Life Sentence Read online

  For Philip

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Flyte

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

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  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

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  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

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  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

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  Chapter Twenty-Eight

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  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

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  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

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  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

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  Chapter Thirty-Eight

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  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

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  Chapter Forty-Two

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  Chapter Forty-Three

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  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Extract from Body Language

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  ‘He was always such a happy little boy.’

  Bradley’s mum was looking straight at Cassie, but her pupils were wide and unfocused – her thoughts miles away.

  ‘His Year One teacher used to call him Sunshine,’ she added, a sudden smile bringing her tear-blurred features into focus.

  A fervent hope gripped Cassie: that Mrs Appleton was remembering her son aged five or six, on a trike, laughing – anything rather than the image she would forever have of the fifteen-year-old Bradley: lying on his bed with the cord of his laptop tight around his neck, half-suspended from the light fitting on the wall above his head.

  The two women were sitting in the mortuary’s family viewing suite, close enough for their knees to touch. ‘I just don’t understand it.’ Kim Appleton blinked, bumping back down to reality. ‘He didn’t seem unhappy. He never mentioned bullying or anything. I mean, he would have told me . . . wouldn’t he? We always got on.’ Her gaze flickered to her husband Steve – ceaselessly prowling the pastel-painted room like a man looking for someone to punch. ‘As well as you’d expect, anyway, with a teenage boy.’

  Cassie’s only response was an understanding murmur: five years as a mortuary technician had taught her that what grieving relatives needed was a sounding board, not conversation. Anyway, what could she possibly say that would offer any consolation? For whatever reason, Bradley Appleton had ended his life before it had really begun. The selfish little twat . . . But her spurt of anger dissolved swiftly into pity. It was only ten years since Cassie had been Bradley’s age herself, struggling to stay afloat in an emotional maelstrom – the not-knowing who you were yet, intractably at odds with the world. A fifteen-year-old was barely able to grasp the consequences of his actions, let alone foresee the brutal and unassuageable grief he had bequeathed to his parents – a life sentence with no chance of parole.

  That morning Cassie had retrieved Bradley from the refrigerated body store and made him look nice, ready for his mum and dad’s visit. Now he lay out of sight behind the curtained glass doors that bisected the viewing room. When his parents were ready she would draw back the drapes to reveal his body, the dark red coverlet pulled up high enough to cover the ligature mark that creased his neck. She would encourage them to go in, to be close to him, to touch him if they wanted to – the shrinks said that it helped with the grieving process. It was important not to rush things, to give his mum and dad time to prepare for the finality of that moment. This bit was like waiting for curtain-up at the theatre, but with a terrible twist.

  Kim Appleton must have been talking about her son for at least ten minutes straight, trying to stave off the reality behind the curtains – to keep him alive for just a little longer. But now she fell silent.

  ‘Are you ready?’ Cassie asked, careful to include both parents in the question.

  A nod from Kim; a bitter shrug from her husband.

  *

  Minutes later they were on the other side of the glass doors, standing around Bradley’s body, his mum bent over him stroking his hair as if trying to lull him to sleep.

  Bradley’s longish hair was an unnatural black, which stood out against the pallor of his face, and one of his eyebrows and both ears had been multiply pierced. In goth-speak, Bradley had been a ‘baby bat’ – just like Cassie had been at his age. When she’d asked his mum on the phone whether she should remove his body jewellery for the viewing Kim had swiftly said yes, adding, ‘I’m afraid his dad hated all that.’

  Cassie understood – she always took out her own facial piercings before a family viewing and rearranged her black-dyed hair to cover her shaved undercut. Although she’d toned down the full-on goth look after leaving school, she knew that some people still found her appearance challenging. The last thing she wanted was to weird anyone out on top of what they were already going through.

  Cassie had cleaned up the smudged black kohl liner that had panda-ed Bradley’s eyes when he’d been brought in, so that now he looked more or less like any other fifteen-year-old boy: touchingly young, his skin peach-fuzzed and clear, bar a sprinkle of zits on his chin. The red pinpricks scattered across both eyelids and cheeks weren’t spots, though; they were superficial haemorrhages called petechiae – tiny blood vessels burst by increased venous pressure.

  Kim Appleton glanced up at Cassie. ‘Just before . . . it happened, I was showing him how to make cupcakes – he’d bought black colouring to put in the sponge mix.’ She smiled, back in the moment. ‘Funnily enough, he’s really into baking’ – unable to consign her child to the past tense just yet. ‘You wouldn’t think that was a goth thing.’

  ‘That’s why he did this!’ The first words Bradley’s dad had spoken burst out of him in a fierce hiss, his finger jabbing towards his son. ‘All that skulls-and-death . . . bullshit that him and his so-called friends are into!’

  Kim’s face fell – literally – the groups of muscles around the mouth and jaw suddenly slackening, as if the wires supporting them had been cut. Her husband eyed her face, breathing heavily, before looking away. ‘Sorry, love. I can’t do this. I’ll see you at home.’

  ‘Steve!’ Kim threw out a hand, but the door was already closing behind him.

  Cassie left a moment before putting a tentative hand on Kim’s forearm, ready to withdraw if it seemed unwelcome. ‘Bradley and his dad, did they have a difficult relationship?’

  ‘Sometimes.’ Her voice was hoarse. ‘Until a few months ago they loved going to the football together – you know, dad-and-son stuff. Steve has a season ticket for Arsenal. But then Bradley got into this whole goth business and wouldn’t go anymore. Steve . . . well, he found it all very difficult to handle.’

  ‘And they had a bi
t of a falling-out last night?’

  ‘Steve had a go at him about him wearing eyeliner . . . Implied he was gay.’ They shared a look. ‘There was a row. The last thing Bradley said was that he wished . . . he wished he could go to sleep and never wake up.’

  Her eyes strayed back to Bradley’s face. ‘But this . . . this is all my fault. Like I told the woman police officer, we’ve been worried recently, thinking that he might have been smoking cannabis. He’d been acting a bit . . . fuzzy sometimes? So now if he’s up in his room for any length of time I go and check on him. But we were watching a film and . . . drinking wine.’ She turned haunted eyes on Cassie. ‘If only I’d gone up ten minutes earlier I might have saved him . . .’

  If only. The self-scourging litany of those who had lost someone they loved to sudden unexpected death. If only I hadn’t let them get in the car that night. If only we’d called an ambulance out to Mum sooner. If only we’d pushed the GP harder for a test. A never-ending catechism that Cassie wouldn’t wish on her worst enemy. But trying to challenge that kind of thinking at this stage was pointless; the best advice she’d ever got, from a bereavement counselling course early in her training: Don’t tell a grieving person how they should feel.

  ‘Listen, Kim, we don’t know anything for sure yet,’ she said carefully. ‘We’ll probably get some more information after the lab tests, and the pathologist’s examination.’ Examination: her go-to euphemism for the deconstruction that their son’s body was about to undergo in the search for answers.

  Cassie allowed herself to hope that Bradley really had been off his face on something when he’d strangled himself – if he hadn’t been in his right mind it would make his death a little easier for his parents to bear.

  Kim nodded vaguely, her eyes glued to her son’s face.

  Cassie had always thought that she had a good grasp of how important it was for people to know why their loved ones had died, but six weeks ago that understanding had acquired a new and scalpel-like edge.

  That was when she’d made the discovery that demolished at a stroke everything she thought she knew about her life to date.

  Cassie’s mother hadn’t died in a car crash – the story she’d been told since the age of four. She had been murdered by Cassie’s father.

  Chapter Two

  In the loo, Cassie replaced her eyebrow piercings and lip ring and scraped her hair back up into its topknot before wheeling Bradley out of the ‘clean side’ and back into the autopsy suite. First thing in the morning the foreground smell was the harsh chemical reek of bleach and formalin, but in a couple of hours’ time the odours of blood, sweat and urine would get the upper hand.

  Bradley’s mum had left an old soft toy tucked into the curve of his neck, a battered and faded penguin he’d apparently loved when he was little. As Cassie retrieved it, to stow somewhere safe until after the post-mortem, she found the plush fur still damp with his mother’s tears.

  People got it all wrong about her job – the hard part wasn’t cutting up dead bodies; it was looking after the poor bastards they left behind. Two or three traumatic viewings in a row could leave her totally wrung-out by going-home time. But it was also a privilege. When she sat with a grieving relative like Kim she was often reminded of the Latin origin of the formal-sounding word ‘condolences’. Condolore meant ‘to suffer with another’.

  The new technician, Jason Begby, was standing at his autopsy table, singing along to some cheesy pop track playing too loud on the radio. Background music did help make a shift spent up to your elbows in blood and viscera go faster but Jason must be fifty, twice her age, and his taste for Nineties house had made it clear that they would never be musical soulmates. Or soulmates of any kind, come to that.

  Cassie was still missing her old colleague and drinking buddy Carl, who’d done an unscheduled midnight flit six weeks ago, after getting himself into trouble with some local gangsters. In fact, it felt like everything in her life had gone to shit around then, those few traumatic weeks that had culminated in Cassie’s grandmother, Weronika, dropping her bombshell about how her mum had really died.

  Cassie’s gran had raised her from the age of four to believe that both her parents had died in a car accident – a head-on collision with a drunk-driver. It was only after Weronika suffered a mini-stroke that she had finally revealed the truth: Cassie’s dad, Callum, had beaten her mother, Katherine, to death in a jealous rage, a crime for which he’d spent seventeen years behind bars.

  Why had he not contacted her – his only daughter – even after he’d got out of prison four years ago? The question that had nagged at Cassie incessantly since she’d learned the truth, always swiftly followed by another: Why would you even want him to? She gave her head a shake to dislodge this pointless mental loop – knowing the power it had to knock her off-beam.

  She went over to Jason’s table. ‘How’s it going?’ she asked, lifting her chin towards the body that he was working on. The desiccated Marmite-brown carcase was the incinerated remains of an old gentleman who’d fallen asleep with a lit cigarette in his hand and turned his bed into a funeral pyre.

  Jason wafted the air above the body towards him, inhaling ostentatiously. ‘Aaah. The great smell of KFC.’

  Cassie managed a tight smile: it was true that badly burned bodies smelled disturbingly like fried chicken and Jason’s tasteless gaggery was the norm in many mortuaries, especially among older technicians. But talking about a body in that disrespectful way still made her hackles rise.

  ‘Sorry I had to give you Mr Siddiqui. I knew my viewing would take a while.’

  The fierce heat had literally cooked Mr Siddiqui’s long muscles, shortening them and contorting his body into the ‘pugilist stance’ – arms flexed at the elbow and raised in front of him, fists clenched, his legs drawn up. The body looked half human, half praying mantis. His body would be difficult to repair after the post-mortem: the cooked flesh tearing easily when you tried to close the incision.

  ‘Oh, I don’t mind the occasional crispy critter,’ said Jason with a grin. ‘But I’ll be in the mood for a bargain bucket by lunchtime.’

  Cassie turned away to hide her expression. Carl had unquestioningly followed her lead in treating the dead who they looked after with dignity – which meant always calling them guests or bodies and never stiffs, floaters, jumpers or crispy critters. She always referred to them by name – the older ones by their title – treating them, in other words, as if they were a living person. The difference was that Carl had just turned nineteen and Cassie had overseen his on-the-job training. As senior technician she theoretically stood above Jason in the pecking order but she couldn’t bring herself to lecture a guy who’d been eviscerating bodies when she was still in primary school.

  Returning to her own autopsy station she locked the stainless-steel trolley carrying Bradley into position and started to undress him. His black T-shirt emblazoned with the face of Nosferatu was raggedly scissored up the front where paramedics had exposed his chest to attempt defibrillation. But she already knew from the notes that he’d been asystolic by that time – his heart showing no shockable rhythm. Game over. She folded the T-shirt away into a clear plastic bag. No doubt Bradley’s dad would be glad to see the back of his goth gear, but his mum would treasure it: the things someone was wearing when they died were the closest you’d ever get to them again.

  ‘Well, you can tell them I’m not remotely happy with their accommodation plan.’

  Dr Curzon. The sound of the familiar, self-important voice behind her made Cassie’s blood pressure spike. Philip Curzon was their new regular pathologist, replacing her friend and mentor Professor Arculus, who’d taken a sabbatical to write a book about the Somme. As substitutions went, it was like swapping a premium Polish vodka for Asda’s value brand.

  ‘I am growing weary of repeating myself . . .’ Curzon went on. ‘I will accept a Hyatt or a Hilton, at the minimum. Are we perfectly clear? Good. Fix it.’

&nbs
p; Putting his phone away he turned his perpetually irritated gaze on Cassie – apparently finding nothing there to improve his mood. ‘These people. They spend weeks pleading with me to present my paper at their blessed conference, and now they try to fob me off with a Radisson.’

  His gaze swivelled down to Bradley. Taking in the curtain of coal-black hair and the skull amateurishly inked on the milk-pale skin of his forearm, he made a scoffing sound. ‘Another druggie, I assume?’

  ‘Probable suicide, Doctor.’ She turned Bradley’s jaw to reveal the ligature mark on the right-hand side of his neck, a brownish-red streak that finished beneath his ear. She caught the masseter muscle in Curzon’s jaw clenching, his face twisting briefly in what looked like anger before he turned away to take off his camel coat.

  While he started his external examination of Bradley, she ran her own eye over Curzon. His shirt was expensive, densely woven cotton, the cufflinks personalised with his initials, but one cuff bore a tiny smear of what could be ketchup. No, he wasn’t a ketchup sort of guy. More likely the tomato sauce off an M&S pizza. He’d shaved hastily, leaving an patch the size of a fifty-pence piece unshaven in front of one ear, and the aggressive smell of mouthwash coming off him didn’t entirely erase the sour tang of last night’s red wine.

  What was the score with Curzon? His platinum wedding band looked uncomfortably tight, the flesh raised around it in a ruff. A man of his vintage, hungover, in the grip of some private fury, and wearing yesterday’s shirt? It all said ‘recently separated’. Perhaps he hadn’t got round to having the ring cut off – or maybe he was still in denial.

  ‘There’s evidence of self-harm, Doctor,’ said Cassie, turning Bradley’s arm to reveal the soft inner skin of his upper arm with its ladder of pink horizontal scars, incised where they wouldn’t easily be spotted. ‘Razor cuts, I’d say, but not recent – probably three or four months old.’

  Curzon paused to send her a look. ‘Well, I’m indebted to you for your expert opinion’ – his voice loaded with elaborately polite scorn. Any sympathy she’d allowed herself to feel for him evaporated.

  Professor Arculus was at the very top of his profession, and posher than the Queen, but in the five years Cassie had worked with him he had never once failed to ask her opinion – and it wasn’t simply out of good manners.