Peter James - Dead Man's Grip

In her late forties, Nadiuska De Sancha could easily pass for a decade younger. If people wanted to be bitchy, they might comment that perhaps her plastic-surgeon husband’s skills had something to do with her continuing to look so youthful. But because of her warm and open nature, few people were bitchy about her. Far more were envious of her appearance, and half of the males in the Major Crime Branch lusted after her – as well as lusting after Cleo Morey.

A body found in the sea, on its own, would have been taken to the mortuary, where the post-mortem would be carried out the following day by one of the team of local pathologists. But when there were any grounds to give the Coroner suspicion, a full forensic post-mortem would need to be carried out by a trained specialist, of which there were thirty in the UK. A standard post-mortem usually took less than an hour. A Home Office one, depending on the condition of the body and the circumstances, and very much on who was performing it, could take from three to six hours, and sometimes even longer.

As the Senior Investigating Officer, Roy Grace had a duty to attend. And that meant, he realized with dismay, that he did not have a snowball’s chance in hell of making it to Jersey Boys in London tonight with Cleo. He’d booked a hotel up there, and tomorrow, the start of the May Day holiday weekend, they had tickets to the Army and Navy rugby match at Twickenham – at the invitation of Nobby Hall and his wife, Helen. Nobby was an old friend who had been running the Maritime Police in Cyprus.

At least Cleo would understand – unlike Sandy, he thought, with a sudden twinge of sadness. Although Sandy was fading further from his mind by the week, whenever he did think of her it was like a dark cloud engulfing him and leaving him disoriented. Sandy used to go off at the deep end, regardless of the fact he had carefully explained to her that a murder inquiry meant dropping everything, and the reasons why.

She would tell him she disliked it that she came second to his work. No matter how much he tried to refute this, she was adamant about it, to the point of fixation.

Who would you pick? she had once asked him. If you had to choose between me and your work, Grace?

She always called him ‘Grace’.

You , he had replied.

Liar! She had grinned.

It’s the truth!

I watched your eyes. That movement trick you taught me – if they move one way you are lying, the other you are telling the truth. Yours moved to the right, Grace, that’s the side you look to when you are lying!

A gull cried overhead. He glanced at his watch. Almost 12.30 p.m.

A dredger slipped past them in mid-channel, heading towards the lock and then on to the open sea. Nadiuska estimated she would be here by about 2 p.m. She would take a good hour on site at the very minimum, studying and noting the exact position of the body, photographing everything, checking Preece’s body for bruises and abrasions that might or might not be consistent with contact with the interior of the van, and searching for clothing fibres, hairs and anything else that might be lost as a result of the body being moved. Although, after several days’ immersion in water, Grace doubted there could be much in the way of fibres or hairs on the body, he was constantly surprised at the details good forensic pathologists could find that had eluded hawk-eyed detectives and trained police search officers.

He stared in through the open driver’s window. Preece’s lean, sharply delineated features from his photographs were unaltered, but his skin now had a ghostly, almost translucent sheen. At least no visible nibbles had been taken from him by any scavengers. Preece was wearing a white, mud-spattered T-shirt and black jeans, and was barefoot. Odd to be driving barefoot, Grace thought, and cast his mind back to the pair of trainers that had been found in the spare bedroom of his sister’s house. Had Preece left in too much of a hurry to put them on?

An undignified end to a short, sad and squandered life, he thought. At least Preece had been saved from the crustaceans. Or perhaps, with this particular specimen of human trash, it was the other way around.

Grace phoned the Incident Room to tell them to call off the search for Ewan Preece and the Ford Transit and instead to concentrate on the immediate neighbours of Preece’s sister, to see if anyone had seen or heard anything during the night of Monday 26 April or early morning of Tuesday the 27th. He also wondered whether the dead man’s sister might be sufficiently shocked into telling the truth about what had happened that night – if she genuinely knew.

An hour later, Grace completed a careful inspection of the surrounding area. He was looking in particular for any CCTV cameras that might have the approaches to this quay in view, but without success. Freezing cold, he gratefully accepted the offer of coffee inside the Specialist Search Unit truck, where there was a snug seating area around a table.

He clambered up the steps, followed by Branson, both of them rubbing some warmth back into their hands. A PCSO had been dispatched to a nearby supermarket to get some sandwiches. They were joined moments later by the tall figure of Philip Keay, the Coroner’s Officer, and Tracy Stocker, who announced that Nadiuska De Sancha had phoned to say she was only a few minutes away. Two members of the SSU, one a burly man nicknamed Juice by his colleagues and the other, slightly built with fair hair, who was nicknamed WAFI, which stood for Water Assisted Fucking Idiot, moved over to make room.

Grace tried to call Cleo, but both her mobile phone and the mortuary phone went to voicemail. He felt a prick of anxiety. What if she was alone in the place and had collapsed? Most of the time, when no post-mortems were being carried out, there were only three people – Cleo, Darren and Walter – in the building. If Darren and Walter went out to recover a body, she could have been left on her own. If anything happened to her, she could lie undiscovered for a couple of hours.

He had often worried in the past about her being in that place on her own, but now he felt it even more acutely. He rang her house, but there was no answer there either. He was seriously considering driving to the mortuary to make sure she was OK, when suddenly, to his surprise, he heard her voice.

‘Oi! Call this working?’ she called out cheekily, standing at the door of the truck.

Grace stood up. Not many people make blue paper oversuits look like a designer garment, he thought, but Cleo did. With the trousers tucked into her boots, her hair clipped up and the bump in her stomach, she looked like someone who had just arrived in a spaceship from a planet where everyone was much more beautiful than here on earth. A new world that he still could not totally believe he was now a part of. His heart flipped with joy, the same way it did each time he saw her.

Juice and WAFI both wolf-whistled at her.

With some colour back in her face now, Cleo looked more radiant than ever, he thought, going down the steps to greet her with a light peck on the cheek.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked, wanting to hug her, but not in front of a bunch of cynical colleagues who would rib him at the slightest opportunity.

‘Well, I figured the musical was off, so I thought I’d take a trip to the seaside instead. Gather you’ve got a particularly interesting species of underwater creature.’

He grinned. ‘You are under strict doctor’s orders not to do any lifting, OK?’

She jerked her head, pointing. ‘It’s OK. I’ll use that fork-lift truck!’ Then she smiled. ‘Don’t worry, Darren’s here with me. Walter’s off sick today.’