Dead Like You

106

Sunday 18 January

The Lawn Memorial Cemetery at Woodingdean was located high up, on the eastern perimeter of Brighton, with a fine view out across the English Cha

The Coroner had not been wrong when she had talked about the bureaucracy involved in an exhumation. The granting and signing of the order were the easy parts. Much harder, early on a Sunday morning, was to assemble the team that was required.

There was a commercial firm that specialized in exhumations, its main business being the removal of mass graves to new sites for construction companies, or for churches that had been deconsecrated. But they would not be able to start until tomorrow morning without punitive overtime charges.

Grace was not prepared to wait. He called his ACC and Rigg agreed to sanction the costs.

The team assembled for the briefing he’d held at John Street an hour ago was substantial. A Coroner’s Officer, two SOCOs, including one forensic photographer, five employees of the specialist exhumation company, a woman from the Department of the Environment, who made it clear she resented giving up her Sunday, a now mandatory Health and Safety Officer and, because it was consecrated ground, a clergyman. He’d also had present Joan Major, the forensic archaeologist, as well as Gle

Cleo, Darren Wallace – her number two at the mortuary – and Walter Hordern, who was in charge of the city’s cemeteries, and drove the Coroner’s discreet dark green van to body recoveries, were also present. He only needed two of them, but because none of the mortuary trio had been to an exhumation before, they were keen to attend. Clearly, Grace thought, none of them could get enough of dead bodies. What did that say, he sometimes wondered, about Cleo’s love for him?

It wasn’t only the mortuary staff who had been curious. He had received phone calls throughout the morning from other members of the CID as word had spread, asking if there was any chance of attending. For many of them, it would be a once-in-a-career opportunity, but he’d had to say no to all of them on the grounds of lack of space, and, in his tired and increasingly tetchy state, he had nearly added that it wasn’t a bloody circus.

It was 4 p.m. and absolutely freezing. He stepped back out of the tent, cradling a mug of tea. The daylight was fading rapidly, and the glare of the mobile lights, situated around the cemetery, illuminating the vehicle path to the tent covering Molly Glossop’s grave, and several around it, was getting brighter.

The site was ring-fenced by a double police cordon. All entrances to the cemetery were sealed off by a police guard and so far the public reaction had been more one of curiosity than anger. Then there was a second line of police tape directly around the two tents. No press had been allowed closer than the street.

The team inside the main tent were getting close to the bottom of the grave. Grace hadn’t needed anyone to tell him, they all knew from the worsening stench. The smell of death was the worst smell in the world, he always thought, and he was catching whiffs of it now, as he stood out in the open air. It was the reek of a long-blocked drain suddenly being cleared, of the rotten meat in a fridge after a two-week power cut in the summer’s heat, a heavy, leaden smell that seemed to suck your own spirits into it as it sank to the ground.

None of the experts had been able to predict what condition the body in this coffin would be in, as there were too many variables. They did not know what body – if any – was in here, or how long it had been dead before being buried. The humidity of any burial ground would be a major factor. But with this one being on chalky soil, on high ground, it was hopefully above the water table and would be relatively dry. Judging by the worsening smell, they would find out in a few minutes now.

He finished his tea and was about to go back inside when his phone rang. It was Kevin Spinella.

‘Has the Argus hot-shot been having a Sunday lie-in?’ Grace said, by way of a greeting.

There was a lot of wind roar, and the rumble of the huge portable generator, close by.

‘Sorry!’ the reporter shouted. ‘Couldn’t hear you!’

Grace repeated what he had said.

‘Actually I’ve been doing a tour of local cemeteries, trying to find you, Detective Superintendent. Any chance I could come in?’

‘Sure, book a plot here, then go and get hit by a bus.’

‘Ha-ha! I mean now.’

‘I’m sorry, no.’

‘OK. So what do you have for me?’

‘Not much more than you can see from the perimeter at the moment. Bell me back in an hour, I might have more then.’

‘Excuse me, but I thought you were hunting for a young lady who disappeared last night, Jessie Sheldon? What are you doing here digging up an eighty-year-old lady?’

‘You do your work by digging stuff up, sometimes I do mine that way too,’ Grace replied, wondering how, yet again, the reporter had such an inside track.

Joan Major suddenly emerged from the entrance to the main tent, waving at him. ‘Roy!’ she called out.

He hung up.

‘They’ve reached the coffin! Good news. It’s intact! And the plaque on it reads Molly Winifred Glossop, so we have the right one!’

Grace followed her back in. The stench was horrific now and as the flap closed behind him he tried to breathe in only through his mouth. The crowded interior of the tent felt like a film set, with the battery of intense bright lights on stands all focused around the grave and the mound of earth at the far end, and several fixed video cameras recording all that was happening.

Most of the people in here were having problems with the stench too, with the exception of the four officers from the Specialist Search Unit. They were wearing white bio-chemical protective suits with breathing apparatus. Two of them were kneeling on the roof of the coffin, screwing heavy-duty hooks into the sides, ready to attach cables to block and tackle lifting gear once the sides of the coffin had been cleared, which the other two were now manoeuvring into position, a good yard above the top of the grave.

Joan Major took over the excavation work, for the next hour painstakingly excavating down the sides, and under the base at each end of the coffin, for lifting straps to be placed there. As she worked she carefully bagged soil samples from above, the side and beneath the coffin for later examination of any possible leaked fluids from the contents of the coffin.

When she was finished, two of the exhumation specialists then clipped ropes to each of the four hooks, and to the underneath of the coffin front and back, and clambered out of the grave.

‘OK,’ one said, moving clear. ‘Ready.’

Everyone moved back.

The police chaplain stepped forward, holding a prayer book. He asked for silence, then, standing over the grave, read out a short, non-denominational prayer, welcoming back to earth whoever it might be that was in the coffin.

Grace found the prayer strangely touching, as if they were greeting some long-lost returning traveller.

The other members of the exhumation team began heaving on a sturdy rope. There was a brief, anxious moment when nothing happened. Then a strange sucking noise that was more like a sigh, as if the earth was only very reluctantly yielding something it had claimed for its own. And suddenly the coffin was steadily rising.