Looking Good Dead

yes.’
    Then the man hung up.

18
    The remains of the dead woman lay on a steel trolley in the sterile post-mortem room, bagged in translucent plastic like frozen produce from a supermarket.
    The torso was wrapped in one sheet; the two legs and the hand that had been recovered from the field of rape were each parcelled separately. The hand was in a small bag, and there was a separate bag tied over each of the feet – this was done to protect any fibres or skin or soil particles that might be lodged under the nails. Then one large sheet had been wrapped around everything.
    It was this outer plastic sheet that Dr Frazer Theobald was very carefully removing, painstakingly checking for anything, however microscopic, that might have fallen from the dead woman’s skin or hair, which could have come from her killer.
    Grace had been to this place more times than he cared to remember. The first time had been some twenty years back, when he was a rookie cop attending his first post-mortem. He could still recall it vividly, seeing a sixty-year-old man who had fallen off a ladder, laid out stark naked, devoid of all human dignity with two tags bearing his name – one buff and one green – hanging from his big toe.
    When the mortician had cut around the back of the scalp, just beneath the hairline, then had peeled it forward so that it hung down over the face, exposing the skull, and the pathologist, wielding a rotary bandsaw, began to grind into the top of the skull, Grace had done what more than a few rookie cops do, which was to turn a horrible shade of green, stagger out to the toilet and throw up.
    He didn’t throw up any more, but the whole place still weirded him every time he came here. In part it was the reek of Trigene disinfectant that you carried away with you, in every pore of your skin, for hours after you had left the building; in part the diffused light that came in through the opaque windows, giving this room an ethereal quality. Andthen there was always the sense that the mortuary was a depot, a repository, a brutal halfway house between dying and resting in peace.
    Bodies were kept here until the cause of death was ascertained, and in some cases until they had been formally identified, then they would be released to an undertaker under the directions of relatives. Occasionally bodies were never identified. There was one, of an elderly man, in a fridge in the back storage room, which had been there for nearly a year. He had been found dead on a park bench, but no one had claimed him.
    Grace wondered sometimes, in his darker moments, if that might happen to him one day. He had no wife, no kids, no parents – just his sister, and if he outlived her? But he never dwelt on that too much – he had enough problems just with living – although he did think about death a lot. Particularly in here. Sometimes, staring at a body on a trolley or at the freezer locker doors, a chill would seep deep through his veins as he wondered how many ghosts this building contained.
    Cleo Morey, the Chief Mortician or Senior Pathology Technician, to give her her formal title, helped Dr Theobald lift the large outer sheet away and then carefully folded it for storage; it would be sent to a forensics laboratory if the body yielded no clues. Grace let his eyes linger on her for some moments. Even in her working clothes she looked strikingly beautiful, he thought, a view shared by everyone who met her.
    Then the Home Office pathologist unwrapped the torso and began the laborious task of measuring and recording the dimensions of each of the thirty-four stab wounds.
    The flesh looked paler than yesterday, and although much of it, including the dead woman’s breasts, was lacerated into strips of crimson pulp, he could see the first signs of marbling starting to occur.
    The room was dominated by two steel post-mortem tables, one fixed, the other, on which the remains of the woman lay, on castors. There was a blue hydraulic hoist and a row of fridges with floor-to-ceiling doors. The walls were tiled in grey and a drain gully ran all the way round. Along one wall was a row of sinks and a coiled yellow hose. Along another was a wide work surface, a metal cutting board and a glass-fronted display cabinet filled with instruments, some packs ofDuracell batteries and grisly souvenirs that no one else wanted – mostly pacemakers – removed from victims.
    Next to this was a wallchart itemizing the name of the deceased, with columns for the