The building in which they operated housed their diving equipment, including a large Zeppelin inflatable capable of carrying the entire team, a drying room and their lorry, which was equipped with everything from climbing to tunnelling apparatus. They were on permanent standby, 24/7.
Most of the space in Tania’s small, cluttered office was filled with filing cabinets, on the front of one of which was a massive yellow radiation-warning sticker. A whiteboard above her desk listed in blue and turquoise marker pen all immediate priorities. Beside it hung a calendar and a photograph of her four-year-old niece, Maddie. Her laptop, plastic lunch box, lamp, phone and piles of files and forms took up most of the space on her desk.
During the winter months it was permanently freezing cold in here, which was why she had her fleece jacket on. Despite the asthmatic wheezing of the blower heater at her feet, her fingers were so cold she was finding it hard to grip her ballpoint pen. It would feel warmer at the bottom of the English Channel, she thought.
She turned the page of the dive log, then made more notes on the form. Suddenly her phone rang, distracting her, and she answered it a little absently.
‘Sergeant Whitlock.’
Almost instantly she switched to full attention. It was Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, from HQ CID, and it was unlikely that he would be calling for a chat about the weather.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘How’s things?’
‘Fine, Roy,’ she said, transmitting more enthusiasm than she actually felt today.
‘Did I hear a rumour that you got married not long ago?’
‘In the summer,’ she said.
‘He’s a lucky guy!’
‘Thank you, Roy! I hope someone tells him! So – what can I do for you?’
‘I’m at Brighton mortuary – we’re doing a Home Office PM on a young male hauled up yesterday by the dredger,
Arco Dee
, about ten miles south of Shoreham Harbour.’
‘I know the
Arco Dee
– it operates mostly out of Shoreham and Newhaven.’
‘Yes. I think I’m going to need you guys to take a look and see if there’s anything else down there.’
‘What information can you give me?’
‘We have a pretty good fix on the position where they found it. The body was wrapped in plastic and weighted down. It could be a burial at sea, but I’m not sure about that.’
‘Presumably the
Arco Dee
hauled it up from a designated dredge area?’ she said, starting to make notes on her pad.
‘Yes.’
‘There’s a specific charted area for burials at sea. It’s possible a body could drift from there in the currents, but unlikely if it was a professional burial. Want me to come over?’
‘If you wouldn’t mind?’
‘I’ll be there in half an hour.’
‘Thanks.’
As she hung up, she grimaced. She’d been planning to leave early today to get home to cook her husband, Rob, a special meal tonight. He loved Thai food and she’d stopped and bought everything she needed on the way in – including some fresh prawns and a very plump sea bass. Rob, a pilot with British Airways long haul, was home tonight before going away again for nine days. By the sound of it, her plans had just headed out the window.
Her door opened and Steve Hargrave, nicknamed Gonzo, peered in. ‘Just wondered if you were busy, chief, or if you had a couple of minutes for a chat.’
She gave him an acidic smile that could have dissolved a steel girder in less time than it took for him to register her displeasure.
Raising a finger as he started retreating, he said, ‘Not a good moment, right?’
She continued smiling.
26
Who are you? Roy Grace wondered, staring down at the naked body of Unknown Male, who was laid out on his back on the stainless-steel table in the centre of the post-mortem room, beneath the cold glare of the overhead lights. Someone’s child. Maybe someone’s brother too. Who loves you? Who will be devastated by your death?
It was strange, he thought. This place used to give him the creeps every time he came here. But that had all changed when Cleo Morey arrived as the new Senior Anatomical Pathology Technician. Now he came here eagerly, at any opportunity. Even in her blue gown, green plastic apron and white rubber boots, Cleo still looked incredibly sexy.
Maybe he was just perverse, or perhaps it was true what they said about love blinding you.
It struck him that mortuaries shared something in common with lawyers’ offices. Not many people, other than their staff, came to mortuaries because they were happy. If you were an overnight guest here, it meant you were pretty seriously dead. If you were a visitor, it meant that someone you knew and loved had just died, suddenly, unexpectedly and quite often brutally.
Housed in a long, low, grey pebbledash-rendered bungalow, just off the Lewes Road gyratory system and adjoining the beautiful, hillside setting of Woodvale Cemetery, Brighton and Hove City Mortuary consisted of a covered receiving bay, an office, a multi-faith chapel, a glass-sided viewing room, two storage areas, recently refurbished with wider fridges to accommodate the increasing trend of obese cadavers, an isolation room for suspected deaths from AIDS and other contagious diseases, and the main post-mortem room, where they were now.
On the far side of the wall he heard the whine of an angle-grinder. Building work was going on to extend the mortuary.
The greyness of the day outside was grimly matched by the atmosphere in here. Grey light diffused through the opaque windows. Grey tiled walls. Brown and grey speckled tiles on the floor that were a close match to the colour of a dead human brain. Apart from the blue surgical gowns worn by everyone in here, and the green plastic aprons of the mortuary staff and the pathologist, the only colour in the whole room was the bright pink disinfectant in the upended plastic dispenser by the washbasin.
The post-mortem room reeked, permanently and unpleasantly, of Jeyes Fluid and Trigene disinfectant – sometimes compounded by the stomach-churning, freshly unblocked-drain stench that came from opened-up cadavers.
As always with a Home Office post-mortem, the room was crowded. In addition to himself, Nadiuska and Cleo, there were Darren Wallace, the Assistant Mortuary Technician, a young man of twenty-one who had started life as a butcher’s apprentice; Michael Forman, a serious, intense man in his mid-thirties, who was the Coroner’s Officer; James Gartrell, the burly forensic photographer; and a queasy-looking Glenn Branson, who was standing some distance back. Grace had observed several times in the past that, despite the Detective Sergeant’s big, tough frame, he always had a problem at post-mortems.
Unknown Male’s flesh was a waxy off-white. It was the colour Roy Grace had long associated with bodies in which the life forces had ceased, but on which decomposition had not yet begun to present, to the naked eye at least, its hideous processes. The winter weather and the cold of the seawater would have helped to delay the onset, but it was clear that Unknown Male had not been dead for long.
Nadiuska De Sancha, her red hair clipped up, tortoiseshell glasses perched on her finely sculpted nose, estimated that death had probably occurred four or five days ago – but she was not able to get closer than that. Nor was she able to establish, for the moment at any rate, the precise cause of death, largely on account of the fact that Unknown Male was short of most of his vital organs.
He was a good-looking young man, with close-cropped, downy black hair, a Roman nose and brown eyes that were fixed open. His body was lean and bony – but from undernourishment rather than exercise, Grace judged from the lack of muscle tone. His genitals were modestly covered by the fleshy triangle of skin from his sternum, which had been removed and placed there by Nadiuska, as if to afford him some dignity in death. The flesh of his chest and stomach, either side of the massive incision running down his midriff, was clamped back, revealing a startlingly hollow ribcage, with the intestines, like shiny, translucent rope, coiled beneath.
On the wall to their left was a chart for listing the weight of the brain, lungs, heart, liver, kidneys and spleen of each cadaver examined in here. There was a dash against each item, except for the brain, the only vital organ the cadaver still possessed, and very likely to be the only one that would go to his grave with him.
The pathologist removed his bladder, laid it on the metal dissecting tray, which was on raised legs above the cadaver’s thighs, then made one sharp incision to open it. She carefully bottled and sealed samples of the fluid that poured out, for tests.
‘What’s your assessment so far?’ Grace asked her.
‘Well,’ she said, in her exquisite broken English, ‘the cause of death is not absolute at this moment, Roy. There’s no petechial haemorrhaging to indicate suffocation or drowning, and with the absence of his lungs I can’t say for sure at this point if he was dead prior to immersion. But I think we can surmise, from the fact that his organs were removed, that was pretty likely.’
‘Not many surgeons operate underwater,’ Michael Forman quipped.
‘I don’t have much to go on from the stomach contents,’ she continued. ‘Most of it has been dissolved by the digestion process, although that slows post-mortem. But there are some particles of what looks like chicken, potato and broccoli – so that indicates he was capable of eating a proper meal in the hours preceding death. That is not really consistent with his absence of organs.’
‘In what way?’ Grace asked, conscious of the inquisitive eyes of the Coroner’s Officer and Glenn Branson.
‘Well,’ she said, and waved her scalpel down his opened midriff. ‘This is the kind of incision a surgeon would make if he was harvesting organs from a donor. All the internal organs have been surgically excised, by someone experienced. Consistent with this is the fact that the blood vessels have all been tied off with sutures before being cut through to remove the organs.’ She pointed. ‘The perinephric fat that would have been around the kidneys – the suet, if you are a cook – has been opened with a blade.’
Grace reminded himself not to eat suet for a long time to come.
‘So,’ Nadiuska continued, ‘all this would indicate that he was an organ donor. Now, what directs me even more towards this possibility is the presence of these external indications of medical intervention.’ She pointed again. ‘A needle mark in the back of the hand.’ She gestured at the neck. ‘A puncture mark.’ Then she pointed at the right elbow. ‘Another puncture mark in the antecubital fosse. These are consistent with the insertion of cannulae for drips and drugs.’
Then, taking a small torch, she gently levered open the dead man’s mouth with her gloved fingers and shone the beam in. ‘If you look closely you can see reddening and ulceration to the inside of the windpipe, just below the voice box, which would have been caused by the balloon inflated on the end of the endotracheal ventilator tube.’
Grace nodded. ‘But he ate a meal of solids – he couldn’t have done that with an endotracheal tube, right?’
‘Absolutely right, Roy,’ she said. ‘I don’t understand this.’
‘Perhaps he was an organ donor who was subsequently buried at sea, and then carried by currents away from the burial zone?’ Glenn Branson suggested.
The pathologist pursed her lips. ‘It’s a possibility. Yes,’ she concurred. ‘But the majority of organ donors tend to be on life support for a period of time, during which they would be intubated and on intravenous drip feeds. It is odd to me that there is undigested food in his stomach. When I do the tox screen, that may show up muscle relaxants and other drugs that would be used for the removal of organs for transplant.’
‘Can you give me an approximation of how many hours from when he had eaten until he died?
‘From the state of the food, four to six at maximum.’
‘Couldn’t he have died suddenly?’ Grace asked. ‘A heart attack, or a car – or maybe motorbike – accident?’
‘He doesn’t have injuries consistent with a serious accident, Roy. He has no head or brain trauma. A heart attack or an asthma attack is a possibility, but considering his age – late teens – both, I would say, are a little improbable. I think we could be looking for some other cause.’
‘Such as?’ Grace scribbled a sudden note on his pad, thinking of something that would need following up.
‘I can’t speculate at this stage. Hopefully lab tests will tell us something. If we could get his identity, that might help us also.’
‘We’re working on that,’ he said.
‘I’m sure it is the lab tests that will provide the key. I think it is very unlikely that the tapings are going to produce anything, as he wasn’t in waterproof wrapping,’ the pathologist went on. Then she paused briefly, before adding, ‘There is one other thought. This food in the stomach. In the UK, because there is no automatic organ harvesting without consent, it does often take many hours from brain death for consent to be obtained from next of kin. But in countries where there is just an opt-out, like Austria and Spain, then the process can be much quicker. So it is possible that this man is from one of those countries.’
Grace thought about this. ‘OK, but if he died in Spain or Austria, what is he doing ten miles off the coast of England?’
There was a shrill ring on the doorbell. Darren, the Assistant Mortuary Technician, hurried out of the room. A couple of minutes later he returned with Sergeant Tania Whitlock, from the Specialist Search Unit, gowned and in protective boots.
Roy Grace brought her up to speed. She asked to see the plastic sheeting and weights in which the body had been found, and Cleo took her out into the storage area to show her. Then they returned to the post-mortem room. The Home Office pathologist was busy dictating notes into her machine. Grace, Glenn Branson and Michael Forman were standing near the cadaver. The photographer walked out to the storage area to start working on close-ups of the wrapping and binding.