Free Past Mortem by Ben Elton

the wistfulness in the doctor’s voice. Youth was so very fleeting, but what an impression it left. It was as if the rest of a person’s life was merely a pale reflection of its promise.

NINE
    T he second case which Newson had discovered in the police database was one with which he was already familiar. Anybody who read the newspapers knew about this killing. It had been the stuff of tabloid dreams.
    Angie Tatum, ex-page-three stunner, current celeb status D list slipping to E, one of the growing number of damaged identifies of whom most people had heard but in whom no one was remotely interested. A woman who had briefly been the toast of a certain part of the town (notably Stringfellows nightclub) during the period in the eighties when page-three girls had been news. Now, nearly twenty years later, Angie was news only because she’d once been news, and had recently been lampooned in the press for being rejected by the producers of I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here , despite her promise to reveal again her once-celebrated breasts.
    A sad story of a sad life. A little girl with big fits who had dreamt of stardom and who now, having briefly touched the hem of its garment, was stumbling towards anonymity. Then suddenly, against all expectations, Angie Tatum became major news again, when her rotting body was discovered six weeks after her soul had departed it, the victim of a brutal murder and mutilation.
    The killing had occurred at Angie Tatum’s home, one of the smaller, cheaper but still desirable flats that make up the residential developments lining the river between Fulham and Chelsea. The crime notes taken at the time suggested that Ms Tatum probably paid for this accommodation from the proceeds of high-class prostitution. She herself would probably not have recognized what she did as such, but she was closely connected with a number of nightclubs, where she had many wealthy gentlemen friends. The CCTV surveillance cameras that covered the entrance to the block in which Ms Tatum lived recorded many comings and goings of these friends, and the police concluded that Angie Tatum’s ex-celebrity and thrice-remodelled breasts still carried a market value sufficient for her to live in some degree of comfort. One of these visitors, a man who had taken care not to present any identifying features to the surveillance cameras, had killed her.
    ‘She’d been dead a month and a half,’ Dr Clarke said, for by coincidence it had been she who attended the murder scene, the Kensington & Chelsea police pathologist being fully occupied at the time with a train crash at Victoria Station. ‘Obviously there had been a fair bit of damage to the cadaver. Six weeks is a fair time to rot.’
    ‘Amazing how maggots just seem to materialize out of thin air, eh?’ observed Newson.
    ‘Yes. Like wheel dampers.’
    Newson looked at the photographs of the dead woman, once such a cute, fresh-faced- teen whose sixteen-year-old breasts had simultaneously charmed and outraged the nation. He and Angie were almost exactly the same age. When she had first revealed her double Ds to the nation he had been in the lower-sixth form doing French, English, history and sociology. He could remember masturbating over her pictures when they appeared in the Daily Star . Now he was looking at Angie Tatum’s naked photographs again, pictures of a disfigured, maggot-infested corpse. It seemed to Newson that he ought to be feeling some sense of grave and dramatic irony about it all. Instead he shared with Dr Clarke the details of the Manchester murder.
    ‘So, similar to this case in that the victim was secured to a chair,’ Dr Clarke observed.
    ‘Yes. And to the Willesden murder in so far as Bishop was secured to a bed.’
    ‘But then murderers often tape up their victims,’ Dr Clarke pointed out.
    ‘Yes, sadly they do. By the way, the Manchester pathologist sends his regards. He says he was at medical school with you.
    ‘Not Rod Haynes?’
    ‘That was