Not Dead Enough

estimating the time of death. It was an inexact science, subject to weather conditions and a raft of other factors, and one that got harder the longer it took to retrieve the body. Counting the stages of the life cycle of certain insects was one, unpleasant, very rough guide. And Walter Hordern had been boning up on that on a forensic medical site he had found on the internet.
    Then, just a couple of hours ago she’d had a distraught phone call from her sister, Charlie, of whom she was hugely fond, saying she had just been dumped by her boyfriend of over six months. At twenty-seven, Charlie was two and a half years younger than she was. Pretty and tempestuous, she always went for the wrong men.
    Like herself, she realized, more sadly than bitterly. Thirty in October. Her best friend, Millie – Mad Millie , she used to be called when they were teenage rebels at Roedean School – had now settled into landed life with a former naval officer who’d made a fortune in the conference business, and was expecting her second child. Cleo was a godmother to the first, Jessica, as well as to two other children of old schoolfriends. It was starting to feel as if this was her destiny in life. The godmother with the strange job who wasn’t capable of doing anything normal , not even holding down a normal relationship.
    Like Richard, the barrister she’d fallen madly in love with after he had come to the mortuary to view a body in a murder case he was defending. It wasn’t until after they’d got engaged, two years later, that he’d sprung the big surprise on her. He had found God. And that became a problem.
    At first she’d thought it was something she could deal with. But after attending a number of charismatic church services in which people had fallen to the ground, struck with the Holy Spirit, she had begun to realize she was never going to be able to connect with this. She had seen too much unfair death. Too many children. Too many bodies of young, lovely people, smashed up or, worse, incinerated in car accidents. Or dead from drug overdoses, deliberate or accidental. Or decent, middle-aged men and women who had died in their kitchens, falling off chairs or plugging in appliances. Or gentle elderly folk crushed by buses when crossing the road or struck down by heart attacks or strokes.
    She watched the news avidly. Saw items about young women in African countries who had been gang-raped, then had knives inserted up their vaginas, or revolvers, which had then been fired. And, she was sorry, she had told Richard, she just could not buy into a loving God who let all this shit happen.
    His response had been to take her hand and enjoin her to pray to God to help her understand His will .
    When that hadn’t worked, Richard had stalked her fervently, relentlessly, bombarding her alternately with love and then hate.
    Then Roy Grace, a man she had long considered a truly decent human being, as well as extremely attractive, had suddenly, this summer, become a part of her life. She even had, perhaps naïvely, started to believe that they were true soul mates. Until this morning, when she had realized that she was nothing more than a temporary substitute for a ghost. That was all she could ever be in this relationship.
    All the sections of today’s Times and Guardian lay spread out on the sofa beside her, mostly unread. She kept trying to settle down to work on her Open University course, but was unable to concentrate. Nor could she get into her new book, a Margaret Atwood novel, The Hand-maid’s Tale , which she had wanted to read for years and had finally bought this afternoon from her favourite bookshop in Hove, City Books. She had read and re-read the first page four times, but could not engage with the words.
    Reluctantly, because she hated squandering time – and considered most television just that – she picked up the remote and began to surf through the Sky channels. She checked out the Discovery channel, hoping there was maybe a wildlife documentary, but some fossilized-looking professor was pontificating on the Earth’s strata. Interesting, but not tonight, Josephine.
    Now her phone was ringing again. She looked at the caller display. The number was withheld. Almost certainly business. She answered it.
    It was an operator at the police call centre in Brighton. A body had been washed up on the beach, near the West Pier. She was required to accompany it to the mortuary.
    Hanging up, she did a quick calculation.