Dead Simple

she did for a living.
    ‘Brighton and Hove City Mortuary,’ she said.
    ‘Cleo, it’s Roy Grace.’
    ‘Wotcher, Roy, how you doing?’ Cleo Morey’s ordinarily quite posh voice was suddenly impish.
    Involuntarily, Grace found himself flirting with her over the phone. ‘Yes, OK. I’m impressed you’re working on a Saturday afternoon.’
    ‘The dead don’t know what day of the week it is.’ She hesitated. ‘Don’t ’spose the living care much, either. Most of them anyhow,’ she added as an afterthought.
    ‘ Most of them?’
    ‘Seems to me most living people don’t really know what day of the week it is – they give the impression they do, but they don’t really. Don’t you think?’
    ‘This is heavy philosophy for a wet Saturday afternoon,’ Grace said.
    ‘Well I’m doing my Open University degree in philosophy, so I’ve got to practise my arguments on someone – and I don’t get much response from the lot in here.’
    Grace grinned. ‘So how are you?’
    ‘OK.’
    ‘You sound a bit – low.’
    ‘Never felt better, Roy. I’m tired, that’s all. Been here on my own all week – short-staffed – Doug’s on holiday.’
    ‘Those lads who were killed on Tuesday night – are they still in the mortuary?’
    ‘They’re here. And so is Josh Walker.’
    The one who died afterwards, in hospital?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘I need to come over, take a look at them. Would now be OK?’
    ‘They’re not going anywhere.’
    Grace always enjoyed her dark humour. ‘I’ll be there in about ten minutes,’ he said.
    *
    The Saturday-afternoon traffic was heavier than he had expected and it was nearly twenty minutes before he entered the busy gyratory system, then turned right, past a sign saying ‘ BRIGHTON & HOVE CITY MORTUARY ’ and through wrought iron gates attached to brick pillars. The gates were always open, twenty-four hours a day. Like a symbol, he reflected, that the dead didn’t have much respect for business hours.
    Grace knew this place far too well. It was a bland building with a horrible aura. A long, single-storey structure with grey pebbledash rendering on the walls and a covered drive-in on one side deep enough to take an ambulance or a large van. The mortuary was a transit stop on a one-way journey to a grave or a crematorium oven, for people who had died suddenly, violently or inexplicably – or from some fast-onset disease like viral meningitis, where a post-mortem might reveal medical insights that could one day help the living.
    Yet a post-mortem was the ultimate degradation. A human being who had been walking, talking, reading, making love – or whatever – just a day or two before being cut open and disembowelled like a pig on a butcher’s slab.
    He didn’t want to think about it, but he couldn’t help it; he’d seen too many post-mortems and knew what happened. The scalp would be peeled back, then the cap of the skull sawn off, the brain removed and sliced into segments. The chest wall would be cut open, all the internal organs taken out and sliced and weighed and some bits sent off for pathological analysis, the rest crammed into a white plastic bag and stitched back inside the cadaver like giblets.
    He parked behind a small blue MG sports car, which he presumed was Cleo’s, and hurried through the rain over to the front entrance and rang the bell. The blue front door with its frosted glass panel could have come straight from a suburban bungalow.
    Moments later, Cleo Morey opened it, smiling warmly. No matter how many times he saw her, he could never quite get used to the incongruity of this immensely attractive young woman, in her late twenties, with long blonde hair, dressed in a green surgical gown, with a heavy-duty green apron over the top and white wellington boots. With her looks she could have been a model, or an actress, and with her brains she could have probably had any career she set her mind to – and she chose this. Booking in cadavers, preparing them for post-mortems, cleaning up afterwards – and trying to offer crumbs of comfort to the families of the bereaved, invariably in shock, who came to identify the bodies. And for much of the time she worked alone here.
    The smell hit Roy immediately, the way it always did, that sickly sweet reek of disinfectant that permeated the whole place and made something squirm in his guts.
    They took a left off the narrow entrance hall into the undertaker’s office, which doubled as reception. It was a small room