Peter James - Dead Like You

At a few minutes to midnight, with his toolkit clipped to his belt, he drove around the Lewes Road gyratory system, past the entrance to the Brighton and Hove Borough Mortuary, wipers clunk-clunking away the rain, and then turned left on to the hard driveway of his destination, J. Bund and Sons, funeral directors.

He was shaking, all knotted up inside and perspiring heavily. Stupid woman, stupid bloody Rachael, why the hell did you have to take my mask off?

Up on the wall, above the curtained shop window of the premises, he clocked the burglar alarm box. Sussex Security Systems. Not a problem, he thought, pulling up in front of the padlocked steel gates. The lock was also not a problem.

Directly across the road was a closed estate agent’s, with flats on the two storeys above. There was a light on in one of them. But they would be used to seeing vehicles come and go at a funeral parlour around the clock.

He switched the lights off, then climbed out of the Sierra into the rain to deal with the padlock. A trickle of cars and taxis drove past along the road. One of them was a police patrol car, its blue lights flashing and siren wailing. He held his breath, but its crew paid him no attention, just swishing straight past to some emergency or other. Moments later he drove through into the rear yard and parked between two hearses and a van. Then he hurried back through the rain and closed the gates, pulling the chain around them, but leaving the padlock dangling open. So long as no one came, all would be fine.

It took him less than a minute to pick the Chubb on the double rear receiving doors, then he entered the dark entrance hallway, wrinkling his nose at the smells of embalming fluid and disinfectant. The alarm was beeping. Just the internal warning signal. He had sixty precious seconds before the external bells would kick off. It took him less than thirty to remove the front casing of the alarm panel. Another fifteen and it fell silent.

Too silent.

He closed the door behind him. And now it was even more silent. The faint click-whirr of a fridge. A steady tick-tick-tick of a clock or a meter.

These places gave him the creeps. He remembered the last time he had been in here; he had been alone then, and shit-scared. They were dead, all of the people in here, dead like Rachael Ryan. They couldn’t hurt you, or tell tales on you.

Couldn’t leap out at you.

But that didn’t make it any better.

He flashed his torch beam along the corridor ahead, trying to orient himself. He saw a row of framed Health and Safety notices, a fire extinguisher and a drinking-water dispenser.

Then he took a few steps forward, his trainers silent on the tiled floor, listening intently for any new sounds inside or out. There was a staircase up to his right. He remembered it led to the individual rooms – or Chapels of Rest – where friends and relatives could visit and mourn their loved ones in privacy. Each room contained a body laid out on a bed, men in pyjamas, women in nightgowns, their heads poking out from beneath the sheets, hair tidy, faces all rosy from embalming fluid. They looked like they were checked into some tacky hotel for the night.

But for sure they wouldn’t be doing a runner without paying their bills in the morning, he thought, and grinned despite his unease.

Then, flashing his torch through an open doorway to his left, he saw a prostrate white marble statue. Except, as he took a closer look, he saw it wasn’t a statue. It was a dead man on a slab. Two handwritten tags hung from his right foot. An old man, he lay with his mouth open like a landed fish, embalming-fluid lines cannulated into his body, his penis lying uselessly against his thigh.

Close to him was a row of coffins, open and empty, just one of them with its lid closed. There was a brass plaque on the lid, engraved with the name of its occupant.

He stopped for a moment, listening. But all he could hear was the thudding of his own heart and the blood coursing through his veins louder than the roar of a river in flood. He could not hear the traffic outside. All that entered here from the world beyond the walls was a faint, eerie orange glow leaking in from a street light on the pavement.

‘Hi, everyone!’ he said, feeling very uncomfortable as he swung the beam around until it struck what he was looking for. The row of duplicated white A4 forms hanging on hooks from the wall.

Eagerly, he walked over to them. These were the registration forms for each of the bodies in here. All the information was on them: name, date of death, place of death, funeral instructions, and a whole row of optional disbursement boxes to be ticked – organist’s fee, cemetery fee, churchyard burial fee, clergy’s fee, church fee, doctor’s fee, removal of pacemaker fee, cremation fee, gravedigger’s fee, printed service sheets fees, flowers, memorial cards, obituary notices, coffin, casket for remains.

He read quickly through the first sheet. No good: the Embalming box had been ticked. The same applied to the next four. His heart began to sink. They were embalmed and their funerals were not until later in the week.

But on the fifth it looked like he might have struck gold:

Mrs Molly Winifred Glossop

D. 2 January 1998. Aged 81.

And further down:

Funeral on: 12 January 1998, 11 a.m.

Monday morning!

His eyes raced down the form to the words Committal. Not so good. He would have preferred a cremation. Done and dusted. Safer.

He turned to the remaining six forms. But none of them was any good at all. They were all funerals to be held later in the week – too risky, in case the family came to view. And all but one had requested embalming.

No one had requested that Molly Winifred Glossop be embalmed.

Not having her embalmed meant her family was probably too mean. Which might be an indication that they weren’t going to care too much about her body. So hopefully no distraught relative was going to rush in tonight or first thing in the morning, wanting to have one last peep at her.

He shone his beam down on the plaque on the one closed coffin, trying hard to ignore the corpse lying just a few feet away.

Molly Winifred Glossop, it confirmed. Died 2 January 1998, aged 81.

The fact that it was closed, with the lid screwed down, was a good indicator that no one was coming along tomorrow to see her.

Unclipping a screwdriver from his belt, he removed the shiny brass screws holding down the lid, lifted it away and peered inside, breathing in a cocktail of freshly sawn wood, glue and new fabric and disinfectant.

The dead woman nestled in the cream satin lining of the coffin, her head poking out of the white shroud that wrapped the rest of her. She did not look real; she looked like some kind of weird granny doll, that was his first reaction. Her face was emaciated and bony, all wrinkles and angles, the colour of a tortoise. Her mouth was sewn shut; he could see the threads through her lips. Her hair was a tidy bob of white curls.

He felt a lump in his throat as a memory came back to him. And another lump, this time of fear. He slipped his hands down either side of her and began to lift. He was startled by how light she was. He could feel the weightlessness of her frame in his arms. There was nothing on her, no flesh at all. She must have been a cancer victim, he decided, laying her down on the floor. Shit, she was a lot lighter than Rachael Ryan. Several stones lighter. But hopefully the pall-bearers would never realize.

He hurried back outside, popped open the boot of the Sierra and removed Rachael Ryan’s body, which he had wrapped in two layers of heavy-duty plastic sheeting to prevent any water leaking out as she thawed.

Ten minutes later, with the alarm casing replaced, the system reset and the padlock again locked shut on the chain around the gate, he pulled the Ford Sierra out into the busy Saturday-night traffic on the rain-lashed road. A whole weight was gone from his mind. He accelerated recklessly, swinging out across the lanes, halting at a red light on the far side of the road.