her home in Worthing, turned up in Hastings some while later, then had recently been reported as having disappeared again. Could there be a connection? It seemed unlikely. But possible, even allowing for the gap of decades. He always kept an open mind in any enquiry. It was easy to dismiss something as coincidence — and in doing so potentially overlook a vital clue that might one day come back to bite you.

He turned to the forensic archaeologist. ‘Lucy, you said you estimated the woman’s age to be around twenty at the time of death?’

She turned to look at him. ‘Yes, everything points to that. And I would estimate that she died around thirty years ago. I’d like to get soil analysis done on a number of spores I’ve found, so far, on part of the remains, because to me they don’t look like they come from the sandy soil in the Lagoon vicinity. They appear to be clay deposits, more likely found some distance inland — quite a lot of the interior of Sussex farm and woodland is on clay. This makes me even more certain that the Lagoon wasn’t the original crime scene, but merely the deposition site. It’ll take me some days — possibly a week or two — to get this confirmed.’

Grace frowned. ‘Why would someone move her to the Lagoon from an inland burial site — to such a public place?’

‘Possibly because they knew the path was being laid, boss,’ said Glenn Branson. ‘And that then her remains would never be discovered.’

Grace stared down at the remains, pensively.

‘What about,’ Branson went on, ‘the possibility that the offender was part of the crew laying that path?’

Grace nodded. ‘Yes, it’s a possibility. You’re on to that, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

Grace looked at his watch, conscious of the need not to be late for Pewe. ‘Anything else that you have for me?’

Branson nodded with a wry smile. ‘Yeah, there is something else.’ He exchanged an almost conspiratorial glance with Nadiuska De Sancha. Then he jerked a finger towards the front of the skull.

The pathologist went over to the work surface by the large, opaque window, picked up a magnifying glass and brought it over. ‘Take a close look, Roy.’

Peering hard with his naked eye on the front of the skull, where he estimated the top of the forehead would have been, he could just see what looked like a mark, about two inches wide by half an inch high. Then he raised the glass and looked through that. He could make out, very faintly, letters:

He turned back to Nadiuska De Sancha. ‘Strange tattoo to have. Might she have been a Goth, or whatever it was back then?’

‘It’s not a tattoo, Roy.’ She shook her head.

‘It’s not? So what is it?’

‘I think it burned through the skin. It must have been done with a branding iron.’