Chapter One

The sky was just starting to lighten the inky surface of the canal, the peep and quack of the dawn chorus subsiding. Cassie Raven had been walking fast, head bent, eyes on the towpath, replaying the row she'd just had with her boyfriend. Which was how she almost crashed into it.

What the .?.?. ?

A steel barrier blocked the towpath. And a few strides beyond it, a dark red puddle on the ground, the precise shape of a cartoon speech bubble, and instantly recognisable.

Blood, a good litre of it. Going by the colour and viscosity, it had been shed four or five hours earlier, the exposure to air already making the haemoglobin morph into iron oxide – the same compound as rust. Reminding her how the human body was fundamentally just a fancy chemistry set.

A female cop was striding towards her now, shaking her head. ‘You can't go through here, you'll have to find another route.'

‘What happened?' asked Cassie, lifting her chin towards the stain. A knife wound? Stabbings weren't exactly uncommon in Camden, usually drug-dealing related.

‘I'm not at liberty to say,' said the cop, eyeing Cassie's tattoos.

Fair enough. The family might not know yet that someone they loved was seriously injured – or more likely dead.

The pool of blood looked too neat and unsmudged to be a knife wound. Squinting up at the building that overlooked the canal – a huge Victorian warehouse, converted into upmarket apartments – she caught a flash of something. A man in what looked like police uniform peering over the balustrade of a narrow balcony.

Nine, maybe ten, storeys up.

An accidental fall? Or a jumper. Either way, from that height, she'd almost certainly be meeting them later at the mortuary. For sudden deaths in the community the cops had arrangements with local undertakers to deliver bodies out of hours.

Cassie treated all her guests with care and respect but having experienced her own moments of bottomless despair she had always felt a special bond with suicides. Before retracing her steps she told the cop, ‘If I were you I'd cover up the blood until the cleaners arrive? Just in case the family come by.'

Left the cop looking puzzled at the authoritative way the girl with the punk haircut had spoken.

*

Losing her rag with Archie had unsettled her. They'd only been living together on her narrowboat for nine or ten weeks but already she was getting that claustrophobic feeling, all too familiar from her one and only previous – failed – experiment in living with a lover.

On the upside, they both worked with the dead – Archie as a pathologist, Cassie as an anatomical pathology technician, aka APT – which meant they could talk about work without the constant self-censorship needed with civilians. She had taken against him at first, pigeonholing him as the entitled posh boy medic, but they'd gradually fallen for each other across the bodies of the dead, and after dating for a few months, she'd finally taken the leap in agreeing to live with him.

He was easy-going, fun company – and the regular sex was a definite plus. On the downside, the narrowboat wasn't exactly spacious and the headroom in the main cabin was only six foot two at the highest point – the same height as Archie – so he was constantly banging his head on the ceiling. It made her wince in sympathy but also irritated the hell out of her, which she knew was desperately unfair. That morning when he'd got up too fast from their bed and cracked his head she had snapped at him, ‘For Chrissake, Archie! Every single morning?!' Worse, he hadn't snapped back – just sent her his (increasingly familiar) wounded look.

It occurred to her that maybe she was feeling the same way as he was – that she no longer had enough headroom.

*

At the mortuary, Cassie took a shower in the ladies' changing room – her regular routine since Archie had moved onto the boat. When the two of them had to get ready for work at the same time it was like a complex dance routine – or a clown act. After donning a clean set of blue scrubs, she put in her lip and eyebrow piercings and scraped her hair up into its topknot, her reflection telling her it was time to re-dye her hair its usual batwing black and get her undercut reclipped. Making a face in the mirror, she pulled out her phone and tapped out a message to Archie.

Sorry I was an arse this AM. I'll buy us a curry later. C xxx

She'd got into work early, to enjoy a few moments of solitude before everyone else arrived. Going into the tranquil chill of the body store where the only sound was the low hum of the giant fridge, she started checking her inventory – or guest list, as she preferred to think of it. Moving along the wall of polished steel, she opened each of the drawers to check the occupant's name, d.o.b. and identification number on the tag of their body bag against the paperwork, chatting softly to the white-shrouded bodies within as though they could still hear her.

‘Morning, Mr H, Doctor Curzon will be examining you today, to try to find out why you died, get your family some answers' .?.?. ‘Hello, Mrs V, you're leaving us this morning. I hear the service is going to be at your church where you and Mr V got married. That's lovely' .?.?. a few murmured words for each of her ladies and gents, down the line of drawers.

Cassie had always talked to the dead in her care just as if they were still alive. She had always seen the mortuary as a shadowland where the recently dead hung suspended between life and burial or cremation – an interlude in which they might still have some awareness of their surroundings. Irrational nonsense, of course, and at odds with her otherwise scientific outlook. But it was a belief that gave her work meaning, and made her feel responsible for these souls while she was looking after them.

Drawer number eight housed her latest arrival, delivered by the undertakers during the night. Finding the entry in the check-in log she recognised the address of the canal-side apartment block where she'd seen the cops that morning. It read, ‘ Adult female, d.o.b. TBF, thought to be S. J. Angopoulis '. So the person who'd fallen – or jumped – was a woman.

She pulled out the drawer on its runners and started to unzip the body bag – always liking to greet her new charges in person. But at the sight of the face a violent shiver went through her – and not from the perma-chill of the body store. Her autonomous nervous system was sounding a klaxon. The young woman had a depressed skull fracture that had mashed the left-hand side of her head, her face was a livid purple from temple to jaw, but she was still totally recognisable.

Her name wasn't ‘Angopoulis'. It was Angelopoulos .

Sophia Angelopoulos. Better known as Bronte.