Dead Man's Footsteps by Peter James Page B

absently, taking the large latte he handed her and setting it down on a wooden box full of her equipment that she had placed on a tripod structure to keep dry.
    Grace had decided he would make do with a light team over the weekend and then gear up on Monday morning. To Glenn Branson’s immense relief, Grace had given him the weekend off. They were working in ‘slow time’; there wasn’t the urgency that would apply if the death had been more recent – days, weeks, months or even a couple of years. Monday morning would be soon enough for the first press conference.
    Maybe he and Cleo could still make their dinner reservation in London tonight and salvage something of the romantic weekend he had planned if – and it was a huge  if –  Joan got through her mapping and recovery process and the Home Office pathologist was able to do his post-mortem quickly. Some hope, he knew, with Frazer Theobald – and actually, where the hell was he? He should have been here an hour ago.
    As if on cue, clad in white like everyone else in the drain, Dr Frazer Theobald made his entrance, warily, furtively, like a mouse scenting cheese. A stocky little man just under five feet two, he sported an untidy threadbare thatch of wiry hair and a thick Adolf Hitler moustache beneath a Concorde-shaped hooter of a nose. Glenn Branson had once said that all he needed was a fat cigar to be a dead ringer for Groucho Marx.
    Muttering apologies about his wife’s car not starting and having had to take his daughter to a clarinet lesson, the pathologist scurried around the skeleton, giving it a wide berth and a suspicious glare, as if challenging it to declare itself friend or foe.
    ‘Yes,’ he said to no one in particular. ‘Ah, right.’ Then he turned to Roy and pointed at the skeleton. ‘This is the body?’
    Grace had always found Theobald a little peculiar, but never more so than at this moment. ‘Yes,’ he said, somewhat dumbfounded by the question.
    ‘You’re looking brown, Roy,’ the pathologist remarked, then took a step closer to the skeleton, so close he could have been asking it the question. ‘Been away?’
    ‘New Orleans,’ Grace replied, levering the top off his own latte and wishing he was still there now. ‘I was at the International Homicide Investigators’ Association Symposium.’
    ‘How’s the rebuilding going there?’ Theobald asked.
    ‘Slow.’
    ‘Still much damage from the flood?’
    ‘A lot.’
    ‘Many people playing the clarinet?’
    ‘The clarinet? Yes. Went to a few concerts. Saw Ellis Marsalis.’
    Theobald gave him a rare beam of pleasure. ‘The father!’ he said approvingly. ‘Yes, indeed. You were lucky to hear him!’ Then he turned back to the skeleton. ‘So what do we have?’
    Grace brought him up to speed. Then Theobald and Joan Major entered into a debate about whether the body should be removed intact, a lengthy and elaborate process, or taken away in segments. They decided that, because it had been found intact, it would be better to keep it that way.
    For a moment, Grace watched the rain teeming steadily in through the broken section of the drain, a short distance away. The individual drops looked like elongated dust motes in the shaft of light.  New Orleans, he thought, blowing steam from his coffee and sipping it tentatively, trying to avoid frizzing his tongue on the hot liquid. Cleo had come with him and they’d taken a week’s holiday straight after the conference, staying on, enjoying the city and each other.
    It seemed that everything had been much easier between them then, away from Brighton. From Sandy. They just chilled, enjoyed the heat, took a tour around the areas devastated by the flooding that had not yet been restored. They ate gumbo, jambalaya, crab cakes and oysters Rockefeller, drank margaritas, mojitos and Cali-fornian and Oregon wines, and listened to jazz in Snug Harbor and other clubs each night. And Grace fell even more in love with her.
    He was proud of the