Looking Good Dead

swinging, incongruously pretty, against the green apron strap around her neck. ‘Maybe it’s just common to big, bald gorillas.’ He gave him another friendly pat.
    Then he dialled Nick from the landline phone on the work surface beside him. The new digital phones the police were being issued with scrambled all conversations, but at present their conventional mobile phones were simple to eavesdrop on, so he avoided using them on anything sensitive.
    ‘She got cold feet about the wedding,’ Nick Nicholl explained. ‘Did a runner. Now she’s come back very contrite.’
    ‘Sweet,’ Grace said sarcastically. ‘I’ll tell Glenn. He loves a good weepie with a happy ending.’
    Silence down the phone. DC Nick Nicholl possessed a good brain but a sense of humour bypass.
    They ran through the remaining shortlist of missing women who fitted the description, and Grace told Nicholl to make sure the police had something that DNA could be extracted from, from each of the four women. Nicholl updated him on the state of the continuing inch-by-inch grid search of the area surrounding where the body had been found, for the girl’s head and left hand. Privately, Grace did not expect them to turn up. The hand possibly, because a dog or a fox might have run off with it. But he doubted they would ever find the head.
    He made another quick call, to check on the progress of the trial of Suresh Hossain – a case which had become very personal to him. It was a difficult case; the Crown Prosecution Service had made some blunders, and he hadn’t handled it as well as he should have done. He’d been stupid in taking a piece of evidence, a shoe belonging to the murdered man, to a medium. The defence counsel had found out about it and humiliated him in court.
    Dr Frazer Theobald was making his usual slow but thorough progress. His examination of the dead woman’s stomach indicated shehad not eaten in the immediate hours before she was killed, which would give some help in gauging when she might have died – early in the evening rather than late, if she had not had an evening meal. There was no smell of alcohol either – which would have been present after just a couple of drinks – which meant it was unlikely although not impossible that she had been to a bar.
    Shortly after half past twelve, when Grace stepped away again, this time to call Dennis Ponds to check on the 2 p.m. press conference, Glenn Branson walked over to him, looking uncharacteristically shaken and bilious.
    ‘You’d better come and look at this, Roy.’
    Grace killed the call he was about to make and followed him across the room. Everyone was standing around the table in what looked to him like shocked silence. As he approached he could smell the vile stench of excrement and bowel gases.
    The woman’s torso had been opened up, her ribcage was exposed and he could see that her heart, lungs and the rest of her vital organs had been removed, and lay waiting to be bagged and put back inside her chest when the post-mortem was finished, leaving an empty carcass.
    On the metal-edged dissecting tray, raised some inches above her, was a length of pale brown tube which looked like a long sausage. It was about an inch in diameter, lying in a mess of blood, excrement and mucus. Dr Theobald had made an incision in it, which he was holding open with forceps for everyone’s benefit.
    The pathologist turned to him, his moustachioed face even more serious than usual. Then he pointed. ‘I think you should take a look at that, Roy.’
    Anatomy had never been Grace’s strong point, and sometimes when peering at the organs of a cadaver it took him some time to orient himself and figure out what was what. He looked down, trying to work out what this might be. Part of the intestines, he thought. Then, as he was looking, Dr Theobald used the forceps to open the incision he had made further, and now Grace could see something in there.
    Something that everyone else in the room had already seen.
    Something that made him stare, for some moments, in complete, mind-boggled shock.

    Then he took an involuntary step back as if he wanted to get away from it.
    ‘Jesus,’ he said, closing his eyes for an instant, feeling the blood draining from his head. His stomach was boiling in shock and revulsion.
    ‘OhmyGod.’

19
    It was a shiny, fat, black beetle, two inches long, with spiny feet and a ribbed back, and it had a single curved horn protruding from its head.
    Frazer Theobald