Peter James - Dead Simple

Grace pulled the band of the mask over his head, then let the mask hang loose below his chin; the young men had not been dead long enough to smell too bad, in his experience. 'You've had the families of all the four young men up?'

She nodded. 'And has the guy who was missing, the groom, turned up yet?'

'I've just come from the wedding/ Grace said.

'I thought you were looking a bit smart for a Saturday, Roy' She grinned. 'So at least that's resolved itself?'

'No,' he replied. 'That's why I'm here.'

She raised her eyebrows but didn't comment. 'Anything in particular you want to see? I can get you copies of the pathologist's reports to the Coroner's office.'

'What I want to start with when Joe gets here,' he replied, 'are their fingernails.'

48

Followed by Joe Tindall, who was tugging on his gloves, Grace followed Cleo along the hard, speckled floor, watching her streaked blonde hair swinging against the neck of her green gown, past the glass window of the sealed infection chamber, into the main postmortem room.

It was dominated by two steel tables, one fixed, one wheeled, a blue hydraulic hoist and a row of fridges with floor-to-ceiling doors. The walls were tiled in grey and the whole room was surrounded by a drain gulley. Along one wall was a row of sinks and a coiled yellow hose. Along another was a wide work surface, a metal cutting board and a glass-fronted cabinet filled with instruments and some packs of Duracell batteries. Next to the cabinet was a chart itemizing the name of each deceased, with columns for the weights of their brain, lungs, heart, liver, kidneys and spleen. A man's name, Adrian Penny, with his grim recordings was written in blue chinagraph pen.

Seeing what Grace was looking at, she said cheerfully, 'A motorcyclist we did a PM on yesterday. Overtook a lorry and didn't notice a steel girder sticking out the side - sliced the poor sod's head clean off at the neck.

'How the hell do you remain sane?' he asked.

Grinning, she replied, 'Who said I'm sane?'

'I don't know how you do your job.'

'It's not the dead who harm people, Roy, it's the living.'

'Good point,' he said. He wondered what her views were about ghosts. But this was not the time to ask.

The room felt cold. There was a hum from the refrigeration system, and a sharp clicking sound from overhead, from one fluorescent light that hadn't come on properly. 'Any preference who you want to see first?'

'No, I'd like to see all of them.'

Cleo marched up to the door marked '4' and pulled it open. As

she did so there was a blast of icy air, but it wasn't the cold that instantly sent a chill through Grace. It was the sight of the human form beneath the white plastic sheets on each of the four tiers of metal trays on rollers.

The mortician wheeled the hoist up close, cranked it up, then pulled the top tray out onto it and closed the fridge door. Then she pulled back the sheet to reveal a fleshy white male, with lank hair, his body and waxy white face covered in bruises and lacerations, his eyes wide open, conveying shock even in their glassy stillness, his penis shrivelled and limp lying in a thick clump of pubic hairs like some hibernating rodent. Grace looked at the buff tag tied around his big toe. The name read 'Robert Houlihan'.

Grace's eyes went straight to the young man's hands. They were big, coarse hands, with very grimy nails. 'You have all their clothes here?'

'Yes.'

'Good.' Grace asked Tindall to take scrapings from the nails. The SOCO officer selected a sharp tool from the instrument rack, asked Cleo for a specimen bag, then carefully scraped part of the dirt from each of the nails into the bag, labelled and sealed it.

The hands of the next body, Luke Gearing, were badly mangled from the accident, but apart from blood under them, the nails, bitten to the quick, were reasonably clean. There was no grime on Josh Walker's hands either. But Peter Waring's were filthy. Tindall took scrapings from his nails, and bagged them.

Next he and Grace carefully examined all their clothes. There was mud on all their shoes, and plenty of traces of it on Robert Houlihan and Peter Waring's clothes. Tindall bagged all of these items separately. 'Are you going back to the lab now with these?' Grace asked him.

'I was planning to go home - be quite nice to see it before the weekend is over and have a life - or some pretence of one.'

'I hate to do this to you, Joe, but I really need you to start work on these now.'

'Great! You want me to cancel my U2 concert tickets for tonight, which I paid fifty fucking quid each for, stand my date up and haul my sleeping bag out of the office cupboard?'

'U2 - she really is young, isn't she?'

'Yes, and you know what, Roy, she has a short fuse. She's high

itenance.'

'There might be a man's life at stake here.'

His anger rising, Tindall said, 'I want the price of my tickets back ffrom your budget.'

'It's not my case, Joe.'

'Oh - so whose is it?'

'Glenn Branson's.'

'And where the hell is he?'

'At a birthday party in Solihull.'

'It gets better all the time.'

By the row of lockers Tindall peeled off and binned his protective clothing and said, 'Have a nice sodding evening, Roy - go and ruin someone else's weekend next time.'

'I'll come over and keep you company.'

'Don't bother.'

Tindall slammed the door behind him. Moments later Grace heard the angry revving of a car engine. Then he noticed that, in his pique, the forensic expert had left behind the black bin liner containing his bags of evidence. He debated whether to run out after him, then decided to drive it over himself and try to calm the man down. He could understand his being hacked off - he would have been too, in the same circumstances.

He ducked into the sitting area, helped himself to another digestive biscuit and drained the remains of his tea, which had gone cold. Then he picked up the bin liner and Cleo walked him to the door. As he was about to step out into the rain he turned to her.

'What time are you finishing work today?'

'Another hour or so, with luck - assuming no one dies this afternoon.' Grace stared at her, thinking she really did look incredibly lovely - and suddenly feeling a bag of nerves as he glanced at her hands and saw no rings. Of course she could have taken them off for work. 'I--' he said. 'I - just wondered - do you - you know -1 mean - have any plans for this evening?'

Her eyes lit up. 'Actually I have a date to go to the cinema,' she

She dismissed the driver and helped Mark up to the front entrance, where he stared, bleary-eyed, at the door panel then managed to punch in his entry code accurately.

A few minutes later they were inside his apartment. Mark closed the door and slid the safety catch in place.

'I can't stay, Mark,' she said.

He began pawing at her clothes. She pushed his hands away. 'Let's have some coffee, and then I want you to tell me what the detective meant about having your car washed.'

Mark stared at her. She was wearing her white lace wedding dress, the veil pushed up. He lunged forward and kissed her on the mouth. She allowed him to kiss her on the lips and gave him a halfhearted kiss back, then pulled away. 'I mean it, I can't stay. I have to go round to Michael's mother and play the role of the grieving stood up bride - or whatever fucking role I'm meant to be playing. God, what an afternoon. What a nightmare.'

Mark staggered over towards the open-plan kitchen, opened a cupboard and pulled out a jar of coffee. He stared at it with a puzzled expression, put it back in the cupboard, opened the fridge and removed a bottle of Cristal champagne.

'I think we should have a proper toast to your wedding day,' he said.

'That's not amusing - and you've had more than enough to drink.'