Looking Good Dead

The Albanian spoke sharply to the girl in a language the Weatherman did not understand. The girl answered Mr Brown back in a raised voice, feisty for her young years, looked back at the Weatherman again, desperately, but he was staring at the carpet and muttering silently to himself.

Then the Weatherman felt an arm around his shoulders, and smelled the sour reek of cigar smoke combined with body odour, only slightly masked with Comme des Garçons ‘Homme’ cologne – he had recently learned by heart the smell of all the colognes in a Gatwick Airport duty free shop, as a way of killing time before a flight.

‘She doesn’t like it up the ass, John. What do you think about that?’ Carl Ve

His face was a blotchy red with exertion or anger and dry patches of psoriasis, which the Weatherman had noticed before, showed on his forehead; the man was wheezing so hard he wondered if he was about to have a heart attack.

‘She doesn’t like being fucked up the ass,’ Ve

The Weatherman didn’t really have an opinion on the subject. Feeling himself propelled forward by the short, dense mass of Carl Ve

They stopped for a moment and Ve

Putting up with this, and being party to it, was not part of his deal, but then the Weatherman had never understood the true nature of his contractor until he had started looking into Ve

He had first encountered Ve

Ve

Ve

As ever, Ve

‘You know, she really did fucking bite me. Look!’ Ve

The Weatherman could see deep puncture marks just above the first knuckle. Peering at them he said, ‘You’ll need a tetanus jab.’

‘Tetanus?’

The Weatherman fixated on the knickers on the carpet, rocking backwards and forwards in silence, deep in thought.

‘Tetanus?’ the American repeated, worried.

Still staring at the knickers Frost said, ‘The bacterial inoculum of human bite wounds is worse than any other animal. Do you have any idea how many organisms thrive in human oral flora?’

‘I don’t.’

Still rocking, the Weatherman said, ‘Up to one million per millilitre – with over one hundred and ninety different bacterial species.’

‘Terrific.’ Ve

‘Ummm.’ The Weatherman continued to stare at the knickers, still rocking. ‘What is going to, umm – going to, ummm – to the girl? Happen to her?’

‘Mick’s taking her home. What’s your problem?’

‘Ummm – no I, umm – good. OK, great.’

‘Do you have what I asked you to bring? What I’m fucking paying you for?’

The Weatherman unbuttoned the back pocket of his trousers and pulled out a small, lined sheet of paper torn from a notebook and folded twice. He handed it to Ve

‘Yes.’

This seemed to satisfy Ve

Written on it was the address of Tom and Kellie Bryce.

21

Professor Lars Johansson was a man who, in Grace’s opinion, looked more like an international banker than a scientist who had spent much of his life crawling through bat caves, swamps and hostile jungles around the globe in search of rare insects.

Over six foot tall, with smooth blond hair and suave good looks, attired in a three-piece chalk-striped suit, the Anglo-Swede exuded urbane charm and confidence. He sat at his large desk, in his cluttered office on the top floor of London’s Natural History Museum, with his half-moon tortoiseshell glasses perched on the end of his nose, surrounded by display cases and bell jars filled with rare specimens, a microscope, and a raft of medical implements, rulers and weights. The entire room could have come straight from the set of an Indiana Jones movie, Grace thought.

The two men had met and become friends a few years back at the International Homicide Investigators Association Convention, an event hosted in different US cities, which Grace attended a

The entomologist removed the plastic bag containing the beetle from the buff-coloured police evidence bag. ‘It’s been swabbed, Roy?’ he asked in his cultured English accent.

‘Yes.’

‘So it is OK to take it out?’

‘Absolutely.’

Johansson carefully extracted the two-inch-long beetle with a pair of tweezers and laid it on his blotter pad. He studied it in silence for some moments with a large magnifying glass while Grace sipped gratefully on a mug of black coffee, thinking ruefully for a moment about the date with Cleo he had had to cancel tonight, in order to first be here and then get back to Sussex House for a late briefing of his team. He had been looking forward to it more than anything he could remember in a very long time and felt gutted he was not going to see her. But at least they had made a new date, for Saturday, just two days away. And the bonus was that that would give him time to buy some new gear.

‘It’s a good specimen, Roy,’ he said. ‘Very fine.’

‘What can you tell me about it?’

‘Where exactly did you find this?’

Grace explained, and the entomologist, to his credit, barely raised an eyebrow.