She turned right and walked down the short, grey-tiled corridor and into the receiving room, which adjoined the main post-mortem room, and switched the lights on. The dead woman had been booked in as Unknown Female, the name given to all unidentified women who fetched up here. Cleo always felt it was such a sad thing, to be dead and unidentified.
She was lying on a stainless-steel table, next to another three parked alongside each other, her severed arm placed between her legs, her hair hanging back, dead straight, with a tiny strand of green weed in it. Cleo strode up to her, flapping her hand sharply, sending a dozen bluebottles flying into the air and scudding around the room. Through the stench of decay, she could smell something else strongly as well. Salt. The tang of the sea. And suddenly, tenderly plucking the tendril of weed out of the woman’s hair, she wasn’t sure she wanted to meet her sister on the beach.
Then the back doorbell rang. The undertaker had arrived. She checked the image on the CCTV before opening the rear doors into the loading bay and helping the two casually dressed young men load the bodies, in their plastic body-bags, into the rear of the discreet brown van. They then drove off. She locked the bay doors carefully and returned to the receiving room.
From the cupboard in the corner she removed a white plastic body-bag and walked back to the body. She hated dealing with floaters. Their skin after a few weeks immersed had a ghostly, fatty-white colour and the texture seemed to change, so that it looked like slightly scaly pork. The terminology was adipocere. The first mortuary technician Cleo had worked under, who relished the macabre, told her with a gleam in his eye that it was also known as grave wax.
The woman’s lips, eyes, fingers, part of her cheeks, breasts, vagina and toes had been eaten away, by small fish or crabs. Her badly chewed breasts lay, wrinkled, splayed out to the right and left, with much of their inside tissue gone, along with every scrap of the poor creature’s dignity.
Who are you? she wondered, as she opened up the bag, laying it out under her, lifting her slightly but being careful in case her flesh tore.
When they’d examined her last night, along with two uniformed police officers, a detective inspector and a police surgeon, and Ronnie Pearson, the coroner’s officer, they had found no obvious signs to indicate she might have been murdered. There were no marks on her body, other than just the abrasions that might be expected for someone rolled along shingle by the surf, although she was in a considerable state of decomposition, and evidence might already have been lost. The coroner had been notified, and they had been authorized to recover the body to the mortuary for a post-mortem on Monday, for identification – most probably from dental records.
She was looking at her carefully again now, checking for a ligature mark around her neck that they might have missed, or an entry hole from a bullet, trying to see what she could learn about her. It was always hard to determine the age of someone who had been in the water a while. She could be anywhere from her mid-twenties to her forties, she guessed.
She could have been a drowned swimmer or someone who had gone overboard from a boat. A suicide victim, perhaps. Or even, as sometimes happened, a burial at sea that hadn’t been properly weighted down and had broken free, although it tended to be men more than women who were buried at sea. Or she could have been one of the thousands of people who just disappear every year. A misper.
Carefully she lifted away the severed arm and placed it on the empty stainless-steel table next to her body. Then, very gently, she began the process of rolling her over on to her stomach, to check her back. As she did so, she heard a faint click from inside the building.
She raised her head and listened for a moment. It sounded like the front door opening, or closing.
60
‘Sandy!’ he yelled. ‘SANDY!!!’
She was pulling away from him. Shit, she was running fast!
Wearing a plain white T-shirt, blue cycling shorts and trainers, clutching a small bag in her hand, the woman was racing along a path around the side of the lake. Grace followed her, dodging past a statue, and saw her weaving in between several children playing. She swerved around two Schnauzer dogs, each chasing the other. Back on to a path, past a smartly dressed woman on horseback and a whole crocodile of matronly women Nordic-walking in pairs.
Roy was now regretting his beer. Sweat was streaming down his face, stinging his eyes, semi-blinding him. Two roller-bladers were coming towards him. He swerved right. They swerved the same way. Left. They swerved the same way. He lunged right at the last minute, in desperation, his leg banging painfully into a small, free-standing bench, and fell flat on his face, the bench underneath him, digging into him.
‘T’schuldigen!’ One of the roller-bladers, a tall, teenage boy, was standing over him, looking concerned. The other knelt and held out a hand.
‘It’s OK,’ he gasped.
‘You are American?’
‘English.’
‘I am so sorry.’
‘I’m OK, fine, thanks. My fault. I—’ Shaken and feeling foolish, he took the boy’s hand and allowed himself to be hauled up. As soon as he was back on his feet, his eyes were hunting for Sandy.
‘You have cut your leg,’ the other said.
Grace barely gave it a glance. He saw there was a rip in his jeans on his left shin and blood was coming out, but he didn’t care. ‘Thank you – Danke,’ he said, looking ahead, to the left, to the right, in panic.
She had vanished.
The path ran straight on, for several hundred yards, through dense woodland and way in the distance opened on to a clearing. But there was also a right fork over a narrow, metal-railed bridge.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
He balled his hands in frustration. Think!
Which way had she gone? Which possible way?
He turned back to the two roller-bladers. ‘Excuse me, which is the nearest way to a road over there?’
Pointing at the bridge, one said, ‘Yah, this is the shortest way to the road. It is the only road.’
He thanked them, stumbled on for some yards, thinking, then forked right, weaving through a group of cyclists coming towards him over the bridge, and began to run faster, ignoring the stinging pain in his leg. Sandy would head for an exit, he figured. Crowds. He broke into a limping sprint, keeping off the crowded path, running along the grass beside it, shooting the occasional glance down at the ground ahead for benches, darting dogs, sunbathers, but mostly keeping his eyes fixed on the distance, looking desperately for a flash of blonde hair.
It was her! OK, he’d only caught part of her profile, and had not had a good look at her face, but it had been enough. It was Sandy. It had to be! And why the hell else would she have run off, if it wasn’t her?
He raced on, desperation numbing the pain. He could not have come so far, so damn far, just to let her slip from his grasp like this.