Dead Tomorrow

an identical way to Unknown Male, trussed up in plastic sheeting tied with blue cord and weighed down with breeze blocks.
    They arrived at the mortuary parcelled in two further layers, the white plastic forensic bags in which they had been brought to the surface by the police divers, and the heavier-duty black plastic body bags in which they had been hauled up on to the dive boat, and in which they had remained until arriving at the mortuary.
    The first to be unwrapped, in a tediously slow process, was a young teenage boy, perhaps a year or two older than the previous body, Nadiuska estimated. Less good-looking, with a beaky nose and a face badly pockmarked from acne, Unknown Male 2 was also missing his heart, lungs, kidneys and liver. They had been surgically removed in the same meticulous way.
    Nadiuska was now working on the layers around the body of a young girl, also in her mid-teens, she estimated. Death took away the personality from a face, Grace always thought, leaving it a blank, which made it difficult to tell what people had really looked like when they were alive. But even with her pale, waxy skin and her long brown hair, tangled and matted, he could see she had been quite beautiful, if far too thin.
    The pathologist was of the opinion that these two bodies had been in the water for the same length of time as Unknown Male. It wouldn’t take a rocket scientist, Gracefigured, to work out the probability that all three of them had gone into the sea together.
    Which raised the stakes from the initial discovery of a single body considerably. In his mind, he had now dismissed any possibility that these were formal burials at sea that had drifted from the official seabed grave area. So who were these three teenagers? Where had they come from? Who were their parents? Who was missing them? Had they been dumped overboard from one of the dozens of foreign-registered merchant ships that travelled down the English Channel around the clock, from just about every country in the world?
    There were no marks on Unknown Male 2’s body to suggest death from an accident or a blow to the head. There were puncture marks on his skin, just like the earlier body, consistent, as Nadiuska had just repeated, with organ removal for transplant.
    A dark shadow was moving across Grace’s mind. For most of the time, he stood in the corridor that led into the now very crowded post-mortem room, mobile phone to his ear, making one call after another. His first had been to his MSA, Eleanor Hodgson, getting her to clear his diary for the immediate days ahead. There were just two dates he hoped to be able to keep. One, tonight, was his promise to a colleague to visit a football game at the Crew Club in Whitehawk. He might be able to make that if DI Mantle took the 6.30 briefing meeting instead of him.
    The second, was the CID dinner dance tomorrow night, which, with over 450 attending, was going to be quite a bash. It had been a tough year and he was looking forward to taking Cleo, now that their relationship was out in the open, and relaxing with his colleagues. And maybe getting anopportunity to improve on the poor impression he reckoned he had made with the new Chief Constable on Wednesday night.
    Cleo, who had spent weeks fretting about what she was going to wear, and an amount equal to the GDP of an emerging African nation buying a dress, would be deeply disappointed if they now did not make it.
    After going through his diary, Grace had then made a series of calls expanding his Outside Inquiry Team from the original six, to twenty-two. Now, as he stood talking to Tony Case, the Senior Support Officer at Sussex House, organizing space for his new team in one of the building’s two Major Incident Rooms, he watched Nadiuska at work, carefully taping the high-tensile cords around the breeze blocks, in the hope of finding a tell-tale skin cell or glove fibre from whoever had tied them. When each strip lost its tackiness, she bagged it for microscopic inspection later.
    Michael Forman, the Coroner’s Officer, stood beside her, observing carefully and occasionally making notes, or checking his BlackBerry. David Browne, the Crime Scene Manager, was in attendance, along with two of his SOCOs. One of them, the forensic photographer, James Gartrell, was once more taking photographs of every stage of the postmortem, while the other was dealing with the packaging in which the two corpses had arrived. At the next table along, Cleo and Darren were