Leave the Grave Green

The smell of disinfectant always reminded Kincaid of his school infirmary, where Matron presided over the bandaging of scraped knees and wielded the power to send one home if the illness or injury proved severe enough. The inhabitants of this room, however, were beyond help from Matron’s ministrations, and the disinfectant didn’t quite mask the elusive tang of decay. He felt gooseflesh rise on his arms from the cold.

A quick call to Thames Valley CID had directed them to High Wycombe’s General Hospital, where Connor Swann’s body awaited autopsy. The hospital was old, the morgue still a place of ceramic tiles and porcelain sinks, lacking the rows of stainless-steel drawers which tucked bodies neatly away out of sight. Instead, the steel gurneys that lined the walls held humped, white-sheeted forms with toe tags peeking out.

“Who was it you wanted, now?” asked the morgue attendant, a bouncy young woman whose name tag read “Sherry” and whose demeanor seemed more suited to a nursery school.

“Connor Swann,” said Kincaid, with an amused glance at Gemma.

The girl walked along the row of gurneys, flicking toe tags with her fingers as she passed. “Here he is. Number four.” She tucked the sheet down to his waist with practiced precision. “And a nice clean one he is, too. Always makes it a bit easier, don’t you think?” She smiled brightly at them, as if they were mentally impaired, then walked back to the swinging doors and shouted “Mickey” through the gap she made with one hand. “We’ll need some help shifting him,” she added, turning back to Kincaid and Gemma.

Mickey emerged a moment later, parting the doors like a bull charging from a pen. The muscles in his arms and shoulders strained the thin fabric of his T-shirt, and he wore the short sleeves rolled up, displaying an extra inch or two of bicep.

“Can you give these people a hand with number four, Mickey?” Sherry enunciated carefully, her nursery-teacher manner now mixed with a touch of exasperation. The young man merely nodded, his acne-inflamed face impassive, and pulled a pair of thin latex gloves from his back pocket. “Take all the time you want,” she added to Kincaid and Gemma. “Just give me a shout when you’ve finished, okay? Cheerio.” She whisked past them, the tail of her white lab coat flapping, and went out through the swinging doors.

They moved the few steps to the gurney and stood. In the ensuing silence Kincaid heard the soft expulsion of Gemma’s breath. Connor Swann’s exposed neck and shoulders were lean and well formed, his thick straight hair brown with a hint of auburn. Kincaid thought it likely that in life he had been one of those high-colored men who flushed easily in anger or excitement. His body was indeed remarkably unblemished. Some bruising showed along the left upper arm and shoulder, and when Kincaid looked closely he saw faint, dark marks on either side of the throat.

“Some bruising,” Gemma said dubiously, “but not the occlusion of the face and neck you’d expect with a manual strangulation.”

Kincaid bent over for a closer look at the throat. “No sign of a ligature. Look, Gemma, across the right cheekbone. Is that a bruise?”

She peered at the smudge of darker color. “Could be. Hard to tell, though. His face could easily have banged against the gate.”

Connor Swann had been blessed with good bone structure, thought Kincaid, high, wide cheekbones and a strong nose and chin. Above his full lips lay a thick, neatly trimmed, reddish mustache, looking curiously alive against the gray pallor of his skin.

“A good-looking bloke, would you say, Gemma?”

“Probably attractive, yes… unless he was a bit too full of himself. I got the impression he was quite the ladies’ man.”

Kincaid wondered how Julia Swann felt about that—she hadn’t impressed him as a woman willing to sit home meekly while her husband played the lad. It also occurred to him to wonder how much of his desire to see Connor had to do with assessing the physical evidence, and how much to do with his personal curiosity about the man’s wife.

He turned to Mickey and raised a questioning eyebrow. “Could we have a look at the rest?”

The young man obliged wordlessly, flipping the sheet off altogether.

“He’d been on holiday, but I’d say not recently,” Gemma commented as they saw the faint demarcation of a tan against belly and upper thighs. “Or maybe just summer boating on the Thames.”

Deciding he might as well imitate Mickey’s nonverbal style of communication, Kincaid nodded and made a rolling motion with his hand. Mickey slid both gloved hands beneath Connor Swann’s body, turning him with an apparent ease betrayed only by a barely audible grunt.