Dead Tomorrow by Peter James Page A

kick down the stand. Graham Lewis balanced the bike carefully, then pulled off his helmet and leather gloves and began removing his medical bag from the pannier.
    However obvious it might be to an attending police officer that someone was dead, under the requirements of the Coroner, unless the remains were little more than bones, or the head was detached or missing, formal certifying of death had to be done at the scene by a qualified medic. In the past, a police surgeon would have been required to turn up, but in a recent change of practice it was now paramedics who performed this role.
    Grace descended the perilous rope gangway to greet him, passing the PCSO at the bottom, and was glad to see that none of the local journalists, who usually got to murder scenes quicker than blowflies, had yet materialized.
    The paramedic, a short, wiry man with curly grey hair, had the sort of kind, caring face that would give instant reassurance to any accident victim he attended. And he was irrepressibly cheery, despite all he saw daily in his career.
    ‘How are you doing, Roy?’ he greeted the Detective Superintendent breezily.
    ‘Better than the poor chap on the ship,’ Grace replied. Although not that much better if I don’t make it to the party before it ends, he nearly added. ‘I don’t think you’re going to be needing that bag. He’s about as dead as they get.’
    He led Graham Lewis back up the wobbly gangway on to the deck, then along, under the glare of the ship’s lights, past the cable reels and orange rails of the conveyor belt, which would normally have been busily and noisily clanking away, shifting the cargo from the hold on to the chute, which would then discharge it on to the quay. But now it was silent. The paramedic followed Roy Grace to the far side of the ship.
    The claws of the steel drag head, suspended a couple of feet above the deck, looked like a pair of gigantic, parallel crab pincers. Jammed between them was a parcel of black plastic tarpaulin, with several ropes wound around it. Several more lengths of rope, looped through eyeholes sewn into the tarp, were tied around a cluster of concrete breeze blocks, which now lay on the grimy, orange-painted metal of the deck.
    ‘He’s in the bag,’ Grace said. ‘They’ve cut it open but they haven’t touched him.’
    Graham Lewis walked up and peered in through the long slit which had been opened up along part of the length. Roy Grace watched alongside him, horrified but deeply curious.
    The paramedic pulled on a pair of latex gloves, then tugged the sheeting open wider, revealing the full length of the motionless, almost translucent, greyish-white body inside. It was a young man, in his late teens, Grace estimated, and from his condition he did not look as if he had been in the water for very long.
    There was a strong smell of plastic, and a fainter reek of decay, but not the terrible, cloying, rotting-meat reek of death that Grace had long come to associate with a body that had been dead for a while. This person had been dead for only a few days, he guessed, but the post-mortem would hopefully give them a better steer on this.
    The youth was thin, but from under-nourishment rather than exercise, Grace judged, noting the lack of muscle. He was about five foot seven or eight, with an angular, rather awkward-looking face and short black hair, some of which lay in a peak across his forehead.
    The paramedic rotated his head slightly. ‘No immediate sign of any head trauma,’ he said.
    Grace nodded, but his eyes – and his thoughts – were on a different part of the body. He was staring at the abdomen. In particular, at the neat vertical incision down the centre, from the base of the neck to below the belly button, stopping at the edge of the thick triangle of pubic hair, and the large sutures closing it up.
    His eyes met the paramedic’s, then he looked down again. Stared at the incision. At the penis, almost black in colour, lying on top of the hairs,