Perfect Death. Helen Fields

to the kitchen and began opening cupboards to find a glass when feet shuffled in behind her.

      ‘Would he have suffered? I want the truth, Ava. I was married to a policeman for thirty-five years. There’s no point lying to me.’

      Ava ran the cold tap to make sure the water was fresh as she thought how to answer the question. George Begbie’s wife was no fool, and the detail of the cases MIT handled wouldn’t have passed her by. Such was the baggage that came with marrying a police officer.

      ‘Headache, nausea. He’d have felt faint. Probably there’d have been a sense of panic if he was still conscious when his body recognised it was starved of oxygen. He may have had chest pains, especially given his medical history. Possibly some sort of seizure at the end,’ Ava said. ‘I’m so sorry. I wish …’

      ‘Please don’t,’ Glynis said. ‘I’ll take that water now.’

      Ava handed her the glass and leaned back against the kitchen cupboards rubbing her temples.

      ‘You said something was wrong. Can you be any more specific?’ Ava asked.

      ‘There were a few late night phone calls. A couple to his mobile, at least one on the landline. He never told me who they were from. Made a joke about it to distract me. Then a package was left on our doorstep once when we were out shopping. No label. I told him he should call the police. He knew he was still a target given the number of people he’d put inside. He took the package to his shed, told me it was some rubbishy free samples. I always knew when he was lying.’

      ‘And you think whatever it was might have been enough reason for him to have …?’ Ava broke off.

      ‘George hated suicides. Said it was the cruellest thing to do to another human being. If you’re right and that’s what he did, then I have no idea who the man was I’ve been living with for more than half my life. I’d like to go and see him now please.’

      * * *

      They arrived at Edinburgh City Mortuary half an hour later. Dr Ailsa Lambert met them at the door, greeting Glynis with a hug. Ailsa held back her own tears as she showed them into the autopsy suite. There was a body beneath a sheet on a steel table.

      ‘I’m sorry I can’t offer anything more appropriate than this room. Everywhere else is in use. Are you sure you’re ready to do this, Glynis? I can formally identify him. You don’t need to make this your last memory of George,’ Ailsa said.

      ‘I need to,’ Glynis replied, crushing a handkerchief in her hand and staring at the concealed bulk of the man she had loved for decades.

      Ailsa pulled back the sheet to reveal naked head and shoulders. There was an intake of breath from Glynis. Ava reached out an arm to put around her shoulders, tempted to look away but there was no scope for cowardice when Glynis was having to be so brave. Still, it was dreadful to see. Death was never so final as when you had to stare it in the face. Ava hated the slackness of the Chief’s jaw and the way the flesh of his cheeks had rolled back towards his ears, as if his body couldn’t be bothered to pretend to be human any more. Life had literally deserted him.

      ‘Why is he so red?’ Glynis asked.

      ‘Carbon monoxide poisoning can do that after death,’ Ailsa said. ‘Can you confirm that it is George?’

      ‘It is,’ Glynis said. ‘Oh God, it really is.’ She turned around and walked through the door into the corridor. Ava let her go.

      ‘Have you had a chance to have a look at him, Ailsa? Can you give me any information?’ Ava asked.

      ‘I’ve had a few minutes, that’s all. It’s been a busy day,’ Ailsa said, covering Begbie’s face once again with the sheet.

      ‘I heard,’ Ava said. ‘I’m sorry. You must have a lot of families needing you at the moment.’

      ‘I do, but George was my friend. I was working with him when you were still in school. Never thought I’d be asked to perform his autopsy. But the symptoms are classic suicide by inhalation of carbon monoxide. That cherry red colour of his skin? Means he had to have breathed the gas in. If you’re looking for me to tell you someone killed him and posed him there, then I can’t. He has no injuries. He wasn’t restrained in the car. He hadn’t defended himself.’

      ‘Nothing?’ Ava asked. ‘Really Ailsa? You knew him better than me, and I know the Chief wouldn’t have taken this way out.’

      ‘You don’t know anything of the sort. People break, Ava. They get bad news, they suffer a loss, they stop working and find their lives suddenly empty. They look in the mirror one day and find they got old and that scares the hell out of them.’

      ‘It’s cowardly,’ Ava said. ‘It was beneath him.’

      ‘Suicide is the most human and lonely of acts. It’s not for you to judge him,’ Ailsa said.

      There was a pause. Ava reached a hand out to the huge man beneath the sheet, drew it back again and turned to the wall.

      ‘I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it, Ailsa. I just feel like I failed him somehow. I should have visited more often after his heart attack. I should have made sure he was coping. I just carried on, always too busy.’

      ‘When there’s a suicide the people left have a tendency to make it about themselves – what they didn’t do, or say, or remember. It’s not about you, Ava. It’s not about Glynis, or their children, or anyone else. It’s about the place George found himself in. I’m not expecting to find anything in the autopsy to be honest, although I’ll be liaising with his doctor to check any recent diagnoses. His body was unmarked except for this.’ Ailsa walked around to lift the sheet from the left side of George Begbie’s body. ‘Here, on his inner wrist – you can barely make it out now because of the reddening – but it looks like letters, albeit clumsily drawn. Capital N next to a small c. I suspect they’ve been scratched into his arm.’

      ‘Means nothing to me,’ Ava said. ‘N c. I’ll check it out. I’d better get Glynis home now. She’s been more stoic than I’d ever have expected, although of course she’s in shock. That combined with being the wife of a long-serving police officer. She probably spent years half-expecting that knock at the door. It’ll take a while to sink in. She’ll need to contact the rest of the family, too. Let me know, would you, when you have the full autopsy results.’

      ‘Of course. You should go home and get some rest, too. If days like this teach us anything, it’s that you never know what’s coming. Every moment counts.’

       Chapter Five

      ‘I w-want to volunteer,’ the man said, his Adam’s apple working almost completely independently of the remainder of his body.

      ‘You know they won’t pay you, right? There aren’t any proper jobs going at the moment,’ a woman wearing clothes more usually seen at an eye-assaulting runway from London Fashion Week told him.

      ‘I know that. I’m not here for the money. I just really w-want to help. It’s a good thing you do here,’ he said.

      ‘You’ve got some alternative means of funding yourself that allows you not to have to work for money, do you?’ the woman asked, looking from his haircut down to his shoes in a manner that signalled disbelief.

      ‘I w-work somew-where else as w-well,’ he mumbled. ‘I just thought that a few hours a w-week might be a contribution. Even if I’m just making coffee or filing paperw-work.’

      She sighed, pulling a sheet of paper from a drawer and clicking the end of a pen as she waited for him to finish the sentence.

      ‘I can take your name but I’m not sure there’s anything for you.’

      ‘That’s fine, Sian, I’ll take it from here thank you,’ another woman said, placing