Chapter One

The zip of the body bag parted to reveal Cassie’s first customer of the day. The woman’s half-open eyes, a surprisingly vivid blue, gazed up at her, unseeing.

‘Hello there, Mrs Connery.’ Her voice became gentler than the one she used with the living. ‘My name’s Cassie Raven and I’ll be looking after you while you’re with us.’ She had no doubt that the dead woman could hear her and hoped she took some comfort from the words.

The previous evening Kate Connery had collapsed while getting ready for bed and died, there on her bathroom floor one week short of her fiftieth birthday. Laughter lines latticed her open, no-nonsense face beneath hair too uniformly brunette to be natural.

Cassie glanced up at the clock and swore. There was a new pathologist coming in to do the day’s post-mortem list and with Carl, the junior technician, off sick and three bodies to prep, it was shaping up to be the Monday from hell.

Still, she took her time working Mrs C’s nightdress up over her head, registering the faint ammoniac smell of sweat or urine, before carefully folding it away in a plastic bag. The things somebody had been wearing when they died meant a lot to their loved ones, sometimes more than the body itself, which grieving relatives could struggle to relate to. A dead body could feel like an empty suitcase.

‘We need to find out what happened to you, Mrs C,’ Cassie told her. ‘So that we can get Declan and your boys some answers.’

From her first day in the mortuary five years ago it had felt totally natural to talk to the bodies in her care, to treat them as if they were still alive – still people. Occasionally they would even answer.

It wasn’t like a live person talking – for a start, their lips didn’t move – and the experience was always so fleeting that she might almost have imagined it. Almost. Usually they said something like ‘Where am I?’ or ‘What happened?’ – simple bewilderment at finding themselves in this strange place – but now and again she was convinced that their words contained a clue to how they’d died.

Cassie had never told a living soul about these ‘conversations’; people thought she was weird enough already. But they didn’t know what she knew deep in her gut: the dead could talk – if only you knew how to listen.

The only outward sign of anything wrong with Mrs Connery was a few red blotches on her cheeks and forehead and a fist-sized bruise on her sternum where either her husband or the paramedics had administered desperate CPR. Cassie looked through the notes. After a night out at the pub watching football, Declan Connery had come home to find his wife unconscious. An ambulance rushed her to the hospital, but she was declared dead on arrival.

Since Kate Connery had died unexpectedly – she’d apparently been in good health and hadn’t seen her GP for months – a basic or ‘routine’ post-mortem to establish the cause of death was an automatic requirement.

Cassie put her hand on Mrs C’s fridge-cold forearm and waited for her own warmth to expel the chill. ‘Can you tell me what happened?’ she murmured.

For a few seconds, nothing. Then she felt the familiar slip-sliding sensation, followed by a distracted dreaminess. At the same time, her senses became hyper-alert – the hum of the body-store fridge growing to a jet-engine roar, the overhead light suddenly achingly bright.

The air above Mrs Connery’s body seemed to fizz with the last spark of the electricity that had animated her for five decades. And out of the static Cassie heard a low, hoarse whisper.

‘I can’t breathe!’