Dead Tomorrow

other contagious diseases, and the main post-mortem room, where they were now.
    On the far side of the wall he heard the whine of an angle-grinder. Building work was going on to extend the mortuary.
    The greyness of the day outside was grimly matched by the atmosphere in here. Grey light diffused through the opaque windows. Grey tiled walls. Brown and grey speckled tiles on the floor that were a close match to the colour of a dead human brain. Apart from the blue surgical gowns worn by everyone in here, and the green plastic aprons of the mortuary staff and the pathologist, the only colour in the whole room was the bright pink disinfectant in the upended plastic dispenser by the washbasin.
    The post-mortem room reeked, permanently and unpleasantly, of Jeyes Fluid and Trigene disinfectant–sometimes compounded by the stomach-churning, freshly unblocked-drain stench that came from opened-up cadavers.
    As always witha Home Office post-mortem, the room was crowded. In addition to himself, Nadiuska and Cleo, there were Darren Wallace, the Assistant Mortuary Technician, a young man of twenty-one who had started life as a butcher’s apprentice; Michael Forman, a serious, intense man in his mid-thirties, who was the Coroner’s Officer; James Gartrell, the burly forensic photographer; and a queasy-looking Glenn Branson, who was standing some distance back. Grace had observed several times in the past that, despite the Detective Sergeant’s big, tough frame, he always had a problem at post-mortems.
    Unknown Male’s flesh was a waxy off-white. It was the colour Roy Grace had long associated with bodies in which the life forces had ceased, but on which decomposition had not yet begun to present, to the naked eye at least, its hideous processes. The winter weather and the cold of the seawater would have helped to delay the onset, but it was clear that Unknown Male had not been dead for long.
    Nadiuska De Sancha, her red hair clipped up, tortoise-shell glasses perched on her finely sculpted nose, estimated that death had probably occurred four or five days ago–but she was not able to get closer than that. Nor was she able to establish, for the moment at any rate, the precise cause of death, largely on account of the fact that Unknown Male was short of most of his vital organs.
    He was a good-looking young man, with close-cropped, downy black hair, a Roman nose and brown eyes that were fixed open. His body was lean and bony–but from undernourishment rather than exercise, Grace judged from the lack of muscle tone. His genitals were modestly covered by the fleshy triangle of skin from his sternum, which had been removed and placed there by Nadiuska, as if to afford him some dignity in death. The flesh of his chest and stomach, either side of the massive incision running down his midriff, was clamped back, revealing a startlingly hollow ribcage, with the intestines, like shiny, translucent rope, coiled beneath.
    On the wall totheir left was a chart for listing the weight of the brain, lungs, heart, liver, kidneys and spleen of each cadaver examined in here. There was a dash against each item, except for the brain, the only vital organ the cadaver still possessed, and very likely to be the only one that would go to his grave with him.
    The pathologist removed his bladder, laid it on the metal dissecting tray, which was on raised legs above the cadaver’s thighs, then made one sharp incision to open it. She carefully bottled and sealed samples of the fluid that poured out, for tests.
    ‘What’s your assessment so far?’ Grace asked her.
    ‘Well,’ she said, in her exquisite broken English, ‘the cause of death is not absolute at this moment, Roy. There’s no petechial haemorrhaging to indicate suffocation or drowning, and with the absence of his lungs I can’t say for sure at this point if he was dead prior to immersion. But I think we can surmise, from the fact that his organs were removed, that was pretty likely.’
    ‘Not many surgeons operate underwater,’ Michael Forman quipped.
    ‘I don’t have much to go on from the stomach contents,’ she continued. ‘Most of it has been dissolved by the digestion process, although that slows post-mortem. But there are some particles of what looks like chicken, potato and broccoli–so that indicates he was capable of eating a proper meal in the hours preceding death. That is not really consistent with his absence of organs.’
    ‘In what way?’ Grace asked, conscious