Looking Good Dead by Peter James Page B

lenses. He looked more like a drugs dealer than a boffin.
    ‘Morning, Roy.’ Tindall greeted him in his usual sarcastic tone. ‘Welcome to “One Thousand and One Things to Do with a Bin Liner on a Wednesday Morning in Peacehaven”.’
    ‘Been shopping, have you?’ Grace asked, nodding at the black plastic.
    ‘You can’t believe the things you can get with your Nectar points these days,’ Tindall said. Then he knelt and very carefully opened out the liner.
    Roy Grace had been in the police for nineteen years, the past fifteen of which he had spent investigating serious crimes, mostly murders. Although every death disturbed him, there wasn’t much any more that really shocked him. But the contents of the black bin liner did.

    It contained the torso of what had been clearly a young, shapely woman. It was covered in congealed blood, the pubic hairs so matted he couldn’t tell their colour, and almost every inch of her flesh had been pierced by some sharp instrument, probably a knife he thought, in a frenzy of stabbing. The head was absent and all four limbs had been severed. One arm and both legs were in the bag along with the body.
    ‘Jesus,’ Grace said.
    Even Tindall’s humour had dried up. ‘There’s some really sick bastard out there.’
    ‘Still no head?’
    ‘They’re looking.’
    ‘A pathologist’s been called?’
    Tindall waved away a couple of bluebottles. Some more appeared and Grace flapped those away, angrily. Bluebottles – blowflies – could smell decaying human flesh from five miles away. Short of a sealed container, it was impossible to keep them away from a body. But sometimes they were useful. Bluebottles laid eggs, which hatched into larvae, which became maggots and then bluebottles. It was a process which took only a few days. On a body that had not been discovered for weeks it was possible to work out roughly how long it had been dead from the number of generations of insect larvae infestation.
    ‘Someone’s called for a pathologist, I presume, Joe?’
    Tindall nodded. ‘Bill has.’
    ‘Nadiuska?’ Grace asked, hopefully.
    There were two Home Office pathologists who tended to be sent to murder scenes in this area, because they lived reasonably locally. The police favourite was Nadiuska De Sancha, a statuesque Spaniard of Russian aristocratic descent who was married to one of Britain’s leading plastic surgeons. She was popular because not only was she good at her job, and extremely helpful with it, but she was wonderful to look at. In her late forties, she could easily pass for a decade younger; whether her husband’s craftsmanship had had anything to do with that was a matter of constant debate among all who worked with her – the speculation fuelled even more by the fact she invariably wore roll-neck tops, winter and summer.

    ‘No, luckily for her – Nadiuska doesn’t like multiple stabbings – it’s Dr Theobald. And there’s a police surgeon on his way as well.’
    ‘Ah,’ Grace said, trying not to let the disappointment show in his voice. No pathologist liked multiple stab wounds because each one had to be painstakingly measured. Nadiuska De Sancha was not just eye candy, she was fun to work with – flirtatious, a big sense of humour and fast in her work. By contrast, Frazer Theobald was, by general consensus, about as fun to be around as the corpses he examined. And slow. So painfully slow. But his work was meticulous and could never be faulted.
    And suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, Grace could see the man’s diminutive frame, all in white and clutching his large bag, striding across the field towards them, his hooded head not that far above the top of the rape.
    ‘Good morning, all,’ the pathologist said, and exchanged latex-gloved handshakes with the trio.
    Dr Frazer Theobald was in his mid-fifties. A stockily built man a tad under five foot two inches tall with beady, nut-brown eyes, he sported a thick Adolf Hitler moustache beneath a