Peter James - Dead Man’s Footsteps

The grinding sound of metal against metal.

Then the angular tip of a crowbar screeched in through the crack between the doors.

The grinding whine of the winch. The rattle of the idling diesel of the R &K 24-Hour Rescue tow truck.

Lisa batted away a whole bloody cloud of flies. ‘Piss off!’ she shouted at them. ‘Just go away, will you!’

The rattle turned into a roar as the steel hawser tightened and the guy in the cab accelerated, giving more power to the winch.

She was intrigued to know what would happen next. To find out what the car was doing there in the first place. No one drove three klicks down a dirt track and then into a river by accident, MJ said. Then he’d added, ‘Not even a woman driver,’ for which he had received a kick on the shin from her.

One of the local Geelong cops who had turned up, the shorter, calmer of the two, told them the car had probably been used in a crime and then dumped. Whoever had put it here hadn’t reckoned on the drought causing the water level to drop so much.

A fly landed on her cheek. She slapped her face, but it was too fast for her. Time was different for flies, MJ had told her that once. One second to a human was like ten seconds to a fly. It meant that the fly saw everything as if in slow motion. It had all the time in the world to get away from your hand.

MJ knew all about flies. Not surprising, she thought, if you lived in Melbourne and liked to go out in the bush. You’d become an expert faster than you could ever have believed possible. They bred in dung, he had told her last time they went camping, which meant she would no longer eat anything once a fly had landed on it.

Lisa stared at the white cop car with its blue and white chequered band, and the white police van in the same livery, both with their racks of blue and red roof lights. There were two police divers in wet suits and flippers, masks on their heads, standing down below her in the shrubbery at the edge of the water, watching the taut steel hawser steadily rising out of the water.

But flies performed a service as well. They helped clear dead things away: birds, rabbits, kangaroos and humans too. They were some of Mother Nature’s little helpers. They just happened to have lousy table manners, such as vomiting on their food before eating it. All in all, they didn’t make great dinner guests, Lisa decided.

Perspiration from the heat was running down her face. MJ stood with one arm around her, the other holding a water bottle which they were sharing. Lisa had her arm around his waist, fingers tucked into his waistband, feeling the sweat in his damp T-shirt. Flies liked to drink human sweat, that was another nugget he had given her. Sweat didn’t have much protein in it, but it contained minerals they needed. Human sweat was the fly world equivalent of Perrier, or Badoit, or whatever bottled water floated your particular boat.

The river just ahead of where the hawser had entered became a sudden mass of whirlpools. It looked like it was boiling. Bubbles burst on the surface, turning to foam. The taller, more panicky officer kept shouting out instructions, which seemed unnecessary to Lisa, as everyone seemed to know what they needed to do. In his early forties, she guessed, he had brush-cut hair and an aquiline nose. Both he and his younger colleague wore regulation open-throat shirts with epaulettes and a woven Victoria Police shield on one sleeve, navy blue trousers and stout shoes. The flies were enjoying them too.

Lisa watched the rear end of a dark green saloon car breaking the surface, water tumbling off it, which she could hear above the roar of the winch and the bellow of the truck engine. She read the number plate, OPH 010, and the legend that was written beneath it: VICTORIA ON THE MOVE.

How long had it been down there?

She wasn’t an expert on cars, but she knew a little about them. Enough to recognize that this was an older-model Ford Falcon, a good five or maybe even ten years old. Soon the rear windscreen appeared, then the roof. The paintwork was shiny from the water, but all the chrome had rusted. The tyres were almost flat, flapping on the arid, sandy soil as the car was hauled backwards up the steep slope. Water poured out from the empty interior through the door sills and the wheel arches.

It was an eerie sight, she thought.

After several minutes, the Falcon was finally up on the level ground, sitting motionless on its rims, tyres like black paunches. The hawser was slack now, with the tow-truck driver on his knees under the tailgate, unhooking it. The grinding sound of the winch had stopped and the tow-truck engine was silenced. There was just the steady splashing of the water pouring from the vehicle.

The two cops walked around it, peering warily in through the windows. The tall, panicky one had his gun hand on his gun butt, as if he expected someone to jump out of the car at any moment and challenge him. The shorter one saluted away some more flies. The bowerbird yoo-hooed again in the new silence.

Then the taller cop pressed the boot release button. Nothing happened. He tried again, exerting leverage on the lid at the same time. It lifted a few inches with a sharp screech of protest from its rusted hinges. Then he raised it all the way up.

And took a step back, in shock, as he smelled what was inside before he even saw her.

‘Oh, strewth,’ he said, turning away and gagging.

Grey was the default colour of death, Roy Grace thought. Grey bones. Grey ash when you were cremated. Grey tombstones. Grey X-rayed dental records. Grey mortuary walls. Whether you rotted away in a coffin or in a storm drain, all that was eventually left of you would be grey.

Grey bones lying on a grey steel post-mortem table. Being probed by grey steel instruments. Even the light in here was grey, strangely diffused ethereal light that seeped in through the large opaque windows. Ghosts were grey too. Grey ladies, grey men. There were plenty of them in the post-mortem room of the Brighton and Hove City Mortuary. The ghosts of thousands of unfortunate people whose remains had ended up here, inside this grim bungalow with its grey, pebbledash-rendered walls, residing behind one of its grey steel freezer locker doors before their penultimate journey to an undertaker’s premises, then burial or cremation.

He shuddered. He couldn’t help it. Despite the fact that he minded coming here less these days, because the woman he loved was in charge, it still gave him the creeps.

Gave him the creeps to see the skeleton, with its artificial fingernails and fronds of winter wheat-coloured hair still attached to the skull.

And it gave him the creeps to see all the green-gowned figures in the room. Frazer Theobald, Joan Major, Barry Heath – the latest addition to the team of Coroner’s Officers for the area, a short, neatly dressed, poker-faced man, recently retired from the police force, whose grim job it was to attend not only all murder scenes but also sudden-death scenes, such as traffic accident fatalities and suicides, and then the post-mortems. There was also the SOCO photographer, recording every step of the process. Plus Darren, Cleo’s assistant, a sharp, good-looking and pleasant-natured lad of twenty with fashionably spiky black hair, who had started life as a butcher’s apprentice. And Christopher Ghent, the tall, studious forensic odontist, who was occupied taking soft-clay impressions of the skeleton’s teeth.

And finally Cleo. She hadn’t been on duty, but had decided that, as he was working, she might as well too.

Sometimes Roy found it hard to believe that he really was dating this goddess.

He watched her now, tall and leggy and almost impossibly beautiful in her green gown and white wellies, long blonde hair clipped up, moving around this room, her room, her domain, with such ease and grace, sensitive but at the same time impervious to all its horrors.