Thomas kissed her cheek at reception then introduced her to Emilia from forensics. Emilia was pretty, slight build, blonde ponytail, mid-thirties, and Dorothy had a flash of envy at her youth.
Dorothy took Thomas’s hand. ‘Listen, Hannah’s upstairs, she says Craig broke into her flat.’
‘Is she OK?’
‘She’s fine, just a little shaken. She wasn’t in at the time. Can you speak to her?’
‘Sure.’
Dorothy looked up the stairs, then at the bag hanging from her hand.
‘Maybe give her a few minutes to calm down, she’s not going anywhere. We should do the foot first.’
‘Is that it?’ Thomas said looking at the bag.
Dorothy nodded to the back of the building. ‘Let’s go to the embalming room.’
She led them to the separate part of the Skelf premises. Out front were lilies and oak furniture, viewing rooms and the chapel, plush carpet and boxes of tissues. Down the corridor and through the door was the business side, embalming room and body fridges, the coffin workshop and storage, gurneys corralled outside the garage where the hearse and body van were parked.
Dorothy felt the cold of the air con as she entered the embalming room, saw Archie over the body of Mrs Raven, an elderly client who passed peacefully in her sleep after a very short spell with cancer. Dorothy wished all their clients met death so benignly, but the truth was very different. So many painful, drawn out and undignified ways to go – dementia, motor neurone, Parkinson’s – it was hard not to wish for a sharp and simple end.
Archie looked up from Mrs Raven and nodded. The embalming pump was throbbing away, pushing artificial life into her veins. Mrs Raven was only five years older than Dorothy, which made her swallow.
‘Can you join us?’ Dorothy said.
Archie checked the pump gauges then met them at the other metallic body table. He was the same age as Jenny but seemed older, bald, a full but neat beard, stocky and reserved. He seemed to have coped well with his own mother dying last year. It hadn’t exacerbated his Cotard’s Syndrome, he’d been balanced and engaged thanks to the meds and Dorothy was thankful for that. He was the vital engine room of the business and she couldn’t do without him.
Dorothy put the bag on the table. It seemed too small. She glanced at the table’s drainage slats, thought about fluids draining away. She looked at the six body fridges, each with a magnetic whiteboard on the door carrying the details of the person inside. It was a business, of course, but more than that.
Emilia opened a small case and pulled on blue nitrile gloves, untied the bag and pushed the sides of it down to reveal the foot. Dorothy caught a whiff of a cheap scent, recognised it as the stuff they sprayed on the bags to hide the shit stink. There was no smell from the foot except for a slight grassy earthiness.
Emilia looked at the row of body fridges.
‘Before you say anything,’ Archie said, ‘it’s not one of ours.’
The first thing they’d done when Archie came into work was check all the bodies in the fridges, just in case. Archie had assured her it wasn’t possible, and of course he was right.
Dorothy glanced at Mrs Raven’s bare feet, smaller but wider than the one on their table. She looked back at their foot, saw that the second toe was longer than the big one. Wasn’t that supposed to mean something? It was a left foot, and Dorothy wondered for the hundredth time that day where the right one was.
Emilia picked it up, fingertips pressed against the heel and toes, and turned it over in her hands.
‘Female, size seven, I think. From the skin elasticity I’d say elderly. We can get a clearer idea after tests back at the lab.’
She ran a finger along the sole and Dorothy felt her toes cramp as the ball of her own foot twitched away from an imagined touch. She wondered if Archie felt this when he dealt with the hundreds of corpses that pass through this room.
Emilia ran another hand over the top of the foot, across the bridge towards the ankle. ‘It’s been embalmed.’
‘Interesting,’ Thomas said.
‘Is it?’ Dorothy said.
‘Well, that has implications.’
‘Like that it’s not murder.’
‘Not necessarily.’ Thomas ran a finger along his chin.
Dorothy watched him and felt a trill in her stomach. He was handsome and trim for a man in his fifties, buzz cut and salt-and-pepper beard. He had a hard-earned confidence from years being a Swedish black man in the Scottish police, but he wore that confidence lightly. She thought about his hands running along her bare arm in bed, down her side, across her bum and down her thigh. She’d asked him out for a kind-of date a year ago and they took it slow. They were both widowed, had known each other’s partners, her husband of fifty years, his wife of thirty. Those ghosts haunted them all the way, but the trick was to make peace with your ghost, don’t let it tell you who to kiss or touch or make love to. She and Thomas had been sleeping together for a few months. It began as the simple pleasure of a man touching her body, a solid presence in her bed, then more, much more. He felt like home to her now. She’d allowed herself to be loved and opened up to him. Love wasn’t grand gestures and fireworks moments, it was walking to the bakery together, sharing breakfast in the morning, lifting a stray hair from the other person’s pullover without a second thought.
‘It doesn’t make much sense if she was murdered, for her then to be embalmed,’ Emilia said.
Thomas nodded at Dorothy. ‘Finding a foot in Bruntsfield Links doesn’t make much sense.’
Dorothy smiled. ‘True.’
Forensics were out there checking, but Dorothy had already looked where Einstein emerged from the trees, there wasn’t anything there, just a small clump of trees, a coffee box and a public toilet.
Dorothy heard a rhythmic thump and crack from the top of the house and she checked her watch. Emilia looked at her, the other two had been around long enough to know.
‘It’s Abi,’ Dorothy said. ‘Practising drums. She lives with us.’
Emilia looked confused but Dorothy shrugged, it was too much to explain. The drums rumbled in the background, Abi was letting off steam.
‘Can I?’ Archie said, holding his hands out, still in his blue gloves.
Emilia checked with Thomas then handed the foot over.
Archie pushed at the bridge then the arch, separated the toes and ran his hands around the heel. ‘It’s a shit job.’
‘What?’ Emilia said.
‘It’s a terrible embalming job. If my loved one came back like this I’d ask for a refund. Not drained properly, cheap fluid, shoddy workmanship.’
Thomas narrowed his eyes. ‘Could you identify where it was done?’
Archie sucked his teeth. ‘I can ask around.’
Emilia took the foot back. ‘Obviously we’ll get a DNA sample back at the lab. Plus maybe we can get an idea of what killed her.’
Archie looked at Thomas, then Dorothy, then back at the foot.
‘Well, of course there are the bite marks.’ He reached out and touched the ragged ankle, loose flaps of skin, pale bone sticking out from the spongy flesh. ‘This looks like it’s been chewed.’
‘By what?’ Thomas said.
Dorothy shook her head. ‘I didn’t see Einstein at it.’
Archie shrugged. ‘Then it must’ve been something else.’
‘Or someone else,’ Emilia said.