Dead Like You

why?
    Three big unticked boxes.
    So far no undertakers had reported a missing body, but Grace could not get the image of the woman out of his mind. During the past couple of days some of her details had been filled in for him. She was five feet, four inches tall. White. Lab tests carried out by Dr Frazer Theobald on her lung tissue and on the small amount of flesh intact on her back confirmed that she had been dead for some considerable time before the van caught fire – several days before. She had died from cancer secondaries.
    But, it seemed, the county of Sussex was knee deep in little old ladies who were terminally ill. Some of its towns, like Worthing, Eastbourne and Bexhill, with their high elderly populations, were jokily known as God’s waiting rooms. To contact every undertaker and every mortuary was a massive task. Because of the pathologist’s findings, the case was regarded as bizarre rather than as a major crime, so resources allocated to it were limited. It was virtually down to Roy Grace alone.
    She had been someone’s child, he thought. Someone’s daughter. She’d had children herself, so she had been someone’s wife or lover. Someone’s mother. Probably someone’s grandmother. Probably a caring, loving, decent person.
    So how come her last journey had been buckled into the driver’s seat of a stolen van?
    Was it a sick prank by a bunch of youths?
    But if so, where had they taken her from? If an undertaker’s premises had been broken into and a corpse stolen, surely it would have been reported as a matter of urgency? But there was nothing on the serials. He’d checked them all, for three weeks back.
    It just did not make sense.
    He expanded his enquiries to undertakers and mortuaries beyond Sussex and into all the bordering counties, without success. The woman must have had family. Perhaps they were all dead, but he hoped not. The thought made him sad. It also saddened him to think that no undertaker had noticed her absence.
    The indignity of what had happened to her made matters worse too.
    If she wasn’t the helpless victim in some sick prank, was there something he was missing?
    He replayed the scenario over and over in his mind. For what possible reason would someone steal a van and then put a dead old lady into it?
    How stupid would you have to be not to know there were tests that would prove the old woman had not been driving, and that her age would be worked out?
    A prank was the most likely. But where had they got the body from? Every day he was broadening his search of undertakers and mortuaries. There had to be one, somewhere in this country, that had a body that was missing. Surely?
    It was a mystery that was to remain with him for the next twelve years.

Now

79
    Thursday 15 January
    Norman Potting sat on the green chair in the interview room in the Custody Suite adjoining the CID headquarters. There was a window, high up, a CCTV camera and a microphone. The heavy green door, with its small viewing window, was closed and locked.
    Opposite the DS, across a small table the colour of granite, sat John Kerridge, dressed in a regulation-issue, ill-fitting blue paper jump suit and plimsolls. Beside him sat a Legal Aid solicitor who had been allocated to him, Ken Acott.
    Unlike many of his duty solicitor colleagues, who tended not to fuss too much about their clothing as they weren’t needing to impress their clients, Acott, who was forty-four, was always impeccably dressed. Today he wore a well-cut navy suit, with a freshly laundered white shirt and a sharp tie. With his short, dark hair and genial good looks, he reminded many people of the actor Dustin Hoffman, and he had plenty of the theatrical about him, whether protesting his client’s rights in an interview room or addressing the bench in a courtroom. Of all the criminal practice solicitors in the city, Ken Acott was the one that arresting officers disliked coming up against the most.
    Kerridge seemed to be having problems sitting still. A man of about forty, with short hair brushed forward, he was squirming, writhing, as if attempting to free himself from imaginary bonds, and repeatedly looking at his watch.
    ‘They haven’t brought my tea,’ he said anxiously.
    ‘It’s on its way,’ Potting assured him.
    ‘Yes, but it’s ten past,’ Yac said nervously.
    On the table sat a tape recorder with slots for three cassettes, one for the police, one for the defence and one file copy. Potting inserted a cassette into each