Lee Child - MatchUp

He felt a beat of excitement and gave her all the information he had, informing her that tissue had been sent to the lab for fast-track DNA analysis.

“From what I’ve read on SCAS, I’m pretty sure we won’t get a DNA match to your victim. Our body here is fresh. Your feet sound a few weeks old, which doesn’t tally with our time of death estimates or last-seen evidence.”

“They are old. I can’t give you a precise date. About two to three weeks is our pathologist’s educated guess from the generations of insect larvae.”

“Those serration marks you’ve just described interest me,” she said. “Could you send me photographs? If we could establish whether the same, or a similar instrument has been used to sever both pairs of feet, we might make progress.”

“I’ll have them to you in a few minutes.”

Carol Jordan thanked him and told him she would call back as soon as she had confirmation, one way or the other.

Ending the call, he turned to Glenn Branson. “You’re a movie buff. What films can you think of where people have had their feet severed?”

“ Misery. In the book the batty woman chain-sawed off one of his legs and cauterized it with a blowtorch. But they tamed it down in the film and she just shattered his legs with a sledgehammer.”

“Anything more helpful?”

He was feeling tired and fractious.

Branson yawned. “There was some horror movie I saw years ago, but I can’t remember the title. They hacked this guy’s legs off and fed them to a pig in front of him.”

“It had a happy ending?”

“Not exactly. They fed the rest of him to the pig, too.”

“Let me guess, then they ate the pig?”

“You saw it, boss?”

AT 7 A.M., GRACE WAS BACK in the CID HQ for the daily management meeting, prior to the next briefing on Operation Podiatrist. Just as he was entering the room, accompanied by Glenn Branson, his phone rang. Answering it, he heard the excited voice of the duty inspector, Ken “Panicking” Anakin.

“Roy, something that might be of interest to your current inquiry. A uniform crew got called to a firm of undertakers on the Lewes Road at 2 a.m., in response to an alarm and reports of lights on in the premises. It sounds like someone, maybe a drunk, broke in and disturbed some of the bodies in coffins prepared for funerals today. There’s one in particular that might be significant. A young deceased woman in her early twenties, whose feet are missing.”

“Can you give me the name and address?”

Anakin provided him the details and he jotted it down. “Is anyone there now?”

“The keyholder and proprietor. Mr. James Houlihan is quite upset.”

“Meet me there in fifteen minutes,” Grace said.

He brought Branson up to speed as they hurried out to the car park and into his unmarked Ford Mondeo, then with the DI reaching forward and switching on the blue lights and siren, ripped the five miles into central Brighton. Heading past the row of funeral directors’ premises along Lewes Road, they slowed. A short distance along they saw a neat-looking building, with the sign announcing HOULIHAN AND SONS, ESTABLISHED 1868. There were crimson curtains in the windows either side of a grand front door, and a smaller sign with an arrow that indicated parking in the rear.

The two detectives stopped right outside and walked swiftly toward the front door. As they reached it and Grace rang the bell, a marked police car drew up behind theirs. Ken Anakin, wearing his inspector’s braided cap, and a yellow high-viz over his uniform, looking as ever as if the world was going to end in five minutes, hurried over to join them.

The door was opened by a portly, balding man in his late fifties, soberly dressed in a charcoal suit and black tie and wearing unfashionably large glasses. He looked agitated.

“Thank you for coming; this is all quite distressing,” he said, in a mournful voice honed and toned by a lifetime of consoling loved ones and advising them on the decorum of funerals. It was the voice of a master salesman of quality coffins, and all the accoutrements for the funeral of a lifetime you had always promised yourself.

The two detectives introduced themselves and showed him their warrant cards, which he barely glanced at.

“Come in, please. What am I going to say to all my clients? What a disaster. Who would do such a thing?”

Grace and Branson, accompanied by the uniformed inspector, entered a small reception area. It had a deep pile carpet, ornate vases of flowers that looked too real to be real, and framed testimonials on the walls. Houlihan led them on through a door, along a corridor lit with sconces adorned by pink tasseled shades. He stopped outside a closed door.

“Our viewing room is there,” he pointed. “We call it the chapel of rest. That has not been violated, fortunately.”

It was strange, Grace thought; he didn’t mind the mortuary, and postmortems never bothered him, but there was something about funeral homes that gave him the heebie-jeebies. He could see Branson looking uncomfortable, too.

The proprietor opened a door a short distance on, pressed some switches, and led them into a large workspace. Grace smelled glue, varnish, and a strong reek of disinfectant. He heard the click-whirr of a refrigerator, and a steady tick . . . tick . . . tick . . . of a clock or a meter of some kind. He saw a row of health and safety notices taped to one wall, and a drinking water dispenser nearby. Several coffins, some plain, others more ornate, rested on metal trestles, with their lids lying randomly on the floor beside them. In the far corner of the room was a tiled alcove. There, a cadaver lay on a steel tray beneath a white cover, with one darkened, shriveled foot protruding. A large glass container filled with what looked like pink embalming fluid sat on a table, amid several neatly laid out surgical instruments and a long rubber tube.

“It is this one over here, gentlemen,” Houlihan said.

Grace walked past several coffins.

He saw a tiny old lady in one, her face so white it blended, ghostlike, with her hair color. The undertaker had stopped beside a plain pine coffin. Lying inside, between the cream, quilted satin sides, wearing a plain shroud, was a very attractive young woman, with flowing, titian red hair.

Pulling out a pair of protective surgical gloves from his pocket, he snapped them on, then with the undertaker’s nodded assent, he lifted away the shroud completely. Everything else of her beautiful and well-endowed body was intact. Crude stitches right down her midriff showed she’d had a postmortem, and further marks were visible at the start of her hairline.

But her feet were missing.

They’d been severed at the ankles by an instrument that both detectives could see, with their naked eyes, had a serrated blade.

A pile of what was obviously her clothing lay alongside the coffin so she could be dressed for the funeral.

He found his phone and snapped several close-up photographs of the leg stumps. He e-mailed them to the crime scene manager and asked him to send them straight to DCI Carol Jordan.

“What can you tell us about this young lady, and the circumstances,” he asked Houlihan, as he watched the e-mail sending on his screen.

The undertaker led them through to his small, overly cozy and plush office, Grace dropping his gloves in a trash can on the way. There were more flowers on display, pictures of a smiling woman, presumably Houlihan’s wife and two small girls, also happy, and a stack of leather-bound books, which Grace presumed contained photographs of coffins, urns, and other funeral accoutrements. They sat in red leather armchairs in front of his desk, while Houlihan settled on the far side and glanced down at some notes.