Free Ungrateful Dead by Naomi Clark Page B

cases make up the bulk of my work. Sometimes the cases end happily, reunited families skipping through flower-filled meadows to hug, that sort of thing. More often they just ... end, with no trace of the missing person to be found, no matter how hard you look. And sometimes the cases end at the morgue. Those are the worst.
    So I know the city morgue pretty well. Better than I’d like, at any rate. It’s an old, grim building, brickwork tagged with gang graffiti, windows smeared with grime and exhaust fumes. Inside it’s spanking clean – stinking of bleach and weird chemicals they use to preserve the dead. The floors are sparkling white, the walls are suicide-grey. Charlie loves the morgue. Not in an inappropriate way or anything, but you can tell by how his eyes light up when he sees the place that it’s all he’s got in life. I look at two-for-one pizza coupons the same way.
    “I really appreciate this,” he told me as he let us in. The slight hitch in his breath spoke of fear and excitement. He trotted down the hallway, flicking light switchs as he went. Electricity crackled and the lights buzzed, flickering constantly. He scowled up at the fittings. “This never happened before she showed up. Everything round here always worked perfectly.”
    I had to admit, the place felt creepy. Not just normal dead-people-are-here creepy, which was how the morgue always felt to me, but like there was an extra layer of ice in the air, an extra edge of darkness in the corridors. I’m not superstitious. I don’t believe in God or worry about the afterlife, and I didn’t expect to find any ghosts downstairs in body storage. And despite that, I had to admit there were cold fingers running down my spine.
    We passed by the waiting mortuary, where bodies were taken to be confirmed as actually dead, and I couldn’t help glance through the wide windows at the metal trolleys inside. Part of me expected to see some shadowy figure flitting around there. Not many places used waiting mortuaries anymore; they were a throwback to Victorian fears about being buried alive, and medical advances meant not too many people worried about that anymore. But hell, if you were going to see a ghost, that’s where I’d expect to see it.
    “Nobody else has noticed your ghost then?” I asked Charlie, shifting my bag around on my shoulder to try and shake the chills. I was loaded down with my hi-tech PI stake-out kit – digital camera, video camera, polaroid camera, notebook, pen, bottle of Jack Daniels.
    “Well, the receptionist mentioned hearing whispering a couple of times, but that’s it.” Charlie glanced back at me, pleading silently for me to believe him. “Do you need to speak to her?”
    “Nah, I’ll take your word for it.” We headed downstairs to the basement, where bodies lay stiff and cold in metal drawers, and, possibly, ghosts wandered. The chills down my spine got colder. I considered cracking open the Jack to warm myself up, then decided Charlie might not pay me if I was drunk on the job.
    The staircase down to the cold chamber was narrow and dark. Charlie flipped the light switch on and off several times, muttering darkly when the light didn’t come on. “See?” he said. “This never happened before.”
    I glanced up at the bulb over the stairs. “You tried just changing the bulb, right?”
    “I’m not an idiot, Ethan! I asked the janitor to change it three times.”
    “And has he actually done it yet?”
    He glowered at me and stomped down the stairs. I followed, one hand against the rough wall to guide myself. I had a pretty nasty vision of slipping and cracking my head open as I bounced down the steps, and that wasn’t how I wanted to go out.
    Charlie unlocked the basement door, letting a fresh flood of that chemical tang into the hallway. I sneezed and he whipped round to scowl at me.
    “What?”
    “Cover your nose when you sneeze! Do you know how many germs you just spread into the atmosphere?”
    “Really?