Cassie had ignored Doug’s injunction to take the rest of the day off. With the deterioration of Green-Eyes’ body still nagging at her, she’d called out a refrigeration engineer to check the body store was working properly.
When she pulled out one of the drawers, the engineer, a young guy called Sufian, physically recoiled at the sight of the white-shrouded body inside.
‘Come on, then,’ she said, eyeing his aghast expression. ‘You just gave me a lecture about opening the drawers for as short a time as possible.’
He hastily stuck a digital thermometer on the inside wall of the fridge before pulling his hand out and wiping it on his overalls.
‘First mortuary visit?’ she asked, re-closing the drawer.
He nodded. ‘I usually do food cold stores, supermarket fridges, that kind of thing.’
They moved up the fridge and he repeated the thermometer placement.
After the third, Sufian had recovered his composure. ‘Working with dead bodies is a funny job for a girl, isn’t it?’ he asked her.
Cassie was so weary of this question that she had to check a momentary but shocking impulse to slap him.
‘Not really,’ she said. ‘Caring for the dead has always fallen to women traditionally. Not that long ago the female relatives would wash the body, put pennies on the eyes to stop them opening, plug the body’s orifices to prevent leakage . . .’ Seeing the growing look of horror on his face she relented. ‘So . . . do you think there’s a problem with the fridge?’
He grasped gratefully at this change of subject. ‘Nothing obvious. The compressors are clean and the vents are clear. If these readings are too high then I’ll run a check on the thermostat.’ He nodded to the digital temperature display, showing 3.6 °C. ‘What made you think the indicator might be wrong anyway?’
Because a supposedly fresh corpse is starting to smell like kimchi, she thought. Pulling a wry smile, she said, ‘I wouldn’t ask if I were you.’
*
Half an hour later, Sufian came to find her. ‘It’s all working fine, no hotspots,’ he told her, pulling on his jacket as she signed the paperwork. ‘You’ve got one door seal coming loose that’ll need replacing at the next service but that’s it.’ Grabbing the paperwork from her hands, he sent her a nervous smile and scuttled off, probably keen to avert any more talk about plugging orifices.
By the time she’d caught up on her admin it was gone seven and she was alone in the mortuary. Dusk was turning the sky through the windows cobalt blue as she performed a final circuit of the empty mortuary: her evening ritual.
If it wasn’t a faulty fridge making Green-Eyes decompose faster than expected, he must have been in the water longer than she’d originally thought. She ought to call Flyte to tell her that he might have gone in earlier than Curzon’s estimate, although it felt like an enormous effort.
In the body store, as she reached up to turn off the lights, her eye fell on the drawer containing Green-Eyes, the words ‘Unknown Male’ written there in marker pen, and she noticed it was open a crack. Had Sufian failed to close it properly?
She saw her hand reach for the handle of the drawer as if in slow motion. A crackling hum filled the air, and she found herself slip-sliding, helter-skelter, into the dreamlike state she hadn’t experienced in months. The burble of the giant fridge had grown to a rushing roar, and the suddenly fierce light made her narrow her eyes.
After unzipping the body bag to reveal Green-Eyes’ face, she bent her head towards his pale-blue lips, like a priest hearing confession and murmured, ‘Is there something you want to tell me?’
Silence, and then a hoarse and plaintive whisper.
‘Cold. So cold.’