Looking Good Dead

weights of each brain, lungs, heart, liver, kidneys and spleen. All that was written on it so far was anon. woman .
    It was a sizeable room but it felt crowded this morning. In addition to the Home Office pathologist and the Chief Mortician, there was Darren, the Assistant Mortician, a sharp, good-looking and pleasant-natured lad of twenty with fashionably spiky black hair, Joe Tindall, the senior SOCO officer, who was photographing the ruler in position on each stab wound, Glenn Branson and himself.
    The visitors wore protective green gowns with white cuffs and either plastic overshoes or white wellington boots. The pathologist and the two morticians wore blue pyjamas and heavy-duty green aprons, and the pathologist had a mask hanging loosely below his chin. Grace looked at Cleo Morey, caught her eye, then the brief but very definite grin she gave him, and his nerves jangled.
    He felt like an excited kid. And it was wrong, it was unprofessional – every ounce of his concentration should be on this case right now – but he couldn’t help it. Cleo Morey was distracting him and that was a fact.
    They had already been out on a date just a few days ago. Well, it had been a date of sorts – a quick drink in a pub which got cut even shorter by a phone call calling him urgently back to work.
    God, she was gorgeous, he thought. And however many times he saw her, he could never quite square this young, leggy woman in her late twenties with her long blonde hair, English-rose face and quick brain, with working in this place, doing one of the grimmest jobs in the world. With her looks she could have been a model or an actress, and with her brains she could probably have had any career she set her mind to – and she had chosen this. Long hours on call day and night. At a moment’s notice she would get summoned to a riverbank, to a burned-out warehouse, to a shallow woodland grave to recover a body. To prepare the body for the pathologist to carry out the post-mortem, then to reassemble it as well as possible, no matter how burned or decomposed, for identification by relatives, and to offer them somesuccour, some glimpse of hope that their loved one’s death had not been quite as bad as the body indicated.
    As he watched Dr Theobald press a ruler against the fifth stab wound, right above the young woman’s belly button, he did not envy Cleo her task on this one. With luck, identification would be done by DNA, he thought; no parent should ever have to see this sight. Yet, he knew only too well just how important it was to some people to see for themselves. Often, despite all efforts to dissuade them, loved ones would insist on a viewing, just to see them one more time, to say goodbye.
    Closure.
    Something he’d never had. And that helped him to understand the need for it. Without closure you had no hope of moving on. Which was why he’d been stuck in a state of limbo since Sandy’s disappearance. There was a hot young medium coming to Brighton tomorrow, performing to just a small audience at a holistic health centre, and Grace had bought a ticket. It would probably turn out to be another blank, he knew, but the British and international police had exhausted every conventional avenue.
    Cleo shot him a glance, a warm, definitely flirty glance. Careful to check first that Branson wasn’t watching, he shot her back a wink.
    Christ, you are so gorgeous! he thought, heavy-hearted and feeling so damned guilty about Sandy. It was as if still, after all these years, he was being unfaithful to her by dating another woman.
    His mobile phone beeped, signalling a text message. He pulled it from his inside pocket and glanced at the display. It was from DC Nicholl back at the Major Incident Suite.
    Teresa Wallington eliminated.
    Immediately Grace sidled up to Branson and motioned him over to the rear of the room. ‘I think you need to work on your hunch technique,’ Grace said to him. Then he held up the phone for his colleague to read the message.
    ‘Shit. I had a feeling – like I really had a feeling about this,’ the Detective Sergeant said. He looked so despondent Grace felt sorry for him.
    Giving him a pat of encouragement, he said, ‘Glenn, in the movie Se7en Morgan Freeman had a hunch that didn’t turn out quite right either.’
    Glancing sideways at him, Branson said, ‘Are you implying this is some trait common to black cops?’
    ‘Nah, he’s an actor.’ Grace eyed Cleo again, watching her streaked blonde hair