Dead Simple

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 maintenance.’
    ‘There might be a man’s life at stake here.’
    His anger rising, Tindall said, ‘I want the price of my tickets back from 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 – I mean – have any plans for this evening?’
    Her eyes lit up. ‘Actually I have a date to go to the cinema,’ she said. Then added, as if for reassurance, ‘With a friend – an old girlfriend who’s going