Not Dead Yet

lifted. He could see, suited up, the stocky Crime Scene Manager David Green; three SOCOs including the burly, intensely serious Crime Scene Photographer James Gartrell; DS Simon Bates; the Duty Inspector Roy Apps, and the Coroner’s Officer Philip Keay.
    ‘Let’s rock and roll.’ Grace stepped on to the grid.
    ‘Not sure I feel much like dancing,’ Glenn Branson said.
    ‘So, you and the dead body have something in common.’

12
    The dead body was very definitely not dancing. Partly on account of the fact that it was embedded in several feet of chicken excrement, partly because its legs were missing, and partly because it had no hands or head, either. Which would have made co-ordination difficult. A cluster of blowflies buzzed around, and the stench of ammonia was almost overpowering.
    Glenn, close to retching, turned away. Grace stared down. Whoever had done this had little forensic awareness, and even less finesse. The headless, limbless torso, with desiccated flesh missing in patches, covered in excrement and crawling with flies and maggots, was barely recognizable as human. The skin, which appeared acid-scorched in the patches where it was visible, was a dark, leathery brown, giving it the air of a shop-window dummy that had been salvaged from a bonfire. The rank stench of a decaying body, all too familiar to Grace, rose all around him, making the air feel heavy and cloying. It was a smell that always accompanied you home, in your hair, on your clothes, in every pore of your skin. You could scrub yourself raw, but you’d still smell it again the next morning.
    The only person he never noticed it on was Cleo. But maybe Glenn was right, and in ten years’ time he would. He hoped not.
    ‘Coq au vin for dinner, Roy?’ the Crime Scene Manager greeted him, dressed in a white protective suit, with breathing apparatus, his mask temporarily raised.
    ‘Not if it does that to you, thanks!’
    Both men stared down into the space, four foot below the grid, at the torso. The first thought in Roy Grace’s mind was whether this was some kind of gangland killing. ‘So, what do we have so far?’
    In answer to his SIO, David Green picked up a sealed polythene evidence bag from the floor, with an air of pride, and held it up with a gloved hand.
    Grace peered inside. It contained two jagged pieces of badlysoiled fabric, with an ochre checked pattern just visible. What looked like parts of a man’s suit.
    ‘Where did you find these?’ Grace asked.
    ‘Close to the body. Looks like it might have been something he was wearing – for some reason the only parts that didn’t decompose or get taken by rats for a nest. Maybe we’ll find more when we start our fingertip search.’
    ‘ He? ’
    ‘One of the few bits that weren’t cut off, chief, if you get my drift.’
    Grace nodded, uncomfortably getting his drift.
    ‘Must have been a made-to-measure suit,’ Glenn Branson said.
    Grace and Green looked at him. ‘Can you tell that from the cut of the cloth?’ Grace asked.
    ‘No, chief.’ Branson nodded down at the remains and said, drily, ‘I’m imagining they would have had a bit of a problem finding something off-the-peg to fit him.’

13
    Inside the house, just like all Gaia’s homes, the floors looked like Italian marble. Just like the stone that had been imported slab by slab from the Fantiscritti quarry in Carrara that, historically, had supplied the Medicis with the marble for their palaces, and in more recent years, one of the Los Angeles landmarks, Hernando Courtright’s Beverly Wilshire Hotel.
    The walls were hung with Aztec artefacts and stage shots of Gaia. In pride of place, on the wall facing the sofa, was the signed monochrome photo of her with wild, just-out-of-bed hair, wearing a black negligee to promote her world tour. To the left, above one of the armchairs of the white leather three-piece suite, which was a clone of her one in LA, was another tour poster, also signed. In it she wore a green tank top and leather jeans. Gaia would have felt totally at home here! Okay, so maybe the rear aspect wasn’t as fine as in some of her residences. Gaia probably had a better view from her kitchen window than this one, an old woman’s smalls hanging on a washing line, and a disused breeze-block garage.
    Above the fireplace, with fake electric coals burning, was a blow-up of her idol’s lips, nose and eyes in green monochrome, captioned G AIA U P C LOSE AND P ERSONAL . Again, personally signed.
    One