Twenty
Despite his bravado the night before, the stupid remark about bringing nibbles, Miller wasn’t sorry that his visit to Barry Cheshire’s house had made him late to the post-mortem. That he’d missed the sawing and the spreading, the slicing up and the rootling around.
‘What kept you?’ Priya Acharya asked.
‘I had to see a man about an incontinent dog. Well, it wasn’t about the incontinent dog, but there was an incontinent dog there.’
‘I see.’
‘I’m gutted to have missed all the action here, obviously.
’ Miller caught the look that passed between Acharya and Sara Xiu who had, of course, been there exactly on time and witnessed every moment of the proceedings.
He wasn’t sure that either of them quite believed him.
‘I’ll just have to make do with the post-match highlights. ’
With a PM a legal requirement after any sudden, suspicious or unnatural death, Miller had attended enough of them over the years to have earned himself a loyalty card, had the mortuary handed out such things.
These last eight months, though, the two hundred and forty-seven days since Alex’s murder, had skewed his …
perspective a little when it came to bodies on slabs.
That was all, no biggie. He still did his job, was there when he needed to be (today’s tardiness had certainly not been deliberate), but it took just a little more effort than it had previously done to breathe normally.
To stay upright.
To stop himself screaming.
He had not been present at Alex’s PM, of course, but he had been called upon to identify her body, which was horror enough.
It was the knowledge that she’d had one, though, that she’d been opened up in this very room, that informed every hushed, formaldehyde-stinking moment he’d spent since her death watching one pathologist or another at work.
Miller could not imagine anyone working with more skill or sensitivity than Priya Acharya, but that really didn’t matter.
Not when he was picturing Alex, lying cold in a steel drawer or subject to the less than tender mercies of the pathologist’s tools.
‘You good, Miller?’ Xiu walked across and laid a hand on his arm.
Unless she was actually trying to hurt someone, physical contact of any sort was not something Xiu was big on as a rule, so Miller tried not to make his surprise too obvious. He did not want her to feel self-conscious. ‘Never better, Posh.’
‘I’ve got everything covered here. You know that, don’t you?’
‘I do know that,’ Miller said. ‘Never doubted it for a second.’
‘I always have, you know … in case you ever want to give one of these things a miss. Just between us, obviously. They’re never pleasant at the best of times, right?’
Miller nodded, trying not to dwell on the fact that, for him, the best of times could only ever be something to remember.
Trying to hope that better times, at least, might not be very far away.
Thinking, as he did often, that although she might not have felt awfully fortunate, he’d got very lucky the day he’d been teamed up with Sara Xiu.
They walked slowly towards the doors of the PM suite, while Priya Acharya disposed of her heavily stained gown, gloves and bootees in the clinical waste bin.
She gave final instructions to her assistant, who was humming contentedly as he stitched up Darren Grant’s body, then caught up with Miller and Xiu.
In her office, she talked as she made notes on her computer.
‘The killer may just have got lucky,’ she said, ‘but I’m betting they knew what they were doing.
One clean strike, straight through the heart.
’ She picked up a pen and demonstrated. ‘To be honest, I’m amazed the victim lasted long enough to make it to the end of the garden. ’
‘Forensics couldn’t find any blood inside the house,’ Miller said. ‘So it looks like all your guesswork at the crime scene was spot on.’
Acharya nodded, pleased. ‘He’s stabbed on his doorstep, then staggers out towards the road pumping blood all over the front lawn.’
‘A lot of blood,’ Miller said.
‘A lot of blood, containing a lot of alcohol.’ Acharya sat back. ‘He’d definitely been on the booze before it happened, so I doubt he’d have been able to put up too much of a fight, even if he’d had the chance.’ She raised her hands. ‘No defence wounds.’
‘What can you tell us about the knife?’ Xiu asked.
‘Eight inches or so,’ Acharya said. ‘Serrated on one side. Might have been something grabbed from the kitchen, but my money would be on a proper combat knife. I wouldn’t testify to this in court, but it’s something else that leads me to believe the killer isn’t an amateur, that he …
or she, but my money’s on a he, is someone who’s used to carrying a weapon.
’ She looked up and across at Miller. ‘Isn’t the man who lived there an ex-soldier? ’
‘It’s not him,’ Miller said.
‘We are talking about the bloke whose dog was attacked in the park, though, aren’t we?’
‘Yeah, the incontinent one.’
‘Right.’
‘The dog, not the bloke.’
‘Got it.’
‘He was the obvious suspect,’ Xiu said, ‘because the victim was sleeping with his wife, but now it looks very much as if he was the one the killer was after.’
Acharya took a few seconds to process it. ‘Right … so you think this murder’s connected to the death of that dealer in the park?’
‘Certainly looks that way,’ Xiu said.
‘Yep. We’ve got a drug-related homicide with a bit of extra-marital how’s-your-father thrown in,’ Miller said. ‘It’s like Coronation Street meets The Wire. With extra sausage dogs.’
‘Never a dull day,’ Acharya said.
‘I dream about dull days,’ Miller said. ‘I also dream about man-eating squirrels and being in the Beatles, and I once had quite a saucy dream about Wilma Flintstone, but I’m not sure that now’s really the time.’
The pathologist looked up. ‘I’ll email over the full report by the end of the day.’
On the way out to where Xiu had parked the pool car, Miller said, ‘She was definitely a bit less flirty today.’
Xiu stopped. ‘Dr Acharya?’
‘Of course, Dr Acharya.’
‘Dr Acharya was not even remotely flirty.’
‘To be fair, I think I’m more attuned to the signs than you are.’
‘She was performing a post-mortem, Miller.’
‘Strictly speaking, we didn’t really interact until after the post-mortem.’
‘You could not be more wrong about this, which leads me to believe that you’re actually imagining the whole thing. But let’s suppose for just one second that you’re not. Let’s go mad and assume that this highly qualified, extremely attractive and supernaturally clever woman—’
‘Likes the cut of my jib.’
‘Right, whatever that means.’ She looked at him. ‘Do you actually want it to … go somewhere? Are you ready for that?’
It was much the same question Miller had been asking himself on and off for several days, and one he had spectacularly failed to answer.
He told himself that it was no more than an idle fancy.
Him with Priya; him with anybody, come to that.
It was just a notion, that was all, a vaguely interesting thought which was, ultimately, harmless enough.
He wasn’t completely sure Alex would think the same thing, even if being dead would render her objections moot at best.
That didn’t mean he would be able to ignore them, even if he wanted to.
He followed Xiu to the pool car and climbed in, more than usually distracted. Thinking about the speech he’d made at a wedding many years before and another, rather more recently, at a funeral. About something Barry Cheshire had said to him about life being too bloody short.
Thinking, Better days.