GRAVE MATTER

THREE

The living and the dead stainless steel: basins, scalpels, and scales disinfected and polished to a dull gleam under the halogen lights.

The mortuary is located in the new coroner's court basement, smells like a hospital and looks like an office block. A ramp leads down from the road to an underground parking area where Home Office' meat wagons are parked in bays.

Pushing through swing doors, Brooks walks like a sailor in search of a fight. A white leads the way along brightly lit corridors. The place seems deserted until a cleaning lady appears wearing elbow-length rubber gloves. I don't want to contemplate what she's been cleaning.

Another door opens. Blanche Bradbury had her hands deep inside a butterflied ribcage. Half a dozen students are gathered around him, dressed in matching surgical scrubs and cloth caps.

"You see that?" Blanche questions, adjusting a lamp on a retractable metal arm above her head.

Nobody answers. They're staring at the disembowelled body with a mixture of awe and disgust.

Blanche points and raises her eyes to theirs. Still no response.

"What are we looking for?"

One of the requests.

"Evidence of a heart attack or otherwise."

She waits.

Silence.

"I swear you're all blind. Right there! Damaged heart tissue. You don't always find the clot, but cardiac arrhythmia can still be the likeliest cause of death."

"He suffered a heart attack." So, exclaims one of the students.

"You think?"

Blanche's sarcasm wasted on them.

"Sew him up," she declares, peeling off surgical gloves. She tosses them overhead like she's shooting a netball.

Rattles the bin. Scores.

"You had something to show me," says Inspector Brooks.

"Absolutely."

Blanche then looks at me and smiles.

"It is good to see you, Justin."

"And you, Blanche."

She leads us to a glass-walled office with a desk and filing cabinets. Having collected a manila folder, she waves it above her head like a tour leader, and we follow her down another corridor until she stops before a large steel door. Pulling down on the handle, she opens the door, breaking the airtight seal with a soft hiss. I feel a breath of frigid air as lights are triggered automatically to reveal four cadavers are on trolleys beneath white sheets. Three walls of the room have metal drawers. Bodies lie within.

Blanche checks a nameplate and tugs a handle. Another hiss as the seal breaks. Robbie Chase slides into view on metal runners. His joints are stiff with rigour mortis, and his skin is marbled by lividity.

Blanche pulls on latex gloves.

"Toxicology tests show Robbie Chase was clean and sober when he fell."

"Nothing?" Brooks pressed.

"Nothing," Blanche responds.

"But he had a history of drug and alcohol abuse that brought on manic episodes."

"He is clean," Blanche re-emphasizes. "However, in addition to injuries consistent with impalement, Chase also had a severe head injury, grazes on his arms, wrist, and thumb, and a cut on the tip of his middle finger."

"How did he pick up these additional injuries?" I ask.

"It is likely that Chase hit something as he fell," Blanche said, before adding, "sometimes people hit awnings."

"But there weren't any awnings on the houses in the square," I insisted.

"And no one checked whether he could have hit anything on the way down," Brooks added.

Blanche opens the folder and withdraws a forensic report.

"We pulled forty-two full or partial prints from the apartment. Some of them match Chase and his girlfriend and his wife. We collected fibres from the rug and the wound, and there might be DNA from the hand towel in the bathroom. There were old semen stains on the bedsheets and also on her underwear. DNA results won't be back for another five days."

I can hear the Inspector's teeth grinding.

"Check them against the victim. Then run them through the national database. Tick off the boxes."

Blanche slides Chase's body from view and opens a folder of crime-scene photographs. The first shows Chase lying face down impaled on the railings beside his arms outstretched, head to one side, eyes open.

"What about the wounds on his arms and hands?" I ask.

"These are typical of falls because people can grip to stay inside. Except, of course, that Chase meant to have thrown himself out of the window deliberately."

"Do you think that the window would have been difficult to climb through?" I ask.

"Yes," Blanche acknowledges.

"What if he went through the window like this?" Brooks suggested, he postulated, stretching his arms forward like Superman, "front first and hands out."

There's no point in arguing because Brooks hasn't put a foot wrong procedurally. Meanwhile, I'm doing what I should never do, and I'm ignoring the obvious answers. There's only one greater sin, and that is embracing it.