Dead Tomorrow

he nearly added. ‘I don’t think you’re going to be needing that bag. He’s about as dead as they get.’
    He led Graham Lewis back up the wobbly gangway on to the deck, then along, under the glare of the ship’s lights, past the cable reels and orange rails of the conveyor belt, which would normally have been busily and noisily clanking away, shifting the cargo from the hold on to the chute, which would then discharge it on to the quay. But now it was silent. The paramedic followed Roy Grace to the far side of the ship.
    The claws of the steel drag head, suspended a couple of feet above the deck, looked like a pair of gigantic, parallel crab pincers. Jammed between them was a parcel of black plastic tarpaulin, with several ropes wound around it. Several more lengths of rope, looped through eyeholes sewn into the tarp, were tied around a cluster of concrete breeze blocks, which now lay on the grimy, orange-painted metal of the deck.
    ‘He’s in the bag,’ Grace said. ‘They’ve cut it open but they haven’t touched him.’
    Graham Lewis walked up and peeredin through the long slit which had been opened up along part of the length. Roy Grace watched alongside him, horrified but deeply curious.
    The paramedic pulled on a pair of latex gloves, then tugged the sheeting open wider, revealing the full length of the motionless, almost translucent, greyish-white body inside. It was a young man, in his late teens, Grace estimated, and from his condition he did not look as if he had been in the water for very long.
    There was a strong smell of plastic, and a fainter reek of decay, but not the terrible, cloying, rotting-meat reek of death that Grace had long come to associate with a body that had been dead for a while. This person had been dead for only a few days, he guessed, but the post-mortem would hopefully give them a better steer on this.
    The youth was thin, but from under-nourishment rather than exercise, Grace judged, noting the lack of muscle. He was about five foot seven or eight, with an angular, rather awkward-looking face and short black hair, some of which lay in a peak across his forehead.
    The paramedic rotated his head slightly. ‘No immediate sign of any head trauma,’ he said.
    Grace nodded, but his eyes–and his thoughts–were on a different part of the body. He was staring at the abdomen. In particular, at the neat vertical incision down the centre, from the base of the neck to below the belly button, stopping at the edge of the thick triangle of pubic hair, and the large sutures closing it up.
    His eyes met the paramedic’s, then he looked down again. Stared at the incision. At the penis, almost black in colour, lying on top of thehairs, limp and wrinkled, like the cast-off skin of a snake. He could not help continuing to stare at it for a moment. The penises of dead men always seemed so profoundly sad, as if the ultimate symbol of manhood, through its motionlessness, became the ultimate symbol of death. Then his eyes returned to the incision.
    ‘What the hell is that?’ Graham Lewis asked. ‘There’s no scar tissue, so it has been made post-mortem–or close to it.’
    ‘It looks very neat,’ Grace said. ‘Surgical?’
    Danny Marshall, who was standing a short distance away, next to DI Mantle, asked her anxiously how much longer it would be before the body was off-loaded and they could sail again–they had already lost over an hour of valuable discharging time. The Arco Dee needed to operate round the clock to earn its keep. Which meant never missing a tide. Another hour’s delay and they would not unload in time to make tonight’s tide.
    She told him the decision would be Roy Grace’s.
    For the first time in his career Marshall could understand the behaviour of a couple of skippers of fishing vessels he had met who had pulled up bodies from the deep in their nets, and confessed they had chucked them straight back rather than endure the delays that police procedures would inflict on them.
    ‘Definitely. That is not a wound,’ Lewis said. ‘This poor bastard’s had surgery. But…’ He hesitated.
    ‘But what?’ Grace prompted.
    ‘That incision definitely looks like a post-mortem one to me.’
    ‘Any idea how long you are going to be, Detective Superintendent?’ the captain asked.
    ‘It depends on thepathologist,’ Grace told him apologetically.
    ‘We have to wait?’
    At that moment, Grace’s phone rang. ‘Speak of the devil,’ he said. It was the Home Office