At work, after changing into scrubs, Cassie headed into the autopsy suite where her fellow APT Jason was already prepping one of their guests for the post-mortem list. That meant the pathologist had already done his external examination of the body and would be on the clean side checking his emails. Was Archie doing the list today? She couldn’t ask Jason – for the last few months she and Archie Cuff had been occasional lovers/boyfriend–girlfriend/friends with benefits . . . ? – she wasn’t really sure what to call it, but they had agreed to keep work colleagues in the dark about their affair.
Going over to Jason’s autopsy station she saw the body of a middle-aged woman, who was already open from the suprasternal notch at the base of the throat to the pubis, her ribs butterflied to expose her heart and lungs. From the central line still taped in place under her right collarbone – all catheters and cannulas were left in situ for the PM – she’d clearly died in the hospital, to which the mortuary was linked by an underground walkway.
‘You don’t get many of them to the pound,’ said Jason, with a nod and a sly grin.
There was no mistaking his meaning: either side of the midline incision the woman’s breasts stood unnaturally upright, like upended flowerpots. Cassie could see the tell-tale silvery scars, several years old, under each breast where she’d had silicone implants inserted. As the senior technician she could tear Jason off a strip, remind him of their duty to treat their guests with respect, but he was fifty-one, and she knew it couldn’t be easy for him, taking orders from someone half his age.
In any case, since Cassie’s bond with the dead had deserted her, she had to admit to feeling less emotionally invested in her work. Her old conviction that she’d been able to pick up the last thoughts of her ‘guests’ hanging in the air like unspent electrical activity seemed like a child’s fairy tale. It was obvious to her now that her occasional insights into why someone had died had just been a matter of clues she’d picked up either from the bodies or from her dealings with their loved ones.
She watched Jason fitting a new scalpel blade, whistling along to a cheesy track on the radio. He had once summed up their job for her in three brutal words: ‘cut and shut’. Maybe she would end up a cynical old lag like him, treating the bodies like cars on an assembly line.
‘Have you made a note of the augmentation?’ she asked. Although vanishingly unlikely to have contributed to her death, the lady’s breast implant surgery should still be recorded.
Jason nodded towards the body chart on his bench. It was pre-printed with two basic outlines of a body – front and back view – which the technicians marked up to alert the pathologist to anything out of the ordinary. Usually, the location of the implants would have been marked with a simple cross in the chest area but instead Jason had added comically outsized breasts.
Twat.
‘Do it again, Jason. Minus the hilarious artwork,’ she snapped, unable to conceal her irritation this time. ‘So, what is this lady’s story?’
‘Came into A&E with a bad headache, kicked the bucket a couple of hours later.’
Shrugging, he leaned against the body and started filleting out the neck structures, blood frothing out of the severed jugular vein. ‘I’d put a tenner on a stroke.’
Although Cassie no longer got the same buzz she once had from looking after the dead, she still felt a duty to those left behind to find answers.
‘Can I see her notes?’ she asked.
Jason heaved the viscera into a waiting pail. ‘Do what you like, I’m going for a smoke.’
The hospital notes said that forty-seven-year-old Becka Bennett had been brought in by her husband Dan at 11.30 the previous night with a severe headache which she had reported as a nine on the pain scale. The red flag was muscular weakness down her left side – a classic sign of stroke. Becka had contrast medium injected prior to an MRI scan of her head – which explained the line in her subclavian vein – but before they’d even got her into the scanner her heart had stopped. With no detectable rhythm there was no point in defibrillating her, and repeated 1 ml doses of adrenaline hadn’t brought her back. Ten minutes later, Becka Bennett was declared dead. Since she’d previously been in good health and her death was unexplained, the coroner’s office had ordered a routine – i.e. a non-forensic – post-mortem.
The death left Dan Bennett a widower and their two teenage daughters motherless. What must it be like to bring your wife in with a bad headache and an hour later watch her flatline and die despite the frantic efforts of a team of medics?
Cassie noticed the little dancing dolphin tattooed on her left hip. ‘Hi, Becka,’ she murmured. ‘I’m going to get you ready for the doctor so that we can find out what happened to you.’
Nowadays, speaking to the guests was just habit, a reflex: it had been months since she’d experienced the slide into dreaminess, the hyper-heightened senses, the fizz of static in the air that used to foreshadow her moments of communion with the dead.
Putting her hand on Becka’s fridge-cold arm, Cassie closed her eyes, straining to feel something.
Nada.
She turned away. Each failure to connect left her feeling a little more hollow inside.
A loud rapping made her jump, pitching her back to the sound of Green-Eyes’ skull knocking against her hull. Looking up, she saw the wide cheekbones of DS Phyllida Flyte through the wired glass of the door to the clean side, wearing her default look of borderline impatience.
Great. That was all she needed.
They exchanged greetings, not quite making eye contact. They’d spent a lot of time together during two murder investigations – including the two-decades-old killing of Cassie’s own mum, which had found the real perpetrator and absolved her dad of the crime. Yet still there was this awkward vibe between them: the air of something . . . unresolved.
‘How’s it going with your dad’s appeal?’ asked Flyte. Cassie always forgot how extraordinary her eyes were: ice blue with a darker limbal ring. Like an Arctic fox. She had ditched her go-to pale-pink lipstick in favour a nude matt tone that offset her pale Scandi colouring and wheat-blonde hair, which these days she wore in a choppy bob.
‘The hearing should be pretty soon.’ Cassie managed a smile. ‘The brief says it’s a formality – the conviction will be set aside.’
‘I’m pleased for you.’ Another pause and then her tone returned to its usual brisk, no-nonsense setting. ‘Right. I’m here to see the unidentified male pulled out of the canal, to get some photographs for the local paper and mispers database. I hear you were the one to find him?’
‘Yeah. Like I don’t get enough bodies in the day job.’
Cassie led the way to the body store, struggling with the emotions that Flyte could stir in her. The uptight cop was her polar opposite, but whenever they met Cassie felt the buzz of something intriguing – unfathomable – about her that she had to confess she found appealing. And now and again during their encounters she’d felt that the attraction, although unspoken, might be mutual.
Anyway, it was all academic. Cassie couldn’t imagine dating a cop, and Phyllida Flyte was clearly so deep in the closet she could see Narnia.
Cassie pulled out drawer number six of the giant fridge that occupied the whole of one wall. It took more effort than it should do, sticking on its rollers, but then the whole unit was past its sell-by date. Her manager Doug knew about it, but his application for a new refrigeration system had twice been rejected. Budget cuts.
The ID tag on the side of the white body bag said simply ‘Unknown male’, a reference number, and the date and location on the Regent’s Canal where he’d been found.
Cassie unzipped the bag down to his chest and Flyte pulled out her phone. ‘The officers who attended reported no signs of injury, but said he had no wallet or phone on him?’ she said, taking a close-up of his face.
‘They’re probably at the bottom of the canal.’ Cassie shrugged. ‘The button fly on his jeans was partly undone, so he probably had a skinful, went to take a leak in the canal and lost his balance. We get a few of these a year. The water’s cold at night and if he was drunk . . .’
They fell silent for a moment. The last time they’d stood together over a body recovered from the canal had been the previous winter – and the victim had been the closest Cassie had to a best friend. No hard evidence of foul play had ever been found but Cassie knew he’d been killed in the course of helping her investigate her mother’s murder. After his funeral she’d buried the whole episode in a lead-lined mental box, so it was a relief when Flyte didn’t drag it all up.
‘What was he wearing?’ Flyte asked. ‘It might help identify him.’
Cassie read from the property inventory. ‘Massimo Dutti puffer jacket, Reiss top, Diesel jeans, Nike Air trainers.’
Flyte raised her eyebrows. ‘Upmarket labels.’
Cassie shrugged. ‘I suppose so.’
Flyte was staring intently at the guy’s face. ‘What colour are his eyes? For the description.’
Cassie pictured the guy’s perplexed stare after he was pulled out of the canal. ‘A kind of goldish-green.’
‘Any tattoos or birthmarks?’
‘Nope.’ Cassie glanced at the clock; she didn’t have time for this. ‘Look are we done here? I’ve got two customers to eviscerate next door.’
Flyte ignored her, still staring at the guy’s face. ‘How long do you think he’s been dead?’
‘I don’t know!’ Cassie burst out. ‘I’m not a pathologist.’
Flyte glared at her. ‘Don’t you care about finding out who this poor chap was? Letting his family know as soon as possible?’
Cassie felt a jolt of guilt. ‘Sure I do,’ she snapped. ‘But I forgot to bring my Ouija board in today. If you’re that interested I suggest you come back for the PM on Monday.’ Knowing that a detective would rarely – if ever – attend the post-mortem on a non-suspicious death.
‘I might just do that,’ retorted Flyte.