Kissed a Sad Goodbye

internal organs. She’d always assumed that this part of the job would get easier for her the more exposure she had, but that hadn’t turned out to be the case, and somehow it was always worse when the corpse was as unblemished as this one.
    “What about fluids on the body?” she heard Kincaid ask as she stared at the loops and dashes of her shorthand.
    “Nothing came up on the swabs, and I’ve not found anything else obvious. No evidence of recent intercourse, either.”
    “There’s no indication that this was a sex crime, then.” Gemma heard Kate’s shrug in her voice as she said, “Not unless it’s a nutter who just likes to fantasize about it afterwards. But they usually leave something behind.” When Kate had finished with Annabelle Hammond’s back and had Gerald turn the body again, she said, “Unless you have something else in particular you want me to look for, I’m ready to start the internal now.”
    As Kincaid shook his head he met Gemma’s eyes. He knew she’d be struggling, but he wouldn’t embarrass her by saying anything. And from his expression, he wasn’t too keen, either.
    Kate chose a scalpel from her array of instruments and spoke into the mike. “Right, then. Let’s begin with a Y incision.”
    Gemma concentrated on breathing through her nose and recording Kate’s observations in her notebook. Healthy female. Probably an occasional smoker. No sign of a pregnancy, or of previous pregnancies.
    When the internal organs had been removed and weighed, Kate said, “We’ll get the stomach contents off to the lab—should have something for you shortly. Now let’s have a look at the neck.”
    Gemma glanced up just long enough to see the scalpel poised over Annabelle’s white throat; then she forced her gaze back to her shorthand.
    “Look.” Kate sounded as though she’d found a prize in her Christmas cracker. “There’s some bruising on the tissue that didn’t show up on the skin. Odd, but you sometimes see that. And the hyoid cartilage is intact.”
    “Are you saying she wasn’t strangled?” Kincaid asked, frowning.
    “No, just that it’s not obvious. And there’s always the possibility of vagal inhibition. But let’s have a look at that head injury,”
    Gemma took a deep breath and focused on Annabelle Hammond’s toes.
     
    EVEN WITH THE AID OF A sedative, Reg Mortimer had slept poorly. He had dreamed of Annabelle, disjointed fragments in which she had either dismissed him or furiously accused him of something he could not remember. In the last dream, they had been children again, and he had watched helplessly as she stepped into an abyss—then it had been he who was falling, and he’d awakened with mouth dry and heart pounding.
    He forced himself to bathe and dress, to eat a bowl of cornflakes and drink a cup of tea, but through it all he had the strangest feeling of unreality, as if any moment he might wake again and find that everything, even the dreaming, had been a dream.
    By half past nine, the walls of his flat had begun to close in, and not even the much-prized view of the Thames from his sitting room window offered relief. He had loved the playful conceit of his building, with its architectural mimicry of a great steamliner, but now he had a sudden vision of the building tipping, plunging to the depths and taking him with it.
    Reg blinked away the vertigo and grabbed his keys from the entry table. The central lift whooshed him to the ground floor and the lobby doors ejected him into a fine morning. His feet took him south, along the river path and the blinding, molten sheet of the Thames, then into West-ferry Road and round the corner into Ferry Street.
    The sight of the blue and white tape fluttering from the door of Annabelle’s flat brought him up short. A uniformed constable stood near a van, talking to a man in a white overall. Reg stood for a moment, watching, then forced himself to go past. Whatever impulse had driven him there was spent, but he knew now where he should go.
    By the time he’d crossed under the river and climbed halfway up the hill in Greenwich, he was sweating. He entered Emerald Crescent from the bottom end, slowing his steps as his sense of unreality deepened. The lane had the peculiar Sunday morning sort of quietness that spoke of families sleeping in or lazing over coffee and newspapers; birdsong swelled from the hedges, and death seemed an impossibility.
    As he neared the top of the lane, the land rose sharply on the left