‘Of course, madam.’
‘I am in a hurry.’
‘Yes, but can I interest you in our range of counterpanes impregnated with real silver? Providing 100% protection against bacteria and MRSA,’ said Lurch.
‘I just want to buy that fucking bed,’ said Erika, losing her temper. His eyebrows shot into his hairline.
‘Madam. Here at Bed World, we don’t tolerate abusive behaviour…’ he started to say. Erika’s phone rang in her bag, and when she pulled it out, she was relieved to see it was Isaac. She moved away from Lurch and answered the call.
‘Hi. I’ve been trying to call you, is everything okay?’ asked Erika.
‘I’m sorry, there have been some confusing developments, and I needed to be sure before I called you,’ he said, sounding weary on the end of the phone.
‘What is it?’
‘It’s the body of that young woman you found last night. It isn’t Victoria Clarke.’
16
The entrance to the morgue was next to the tall chimney of the hospital incinerator, and when Erika parked and got out of her car, there was a nasty sweet smell of burning in the cold air. She pulled the neck of her sweater up and over her nose, and hurried to the door where Isaac was waiting for her, sitting in the darkness of the reception area where the only light came from a computer screen at the front desk.
‘Hello,’ he said wearily. ‘Should I have waited until tomorrow to call you?’
‘No. I need to know,’ said Erika. She checked her watch; it was almost 10pm.
‘I just needed a few minutes in the darkness,’ he said, getting up. ‘I’ve been working under bright lights for sixteen hours. Shall we go down?’
‘Yes,’ said Erika. ‘I just don’t understand. The sister found the body. We all took our cues from her.’
They moved down a long, sloping corridor with a low ceiling, their footsteps echoing off the concrete walls.
‘I pulled Victoria Clarke’s medical records just before I did the post-mortem,’ said Isaac. ‘It showed she was a healthy young woman. She’d never been to hospital. Never had an operation or any broken bones, not even a filling, which is impressive at twenty-seven.’
The reached a tall metal door, and Isaac opened it with his card key. A puff of cold air hit Erika, and they moved into the dimly-lit morgue. A long row of tall fridges hummed, and at the end of a row of stainless-steel post-mortem tables lay the small form of the young woman.
Erika walked towards the body, passing through the pools of shade to where it lay under a bright light. She tried to think back to the previous evening, when she’d seen her lying on the bed. The young woman on the table looked completely different. She was all beige. Her long dark hair was brushed back off her head, and had been washed clean of blood. Her face sagged with an open mouth, the jaw dropping down to elongate the face. The cheeks were hollow and the bloodlessness of her face made it hard to differentiate between the skin of her lips, cheeks and eyelids. A huge bruise stood up on her forehead, altering the symmetry of her face. Erika saw there was a small coin-sized clump of hair missing at the hairline on the left side of her head.
On a practical level, corpses were stripped of the adornments that indicate their lifestyle, their personalities – clothes, jewellery, and make-up. Death made the skin shrivel, and the face collapse and contract. Sometimes, a dead body would look as if the person was merely asleep. More often than not, they looked completely different to how they appeared in life.
‘This young woman has had all of her wisdom teeth removed,’ said Isaac, breaking the silence. ‘I also found a faint hairline scar along her spine, and when I excised the area… cut it open, I found that she had spinal fusion surgery as a child. There was a small titanium rod in her back connecting three vertebrae. This is an operation used to correct problems with the spine in adolescence.’
Erika stared at the body with the stitched-up y-shaped incision in the chest.
‘Let me take you through the results of my post-mortem,’ said Isaac.
Erika nodded.
‘I can officially put the time of death between 5pm and 7pm, narrowing the window down. You found her body at eight fifteen?’
‘Almost on the dot… That’s when I went past the flats and heard the sister, Tess, scream. Well, she’s not her sister. Did she really not realise this wasn’t Vicky?’
‘They have a similar build, and the same hair and eye colour. There are even similarities in the shape of their faces. And she was badly beaten and bloodied. Her left cheekbone is fractured, caused by a severe blow to the head. This is the same side as the bruising on her face, and this alters the shape of the face. And her top left incisor is chipped.’