Mo Hayder - Pig Island

'This is where I start to earn my money,' Struthers muttered at my side, a bit sick-sounding. 'This is the bit no one wants to do. C'mon.' We came to the bottom of the path, out into the clearing, jumping down the last two feet. 'George,' he said, raising a hand in greeting.

'Yeah.' He didn't look up. 'With you in a minute, gentlemen. Just finishing with the doctor here.'

We stood for a few moments, a bit awkward, looking for somewhere to put ourselves while the photographer circled the package, clicking off photo after photo. The doctor crouched and untaped the pink form, handing it to George. He carefully unfolded the layers of plastic. Inside was a thick lump of flesh wrapped in cloth. I stopped breathing, thinking, No way — this is a joke. Someone's got a bit of pig meat and put it in a T-shirt. Who are they trying to shake? Next to me Struthers opened his mouth and started breathing through it. He tried to do it subtly, but I could hear it anyway.

George clipped the form to his board and began to tick off boxes. 'Right — what've we got? Number 147, grid ref 52–10.' He broke off, frowning at what he was reading. 'Oh, what's the sodding point?' he said, dropping the clipboard to his side in frustration. 'No one listens to a thing I tell them.'

The doctor looked up. 'What?'

'Look at this. Section twenty-two. Box ticked? Number one.'

'Yeah?'

'Box number one,' he repeated, nodding significantly at the parcel. 'How many times have I got to tell them? Box two. If it's just a body part, they tick box two. Incomplete.' He shook his head and corrected the mistake, then went bad-temperedly down the list, ticking off boxes as he went. 'So what've we got — the usual? Human. Life extinct-'

'Yes-'

'- at, let's see, eleven oh-four a.m. And what? Caucasian?'

'Yup. Male.'

'And you're saying it's…?'

'Torso.' The doctor turned the meat over. He looked at the underside for a few moments then lowered it. There was a neat circle of bone under the skin — I knew what it was: it was a severed spinal column. I thought about Sovereign and her pink jelly sandals and her dozy way of speaking. I imagined George piecing her brittle leg bones together on a trestle table. I thought about the old missionary and his broken toe pointing at the stars. I turned and sat quickly on a nearby tree-trunk, shaking. I had to spit, had to use my fingers to loop the taste out of my mouth and shake it off them, splattering it on to the ground. 'Malachi, you fucker,' I muttered. 'You arse.'

'Yeah, it's torso,' said the doctor. 'Half the thoracic, all of the lumbar section.'

'So what's that? Everything missing except oh-six and oh-seven?'

'That'll do.' The doctor peeled away the piece of torn T-shirt and held it up for George to inspect.

'A T-shirt.' He ran his pen down the list, tutting. 'When did Interpol write this? They've got a code for a corset, for Christ's sake, even one for a girdle. But is there a code for a T-shirt? They need a course in twenty-first-century living.' He wrote in large angry letters. 'T-SHIRT.'

'What colour would you call it?' The doctor said. 'Brown? Purple? Milly says I get my browns and purples mixed up.'

George peered over his glasses at it. 'Wine-coloured,' he said, after a while.

'Wine-coloured,' the doctor agreed, dropping the cloth into a bag. 'Exactly.'

George completed his form, the doctor initialled it, then the two men refolded the parcel, taped the form back on top and, facing each other, each taking one end of the plastic, shuffled sideways and lifted it laboriously into the lorry. Struthers didn't say anything. After a while he came and sat down stiffly next to me, not looking at me or speaking. Every other breath he made a sound in his throat, like he was trying to dislodge phlegm.

'Well,' he said eventually, 'that'll be a DNA jobby. More money. Boss'll be ecstatic.' A muscle in his face twitched. Just under his right eye, like a nerve was trapped in there. 'DNA,' he repeated carefully, like I might not have heard of it, coming from Liverpool and everything. 'D-N-A.'

'Colour-coding. It's the only way to go. I've seen a file organizer with colour-coded compartments. The way I'm thinking is I can put my ante-mortem forms in the yellow tray, my PM forms in the pink tray. Looks like there aren't going to be any evacuee forms so I'd keep the blue compartment for when I've matched my PMs and mispers.'

Me and George were inside the refrigeration truck. The doors were open behind us but the light was dim, so the photographer had given me a handheld halogen lamp for the viewing. I waited in silence, the lamp dangling in one hand, the other pinching my nose while George moved around in the semi-darkness at the far end of the truck, opening and rearranging two fibreglass coffins, dragging them into the middle of the floor.

'What you said yesterday about them having no medicals, no dentals? Well, you were right. We're looking but so far no biopsies, no X-rays, not even a print on file. It'll be ninety per cent genetic IDing, because if we get a visual on ten per cent we'll be lucky bastards indeed. I'm going to be up to my pointy little ears in paperwork.'

I switched on the lamp and ran it over two piles of plastic-wrapped shapes pushed up against the right side of the truck, all milky and opaque from the cold. Some of the bodies had burned in the fire after the explosion, and in places I could see blackened shapes pressing against the plastic. A pink notice hung above the furthest pile: 'Incomplete 1-100'. I moved the light across the walls, the beam bouncing off the textured aluminium panelling. The sign above the second pile read: 'Incomplete 101–200'. I switched off the lamp, my heart thudding loudly.

'I've only got two for you today.' George straightened and looked at me. The shadows on his face were etched and solid. In the gloom I could see he'd opened both coffins and folded the black rubber body-bag away to reveal the faces. 'The only two who made it out of the chapel after the blast. Must've been in the corners behind the others — that's how you get through an explosion. Someone else takes the force for you. Course, doesn't mean you survive in the long run.' He picked up his clipboard from the floor and showed me two yellow sheets. 'I got these out earlier. Our chat yesterday? Remember? I think I know who our two are. Still, I'd like you to give me the thumbs-up.'

I knew who he meant. The missionary and Blake Frandenburg. There wouldn't be anything of Sovereign left to identify. I switched on the light and approached, holding it down at an angle. In the first coffin lay the missionary, his face intact, eyes sunken. I looked at him in silence.

'Okonole?'

I nodded. 'Okonole.'

George wrote a neat three in a box at the top left-hand of the yellow form and tucked it with some satisfaction behind the other. We moved to the second coffin where Blake Frandenburg lay, his eyes like holes, his leathery face emaciated, like death had taken half his body weight. One of his hands poked stiffly out of the body-bag as if he was reaching for something — a light, or the sky maybe. I stared at that hand, thinking of him sitting in the cottage holding a fire poker, well ready to take me on at twice his size.

'You OK there?' asked George. 'Want some time on your own?'

I turned stiffly to him. 'Sorry?'

'Do you want to be alone?'

'Uh…' I stared at him. It took a moment or two but then the question set off a cog somewhere in my head. 'Uh, yeah,' I said. 'Yeah. Sure. Just a few minutes.'

He left the truck, going noisily down the aluminium steps. 'Hey, Callum,' I heard him say, 'when you get back to Oban get the station officer to look in the stationery catalogue, will you? Tell her page three hundred, there's a file organizer with colour-coded…'