Not Dead Enough

than her previous one. She left a message.
    Then she wandered aimlessly around the station concourse for some minutes, before walking out into the bright sunlight. She didn’t feel like going to her flat – she didn’t really know what she wanted to do. A steady stream of sunburned people were heading up the street towards the station, many of them in T-shirts, singlets or gaudy shirts and shorts, lugging beach bags, looking like trippers who had spent the day here and were now heading home. A lanky man, in jeans cut off at the knees, swung a massive radio blaring out rap, his face and arms the colour of a broiled lobster. The city felt in holiday mood. It was about as far from her own mood as Jupiter.
    Suddenly her phone rang again. For an instant, her spirits rose, hoping it was Brian. Then she saw Holly’s name on the display. She hit the answer button. ‘Hi.’
    Holly’s voice was mostly drowned out by a continuous, banshee howl. She was in the hairdresser’s, she informed her friend, under the drier. After a couple of minutes trying to explain what had happened, Sophie gave up and suggested they speak later. Holly promised to call her back as soon as she was out of the salon.
    The man in the hoodie was following her at a safe distance, holding his red plastic bag and sucking the back of his free hand. It was nice to be back down here at the seaside, out of the filthy air of London. He hoped Sophie would head down to the beach; it would be pleasant to sit there, maybe eat an ice cream. It would be a good way of passing the time, of spending a few of those millions of hours he had sitting on deposit in his bank.
    As he walked, he thought about the purchase he had made at lunchtime today and jiggled it in his bag. In the zippered pockets of his top, in addition to his wallet and his mobile phone, he carried a roll of duct tape, a knife, chloroform, a vial of the knockout, so-called date rape drug, Rohypnol. And a few other bits and pieces – you could never tell when they might come in handy…
    Tonight would be a very good night. Again.

23
    Cleo’s skills really came into their own when, shortly after five p.m., Nadiuska De Sancha finally finished the postmortem on Katie Bishop.
    Using a large soup ladle, Cleo removed the blood that had drained into Katie’s midriff, spoonful by spoonful, pouring it into the gully below. The blood would run into a holding tank beneath the building, where chemicals would slowly break it down, before it passed into the city’s main drainage system.
    After that, as Nadiuska leaned on the work surface, dictating her summary, then in turn filling in the Autopsy sheet, the Histology sheet and the Cause of Death sheet, Darren handed Cleo a plain white plastic bag containing all the vital organs that had been removed from the cadaver and weighed on the scales. Grace watched, with the same morbid fascination he had each time, as Cleo inserted the bag into Katie’s midriff, as if she were stuffing giblets into a chicken.
    He watched with the shadow of the phone call about Sandy hanging heavily over him. Thinking. He needed to call Dick Pope back, quiz him more, about exactly when he had seen Sandy, which table she had been at, whether he had talked to the staff, whether she had been alone or with anyone.
    Munich . The city had always had a resonance for him, partly because of Sandy’s family connections, and partly because it was a city that was constantly, in one way or another, in the world’s consciousness. The Oktoberfest, the World Cup football stadium, it was the home of BMW, and, he seemed to remember, Adolf Hitler had lived there, before Berlin. All he wanted to do at this moment was jump on a plane and fly there. And he could just imagine how well that would go down with his boss, Alison Vosper, who was looking for any opportunity, however small, to twist the knife she had already stuck into him, and get rid of him.
    Darren then went out of the room and returned with a black garbage bag containing shredded council tax correspondence from Brighton and Hove City Council, removed a handful, and started to pack the paper into the dead woman’s empty skull cavity. Meanwhile, using a heavy-duty sailcloth needle and thread, Cleo began carefully but industrially to sew up the woman’s midriff.
    When she had finished, she hosed Katie down to remove all the blood streaks, and then began the most sensitive part of the procedure. With the greatest care, she was putting on