Chapter Fifteen

Cassie's phone woke her at 7 a.m. on Monday. It was the mortuary.

WTF? She wasn't due in for another two hours.

‘Doug?' She ran a hand over her face.

‘I need you to come in straightaway. Something's happened.'

‘What?' She pushed herself upright, her nerves jangling at the anxiety in his voice.

‘I can't talk about it over the phone. Just look at the news.'

Levering herself upright she opened her newsfeed.

DEAD brONTE PHOTO OUTRAGE, screamed the first tabloid headline she saw.

The piece led with an image of a head and shoulders shot of Bronte, her face pixelated but still recognisable, an edge of white body bag in frame. The report adopted a tone of faux outrage that an image of ‘tragic Bronte' had been posted on TikTok while simultaneously milking it for all it was worth.

There was only one place the photo could have been taken – inside the body store.

*

Now, she and Doug were looking at the images on his computer at work. ‘You told me about someone trying to get in the other night?' he said. ‘Talk me through it again.'

‘Someone put a ladder up against one of the windows in the autopsy suite. But when I put the light on they scarpered.'

‘Well they got their photo somehow,' said Doug, looking beyond miserable. ‘I've been onto Malcolm Bellwether at CID and he's promised to send over a detective. I've also informed the coroner and the HTA.' The Human Tissue Authority, the body who oversaw the handling of all bodies and samples in the mortuary system; a body with the power to initiate disciplinary action against staff or even to close a mortuary down.

Cassie decided against telling him that she'd spent the rest of that night at the mortuary to stand guard over Bronte. Why add to his angst? If the photo had come from a break-in it had to have happened some other night.

‘This account they all say it came from @Charly_Detective – that's that .?.?. woman who filmed me without my permission.' At least the dead Bronte image had been taken offline now, possibly for offending platform guidelines. ‘I suppose it could be faked?' she said. ‘You know how sophisticated the tech is these days.'

Doug pointed to a faint red line, just visible through the pixelation. It ran from Bronte's left collarbone towards her sternum. ‘That's the top of the Y-incision, isn't it?' he said glumly.

She scanned the image. He was right. It wasn't a detail anyone would be likely to fake.

*

The PM list was cancelled but when the promised detective arrived she wished she'd put her scrubs on anyway. That morning she'd just pulled on what she'd been wearing the previous evening: ripped jeans, and a black T-shirt emblazoned with a big image of Siouxsie looking at her most goth.

He looked like he'd just stepped off the set of some TV cop series from the eighties: sixty-plus years old, ginger sideburns, waistband of his past-its-best suit straining at his paunch, and what looked like ketchup on his tie. He looked at her chest before her face – of course he did – but when he went in for an old-school handshake she could hardly refuse.

‘How do. DI Bacon.'

Bacon?! Suppressing a smirk, she took his outstretched hand. It felt warm and slightly damp, and she surreptitiously wiped it on her jeans.

After leading him to the autopsy suite, she talked him through the ladder-to-window incident – him taking no notes, she noticed.

‘Who did you deal with at Camden?' he asked.

‘I didn't report it.'

Seeing his frown, she said, ‘Look, there was nothing to see, just the ladder outside where they'd dropped it.'

‘That's not really your call though, is it?' he said mildly.

‘Do you seriously think they'd have sent anyone?' she retorted. ‘When we reported a missing body a couple of years back the nick had to be bullied even to send a uniform. The guy had barely started shaving.' Recalling how the spotty little twat had patronised her, doubting her report that a body was missing.

DI Bacon looked at her assessingly. ‘This photo of Bronte, your boss reckons it's for real. In a case like this we'd usually start by looking for someone on the inside. Someone looking to make some money out of this poor girl's death.'

She dropped her gaze, recalling Jason's cringe-making excitement at having a celeb in the body store. He might be a sexist twat but he wouldn't .?.?. would he .?.?.?

‘Yeah, well last time we had an intruder break in you lot wasted a ton of time hounding me for stealing a body instead of finding the real villains.' Cassie was getting testy. ‘Why don't you start by asking this TikTok "detective" where she got the image?'

‘Trouble is, since you didn't report we have nothing other than your word that it happened,' he mused, hitching his waistband up over his beer belly.

‘For Chrissake, if I was going to invent an intruder story, then I would've made sure to call the cops to cover my back, wouldn't I?!' In the silence that followed she realised her voice had become quite heated.

DI Bacon seemed unperturbed by her outburst. He pulled out his notebook. ‘Could you give me the names of everyone with access to the mortuary?'

Once that was done, she walked him to the front entrance in silence.

He paused with his hand on the half-open door and his gaze fell on Cassie's chest again.

Oh, for fuck's sake .

Cop or not, she was about to call him out when he nodded to her T-shirt. ‘I saw her play once,' he said with a nostalgic smile, and she realised it was the image of Siouxsie he'd been looking at all along. ‘The Roundhouse, 1978. Happy days.'

And with a beatific smile, he was gone, leaving Cassie blinking at his departing back.