Post Mortem (20 page)

‘That's fine, then. No issues. Mark up your overtime.'

He bent down and kissed her neck, and of course at once she wanted to relent, to turn round and bury herself in him.

He said, ‘Will I see you later?'

‘Yes.'

She pushed him away and resumed typing.

She was alone with the day opening through the high parade-room windows. Briefly the night shuttered through her mind. So much could happen in one shift. The sight of Cosmina through the doorway with the lamplight falling on her tilted face. The silent, hostile drive back to the police station with Hadley.

Arif appeared, finally free from dealing with his prisoner in custody. He drew up a chair beside her and opened his arrest book to write his statement.

‘Good arrest, Arif. Liked the offence.'

‘You heard?' he said.

She shook her head.

‘CID have already bumped it down to an ABH.'

‘ABH?' It was unbelievable. Bloody CID. The last she'd heard, Cosmina had been taken back to theatre. ‘What was he like, Stefan?'

‘Evil bastard.'

‘He just turned up at the address?'

‘Yes. Said she's always drinking his stuff.'

‘Did you hurt him?'

‘Best I could. He tried to head-butt me. That gave me an excuse to get him on the ground, at least. I think Sergeant Thompson would have quite liked to drive over him.'

She gave a snort of agreement. ‘Handcuffed?'

‘Face down on the ground. Back to back. No other way to get them on. What a shame.'

It was a shock to Lizzie to realize that for the first time she was wishing they had the option of old-style policing, the stuff that leaked out in the anecdotes of old sweats. She would have quite liked for Stefan to have had a good kicking in the back of a van. Best they could do nowadays was to cuff him face down, with his hands behind his back. And then the Police and Criminal Evidence
Act and all his rights back at the nick. The bastard would have an interpreter and a lawyer and the doctor to check he was OK.
And all these things are right, of course
. She shook her head and pressed her hands against her eyes. She saw her former self as if she were standing across an unbridgeable gulf as deep as the Grand Canyon. And she preferred this former self to the one who still had a crime report to complete before she crawled into bed in full daylight.

Arif finished his statement and went off duty. As the morning light widened, Lizzie rang the duty social worker to try to arrange emergency housing for Cosmina.

The voice on the other end of the line sounded tired and irritated. ‘She'll have to go into the housing office when it opens at nine thirty and queue.'

‘She can't queue, she's got a head injury.'

‘Are you certain she is a resident of the borough?'

‘Yes, I'm certain.' Lizzie repeated herself in case he hadn't picked up on her impatient understanding of his question's hidden agenda. ‘I'm absolutely certain she's a resident of this borough and I've made a note of that on my report.'

In the silence on the other end of the phone she heard the weariness of the social worker's parallel universe: the vortex of lost souls needing housing before God claimed them as his own. Nothing, she thought, could resource the needs of the world. She saw boats drifting on oceans filled with lost populations. The sense of doing something effective receded, as she had known it must. She leaned over the desk and again pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes until she saw patterns.

The drive home saw the mass of Londoners making their way to work through windy streets, pulling their coats tight against the cold morning. Some queued at bus stops. A woman followed behind
two small boys in school uniform, both on micro scooters. Drivers cut each other up where the road narrowed from two lanes to one. The cop's narrative played in her head – the minor offences, the stupid risks. These people were living their lives and she realized that she was looking at them as if she were an observer from outer space, as if she was not one of them. This early-morning banality was what she was protecting – their freedom to live their lives and cut each other up pointlessly.

Her mobile rang, shaking her again out of a drift into sleep. She glanced at the screen.
Number withheld
. She put it down on the passenger seat. It continued to ring and then cut. Two minutes later the voicemail pinged. It could probably wait till she got home, but just in case, she pulled over and tapped to hear the message.

It was Kieran. She needed to return to the station. Cosmina had died.

Murder squad had taken over one of the inspector's rooms. A woman was perched on the desk, clutching a decision log and a hardback notebook. She was thin, late twenties or early thirties maybe. She wore a dark trouser suit and had streaked blonde hair. Crow's feet already marked the corners of her eyes. Lizzie briefly estimated all the night duties and long shifts this woman had done to get this far so quickly. A light-skinned black man stood by the window. He wore the department's classic pinstripe, a white shirt, blue silk tie loose at his collar. It was clear that he found time for the gym. No kids, probably, or if he had them, they didn't come first.

Hadley had squashed himself into one of the tiny chairs by the MDF shelving unit. He caught Lizzie's eye. His message was clear
enough:
Watch yourself
. Kieran was sitting at the desk, facing his computer screen. He glanced at her and smiled encouragingly.

Lizzie said, ‘Guv'nor.'

The woman leaned forward and offered her hand, ‘Lizzie?'

‘Yes.'

‘DS Bradwell. Murder squad. This is my colleague, DC O'Neill.'

O'Neill glanced over from the window and gave her his killer grin. ‘Jack.'

Kieran caught her eye from his computer screen with mild amusement. The DS continued. ‘Thanks for coming back.'

Lizzie glanced between the people in the room. She attempted a smile and, with as much enthusiasm as she could muster, said, ‘No worries.'

‘The hospital think Cosmina died from a cerebral haemorrhage,' the DS was continuing. ‘We'll have the exact cause of death confirmed by post-mortem. In the meantime, you'll appreciate we're running on a clock. We've got one in the bin and before we interview we need to know more about all this. You two were first on scene. Hadley, I'll have a chat with you. Lizzie, I understand you were the first to find her? I need you to view the body, for continuity. Jack will drive you to the morgue. We need you to do that this morning, before the PM. You OK with that?'

Lizzie pushed the thought of Cosmina alive out of her mind and tried to pre-empt the matter of the autopsy by making her not a person but an object, the mere subject of an identifying statement.

‘Yes,' she said. ‘No problem. Am I OK to get a coffee first?'

Jack already had the car keys in his hand. ‘We'll pick one up on the way. I know a good place.'

Some memories we don't like to contemplate even before they have happened. As the metal gates of the mortuary opened and the car
slipped through into the small car park, Lizzie already knew with a heavy sensation that this experience was going to be something she would want to be able to wipe from her consciousness. If you want to be a cop, she told herself, you have to do these things. And every time you do, it will be easier.

A white man was outside, leaning against the wall, smoking. He wore a loose suit with broad stripes. He was tatty and tired, his hair had thinned – fifty years old or more perhaps. By his side on the ground was a metal box of the kind used to hold cameras. They parked up and got out of the car. The man nodded hello to Jack: clearly they knew each other. He was murder squad too. Then she felt his eyes flick to her, appraising her.

‘All right?' he said, not unkindly. ‘You continuity?'

‘That's right.'

He threw his cigarette on the floor, crushed it under his foot and held out his hand. ‘Neal,' he said. ‘Exhibits. Want a fag before you go in?'

She shook her head. ‘No – thanks. I'm fine.'

‘Very sensible. Come on, then. Let's be at it.'

They left Jack outside and went into an exterior room.

‘You'll need to suit up. Shoes, face mask, double glove, the lot.'

‘OK.'

She split open the cellophane wrapper he handed her and struggled into the white suit. The zip stuck, caught in the shiny paper fabric. Neal said, ‘Here, let me.' His hands were old and, facing him as he struggled with the zip, she felt like a child being dressed to go out into the cold. He met her eyes and smiled. ‘Don't worry, love. You need to take a good look and make sure it's the same woman you found in the squat. Then we'll start the post-mortem. She's recently dead so she shouldn't smell too bad. You don't need to do anything. Stand at the back, look away if you want. Afterwards it's just a quick statement. That's all.'

She stood back from the table. There was a shape in a bag, zipped up. Neal and Jack were waiting beside it. Neal had his metal box open and ready. She could see that everything was neatly ordered. Labels already written on evidence bags. Two men in white coats stood by. One was tall, with grey hair. The other stooped and small with a nose piercing. This man, the technician, said, ‘Ready, everyone?'

He unzipped the bag.

Lizzie had expected to see Cosmina, but the open bag revealed a shape wrapped in a white sheet. There was a piece of paper attached to the front of the shroud, and someone had written in marker pen Cosmina's name, date of birth and hospital number.

Neal said, ‘Lizzie.'

She stepped towards the table. The man with the nose piercing cut through the sheet.

Cosmina, further violated by the rushed assistance of the medics, was briefly unrecognisable. Her head had been roughly shaved and a bolt drilled into the skull just back from the hairline. It reminded Lizzie of a vice, a piece of metalwork from a workshop. A tube snaked around from the back of the head. Her face was bruised, livid, black and grey and yellow like the skin of a vile banana. A sticky yellow fluid ran down from her nose. There was a tube in her neck and a bruise flowered there too. Another tube ran out from between her legs. And for some reason there was a neat stitched incision in her abdomen. Lizzie stared. She had forgotten what her job was.

Neal repeated, ‘Lizzie?'

She looked again at the corpse as if it were some discourtesy to answer too quickly. Then she said, ‘Yes, I recognize her as the woman I found earlier at . . .'

She couldn't remember the name of the street.

Neal said. ‘At Windermere Road?'

‘Yes, at Windermere Road. Cosmina.'

She stepped back. She was aware of system and order. Of photographs and measurements. They were busy. She was passive. She was there to witness. She saw Cosmina's body, naked except for the bandage on her right arm. For a short time only it remained, as if in mockery of recovery. Blotched skin. Bruises to her chest and the visible skin of her arms. The skin, Lizzie thought coldly, as she stared at the body, was completely different in death, an unsolvable puzzle. The pathologist narrated the damage as he moved around the cadaver.
Adult white female. Whitened fingernails. Bruises to the inside of the upper arms
. A dictionary of trauma. He examined the head carefully, pressing the bruising, trying to differentiate.

‘I don't know,' he said. ‘Could be the imprint of the Oscar.'

Neal considered the marks like an art expert examining brushstrokes. He photographed carefully, absorbed in his work.

They moved in front of Lizzie like busy shadows, slipping in and out of activity, giving way to each other, stepping back. The technician slid a block under Cosmina's back. Lizzie remembered diving to the bottom of her school swimming pool. The dark blue tiles and the pressure in her ears as she gripped the corners of the heavy rubber brick. Surfacing to the smell of chlorine.

Cosmina's chest protruded, the artificial light falling across her virescent skin. Her arms and neck fell back, her breasts to each side. The technician began to cut open the ribcage using shears as big as hedge-trimmers. The bones crunched and broke. Lizzie saw the line of the ribs, the cartilage and the marbling of white fat, just like a cow or a sheep hanging in a butcher's freezer. On the outside it was still Cosmina. The breasts now impossibly separated but still human, still Cosmina's. The boys at work called them fun bags. She thought of her own fun bags and how inconsequential they were, just flesh and fat that would hang lifeless off her own body one
day. The technician was reaching into the cavity, his arm up high, a tideline of blood against the pale latex of his gloves. He pulled out the organs and Lizzie saw them. Hefty giblets, the claret shine and fat and slip of them. Each weighed and bagged and labelled.