Dead Like You

angry, just went silent on him, sending him to Coventry, shutting him out, sometimes for days. Not even the massive bunch of flowers he’d bought her had thawed her.
    He had not been able to sleep, but it wasn’t because of Sandy. She’d get over it eventually, she always did, and then it would be forgotten. All night he’d just lain in bed thinking one thought, over and over. Was the body in the van the missing Rachael Ryan?
    Charred human corpses were the worst thing of all, so far as he was concerned. As a rookie PC, he’d had to help recover the remains of two children, aged five and seven, from a burnt-out house in Portslade after an arson attack; the horror had been made ten times worse because it was children. It had given him nightmares for months.
    He knew what he was about to see in the mortuary would have a similar effect and would be staying with him for a long time. But he had no choice.
    Already late because his SIO, Jim Doyle, had called an early briefing which had overrun, he climbed out of the car, locked it, then hurried to the front door of the mortuary, holding the collar of his mackintosh tight around his neck.
    The briefing had been attended by a sergeant from the Accident Investigation Unit, the team which forensically examined all vehicles involved in serious crashes. It was early days with the van, the sergeant had told them, but on first impressions the fire was extremely unlikely to have been caused by the accident.
    He rang the bell and moments later the door was opened by the Senior Mortician herself, Elsie Sweetman, wearing a green apron over blue surgical scrubs that were tucked into long white wellington boots.
    In her late forties, with a bob of curly hair, Elsie had a kind face and a remarkably cheery demeanour, considering the horrific things she had to deal with on a daily – and nightly – basis. Roy Grace always remembered she’d been kind to him when he had nearly keeled over at the first post-mortem he’d attended. She had led him into her sitting room and made him a cup of tea, telling him not to worry, that half the coppers on the force had done the same thing.
    He stepped in through the door, which was like the front door of any suburban bungalow, into the narrow entrance hallway, and there the similarities ended, starting with the pervading reek of Jeyes Fluid and Trigene disinfectant. Today his nostrils detected something else, and the curdling in his stomach worsened.
    In the small changing room he wrestled a green apron over his head and tied the tapes, then put on a face mask, tied that securely too, and slipped his feet into a pair of short white rubber boots that were too big. He clumped out along the corridor and turned right, passing the sealed, glassed-in room where corpses that had died of suspected contagious diseases were examined, then walked into the main post-mortem room, trying to breathe in through his mouth only.
    There were three stainless-steel tables on wheels, two of which were pushed to one side against a cupboard. The third was in the centre of the room, its occupant, lying on her back, surrounded by people similarly clad to himself.
    Grace swallowed. The sight of her made him shiver. She didn’t look human, her blackened remains like some terrible monster created by the special effects team on a horror or sci-fi movie.
    Is this you, Rachael? What happened? If it is you, how did you come to be in this stolen van?
    Leaning over her, with a surgical probe in one gloved hand and tweezers in the other, was the Home Office pathologist, Dr Frazer Theobald, a man Grace always thought was a dead ringer for Groucho Marx.
    Theobald was flanked by a fifty-year-old retired police officer, Donald Whitely, now a Coroner’s Officer, Elsie Sweetman, her assistant mortician, Arthur Trumble, a drily humorous man in his late forties, with Dickensian mutton chops, and a SOCO photographer, James Gartrell, who was intently focusing his lens on a section of the woman’s left leg that had a measuring rule lying across it.
    Almost all of the dead woman’s hair was gone and her face was like melted black wax. It was difficult to make out her features. Grace’s stomach was feeling worse. Despite breathing through his mouth, and the mask over his nose, he could not avoid the smell. The Sunday lunchtime smell of his childhood, of roast pork and burnt crackling.
    It was obscene to think that, he knew. But the smell was sending confused signals to his brain and his