Page 3 of Dead Fall

Cassie wasn’t about to let Sophia get a raw deal. Still, it must be two years since Curzon had come home to the terrible sight of his wife hanging from a ceiling joist of their garage. Perhaps he’d come to terms with it by now?

Curzon glanced down at Bronte. ‘Another narcissist who didn’t care about wasting valuable police time and resources,’ he said, in a voice etched with acid.

Or not.

‘What’s wrong with a quiet overdose in bed? At least that doesn’t upset the neighbours.’ He handed the report back to her with a dismissive sniff. ‘She was on drugs I assume?’

‘The police report says there was what appeared to be synthetic cannabinoid at the scene.’

Reaching out a gloved hand, he flipped Sophia’s poor damaged head from side to side, making Cassie wince. ‘No doubt as to the CoD anyway. Fracture dislocation of C-spine and significant head injury due to collision with terra firma. The lividity suggests she lay undiscovered for at least four hours.’

He was referring to the mauve colour that stained the left side of Sophia’s face like a birthmark, which could also be seen on her left shoulder, upper arm, and hip: not bruising, but the result of her blood pooling and coagulating where her body had lain closest to the ground.

‘I did notice an abrasion,’ said Cassie carefully, turning Sophia’s right hand upwards to show him the palm. ‘Hard to see how that fits with the rest of the injuries? From the fractures to the left arm it’s clear that side took the impact,’ extending her own arm to demonstrate.

Curzon’s mouth went down at the corners. Barely glancing at the grazed hand, he shrugged. ‘She probably scraped it on something on the way down. I think we can file it under “not significant”’ – sending Cassie a warning look.

Stay in your lane.

And with that he headed over to Jason’s table to meet his next customer.

Cassie bent her head level with Sophia’s dark curls. ‘Don’t take any notice of him,’ she murmured confidentially, as if they were back in the loos at school bitching about a teacher. ‘He’s a professional dickhead.’

Bronte. My name is Bronte.

Cassie blinked. The words seemed to rise from the body in what she remembered as Sophia’s fourteen-year-old voice: a slightly harsh tone, aggrieved sounding. As a rational person, Cassie knew that it was probably all in her head, but nonetheless she always respected anything she got from the dead.

‘Bronte it is,’ she said.

Chapter Three

As the blade of Cassie’s scalpel breached the tender skin below Bronte’s collarbone, she waited for the usual mental gear shift: the necessary switch from seeing the body she was slicing open as a person to an inanimate object to be analysed.

Nothing. The body was still nerdy Sophia Angelopoulos from Mrs Hooper’s Year Ten class.

She felt a flutter of panic. This had never happened before, not even the time she’d eviscerated someone she’d been far closer to.

Come on, she muttered to herself fiercely, forcing herself to make the second cut of the Y-incision that started at the collarbone, meeting at a point on the chest where a pendant might hang. But her hand was shaking.

She noticed that Bronte’s eyes had drifted half-open. It was simply the result of the facial muscles relaxing as rigor faded – but feeling that half-lidded gaze resting on her made sweat prickle out on her forehead. Throwing a glance at Jason on the other side of the autopsy suite – who was busy opening his gent’s chest with the rib shears – she reached for the blue roll they used to clean up, tore off half a metre and draped it over Bronte’s face, her hands still trembling.

‘Sorry,’ she murmured. ‘I just can’t .?.?.’

It worked. Her racing heart slowed, and she was able to make the midline incision.

Ten minutes later, after extracting the viscera in a single ‘block’ into the waiting white pail, she removed the blue paper mask shrouding the face. Now that the body was an empty shell from neck to groin her usual self-preserving dissociation had finally kicked in. Bronte’s body had become anonymous, a puzzle to be solved rather than a person, and would remain that way until the organs were replaced and the body reconstituted.

Seeing Dr Curzon had arrived at his dissecting bench, she used both hands to carry the pail over – viscera were surprisingly heavy even in someone as small-framed as Bronte – and tipped out its contents. ‘Do you want the head opened, Doctor C?’

‘No need,’ said Curzon without looking at her.

Usually she would agree: the severity of the head trauma needed no internal confirmation of catastrophic brain injury. But this time she hovered at his shoulder as he started separating the organs for dissection with swift strokes of his PM40. She lowered her voice. ‘Look, I should probably let you know, she’s a singer, name of Bronte?’ He looked blank. ‘Anyway she’s a bit of a rising star? .?.?. So I wouldn’t be surprised if the media crawl all over her death. Just saying.’

He shot her a look, picking up her meaning immediately. ‘Let’s have her brain then,’ he said wearily.

She headed back to the body, hoping that Curzon would be covering his substantial arse by giving Bronte a more thorough PM than the usual. A routine post-mortem examination could take as little as thirty or forty minutes. And no wonder: the pathologists only got paid around a hundred quid per body, as opposed to the four-figure fee they charged for the full forensic version.

Jason must have been earwigging because she hadn’t even fired up the bone saw before he sidled over to her station. Staring at Bronte’s face, he said, ‘Is it her? That singer, you know? The one who was in all the papers, off her tits?’

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