Free Not Dead Yet (Roy Grace 8) by Peter James Page B

mortuary. But she wasn’t daunted. The torso lying in a tank of chicken droppings was grim work, but mangled and sometimes disembowelled bodies in car crashes were far worse and more harrowing. So were charred corpses in fires. And it always made her sad to see lonely, elderly people who had died in their homes and not been discovered for months. But by far the worst of all were children. A couple of weeks previously she’d had to recover a six-month-old baby who’d died of suspected sudden infant death syndrome.
    Removing that tiny girl from the little cot in the house had been traumatic for her, thinking all the time of how she might feel if that had happened to her and Roy. And the frightening prospect that it could.
    But she wasn’t thinking of any of that now as she stepped out of her front door into the early June sunshine. Above her was a cloudless sky, and she smelled the tang of salt in the air from the English Channel, a short distance to the south. The forecast was good, and although she was destined to spend much of the day in the mortuary, she hoped to get away by late afternoon, and meet her sister for a coffee and catch-up in a café on the seafront. Afterwards she planned to get prawns and avocado and some nice Dover sole and cook Roy one of his favourite meals this evening – after which they could watch a DVD, if she could stay awake that long!
    She strode across the courtyard, dressed in a long lycra T-shirt, with her bump out loud and proud, her Crocs – which Roy didn’t care for – slapping on the cobbles. She ignored her almost constant backache from the weight of the baby, feeling so blissfully happy she was almost high. She was carrying the child of the man she truly, deeply loved. A wonderfully kind, caring and strong person. And she genuinely believed he loved her just as much.
    Two seagulls swirled overhead, shrieking, and she glanced up at them for a moment, then carried on towards the wrought iron gates. She clicked the lock and stepped out into the narrow street. This part of the city was always teeming with people on a Saturday morning, spilling out of the rammed Gardner Street bric-a-brac market a couple of streets away. It was 9.30 and the antique dealer across the road, who specialized in fireplaces, already had some of his goods out on display, propped against the shop front.
    She walked up the hill, taking the first right turn, and strode along the even narrower street, lined on both sides with small terraced Victorian houses, past the nose-to-tail parked cars. She saw her black Audi TT halfway along, where she had parked it last night – relieved as ever that it had not been stolen.
    As she neared it, she witnessed the standard hazard of parking out in the open in this city – thanks to all the gulls, half of the vehicles looked like Jackson Pollock paintings. Even from a hundred feet away, she saw the streaky, swirly white and mustard-yellow splodges all over her beloved convertible.
    But then as she got closer, her mood suddenly changed. With a tightening in her gullet, she broke into an anxious run, ignoring the fact she wasn’t supposed to run. Then she stopped beside the car.
    ‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Shit.’
    The fabric roof had been ripped open, both lengthways and sideways.
    Feeling a flash of fury, her sunny mood totally gone, she peered inside, looking for the damage. But to her surprise the CD and radio player were intact. ‘Bastards,’ she mouthed. ‘Scumbags.’
    Then she saw the marks on the bonnet. At first she thought it had been someone tracing in the dust with their fingers, until she looked closer. And froze.
    Someone had used a sharp instrument, a screwdriver or a chisel, and had engraved the words in the paintwork, gouging right down to the bare metal.
    COPPERS TART. UR BABY IS NEXT.

21
     
    Malling House, the headquarters of Sussex Police, was on the outskirts of Lewes, the historic county town of East Sussex, eight miles north-east of Brighton.
    The