This would not be the first morgue Strike had visited, and far from the first corpse he had viewed. He had become almost immune to the despoliation of gunshot wounds; bodies ripped, torn and shattered, innards revealed like the contents of a butcher’s shop, shining and bloody. Strike had never been squeamish; even the most mutilated corpses, cold and white in their freezer drawers, became sanitized and standardized to a man with his job. It was the bodies he had seen in the raw, unprocessed and unprotected by officialdom and procedure, that rose again and crawled through his dreams. His mother in the funeral parlor, in her favorite floor-length bell-sleeved dress, gaunt yet young, with no needle marks on view. Sergeant Gary Topley lying in the blood-spattered dust of that Afghanistan road, his face unscathed, but with no body below the upper ribs. As Strike had lain in the hot dirt, he had tried not to look at Gary’s empty face, afraid to glance down and see how much of his own body was missing…but he had slid so swiftly into the maw of oblivion that he did not find out until he woke up in the field hospital…
An Impressionist print hung on the bare brick walls of the small anteroom to the morgue. Strike fixed his gaze on it, wondering where he had seen it before, and finally remembering that it hung over the mantelpiece at Lucy and Greg’s.
“Mr. Strike?” said the gray-haired mortician, peering around the inner door, in white coat and latex gloves. “Come on in.”
They were almost always cheerful, pleasant men, these curators of corpses. Strike followed the mortician into the chilly glare of the large, windowless inner room, with its great steel freezer doors all along the right-hand wall. The gently sloping tiled floor ran down to a central drain; the lights were dazzling. Every noise echoed off the hard and shiny surfaces, so that it sounded as though a small group of men was marching into the room.
A metal trolley stood ready in front of one of the freezer doors, and beside it were the two CID officers, Wardle and Carver. The former greeted Strike with a nod and a muttered greeting; the latter, paunchy and mottle-faced, with suit shoulders covered in dandruff, merely grunted.
The mortician wrenched down the thick metal arm on the freezer door. The tops of three anonymous heads were revealed, stacked one above the other, each draped in a white sheet worn limp and fine through repeated washings. The mortician checked the tag pinned to the cloth covering the central head; it bore no name, only the previous day’s scribbled date. He slid the body out smoothly on its long-runnered tray and deposited it efficiently on to the waiting trolley. Strike noticed Carver’s jaw working as he stepped back, giving the mortician room to wheel the trolley clear of the freezer door. With a clunk and a slam, the remaining corpses vanished from view.
“We won’t bother with a viewing room, seeing as we’re the only ones here,” said the mortician briskly. “Light’s best in the middle,” he added, positioning the trolley just beside the drain, and pulling back the sheet.
The body of Rochelle Onifade was revealed, bloated and distended, her face forever wiped of suspicion, replaced by a kind of empty wonder. Strike had known, from Wardle’s brief description on the telephone, whom he would see when the sheet was revealed, but the awful vulnerability of the dead struck him anew as he looked down on the body, far smaller than it had been when she had sat opposite him, consuming fries and concealing information.
Strike told them her name, spelling it so that both the mortician and Wardle could transcribe it accurately on to clipboard and notebook respectively; he also gave the only address he had ever known for her: St. Elmo’s Hostel for the Homeless, in Hammersmith.
“Who found her?”
“River police hooked her out late last night,” said Carver, speaking for the first time. His voice, with its south London accent, held a definite undertone of animosity. “Bodies usually take about three weeks to rise to the surface, eh?” he added, directing the comment, more statement than question, at the mortician, who gave a tiny, cautious cough.
“That’s the accepted average, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out to be less in this case. There are certain indications…”
“Yeah, well, we’ll get all that from the pathologist,” said Carver, dismissively.
“It can’t have been three weeks,” said Strike, and the mortician gave him a tiny smile of solidarity.
“Why not?” demanded Carver.
“Because I bought her a burger and chips two weeks ago yesterday.”
“Ah,” said the mortician, nodding at Strike across the body. “I was going to say that a lot of carbohydrates taken prior to death can affect the body’s buoyancy. There’s a degree of bloating…”
“That’s when you gave her your card, is it?” Wardle asked Strike.
“Yeah. I’m surprised it was still legible.”
“It was stuck in with her Oyster card, in a plastic cover inside her back jeans pocket. The plastic protected it.”
“What was she wearing?”
“Big pink fake-fur coat. Like a skinned Muppet. Jeans and trainers.”
“That’s what she was wearing when I bought her the burger.”
“In that case, the contents of the stomach should give an accurate—” began the mortician.
“D’you know if she’s got any next of kin?” Carver demanded of Strike.
“There’s an aunt in Kilburn. I don’t know her name.”
Slivers of glistening eyeball showed through Rochelle’s almost closed lids; they had the characteristic brightness of the drowned. There were traces of bloody foam in the creases around her nostrils.
“How are her hands?” Strike asked the mortician, because Rochelle was uncovered only to the chest.
“Never mind her hands,” snapped Carver. “We’re done here, thanks,” he told the mortician loudly, his voice reverberating around the room; and then, to Strike: “We want a word with you. Car’s outside.”
He was helping police with their inquiries. Strike remembered hearing the phrase on the news when he had been a small boy, obsessed by every aspect of police work. His mother had always blamed this strange early preoccupation on her brother, Ted, ex-Red Cap and fount of (to Strike) thrilling stories of travel, mystery and adventure. Helping police with their inquiries: as a five-year-old, Strike had imagined a noble and disinterested citizen volunteering to give up his time and energy to assist the police, who issued him with magnifying glass and truncheon and allowed him to operate under a cloak of glamorous anonymity.
This was the reality: a small interrogation room, with a cup of machine-made coffee given to him by Wardle, whose attitude towards Strike was devoid of the animosity that crackled from Carver’s every open pore, but free of every trace of former friendliness. Strike suspected that Wardle’s superior did not know the full extent of their previous interactions.
A small black tray on the scratched desk held seventeen pence in change, a single Yale key and a plastic-covered bus pass; Strike’s card was discolored and crinkled but still legible.
“What about her bag?” Strike asked Carver, who was sitting across the desk, while Wardle leaned up against the filing cabinet in the corner. “Gray. Cheap and plastic-looking. That hasn’t turned up, has it?”
“She probably left it in her squat, or wherever the fuck she lived,” said Carver. “Suicides don’t usually pack a bag to jump.”
“I don’t think she jumped,” said Strike.