Dead Man's Time Read Free Page B

fine oil paintings hanging on the walls, and then at the Louis XIV table in the hallway. The Georgian tallboy. The
Georgian chest. The two Chippendale chairs. Bargains, once, all of them, pointed out by her brother, who knew a thing or two about antiques of all descriptions.
    ‘Where would you like to start your investigations, gentlemen?’
    She saw the blur of the man’s fist only a fraction of a second before it struck her stomach, punching all the wind out of her. She doubled up, her frail hand clutching at the panic
button.
    But it was ripped off her neck long before she could press it.

8
    It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife
, PC Susi Holiday thought. A sturdily built woman of
twenty-eight, with brown curly hair and a constantly cheerful face. That line had been running through her head repeatedly ever since she had woken up this morning. She’d had a day off
yesterday, and much to her husband James’s incredulity had spent much of it watching all six episodes of the BBC production of
Pride and Prejudice
, binge-eating junk food, and
smoking an entire packet of fags. She was like that. One week all healthy, working out at the gym, not smoking, then the next being a total slob.
    Now, irreverently, she decided that another truth universally acknowledged is that no one looks their best sitting on a toilet seat with their trousers round their ankles.
    Especially not if they are dead.
    Memo to self. Please, please, please don’t die on the loo.
    The need to go to the lavatory was a frequent precursor to a heart attack. All too many did die that way.
    Like the plump old man in front of them, in the dingy, narrow little toilet in the squalid Housing Association flat with its bare pale-blue walls and unwashed underwear, socks and shirts lying
all over the floor in every room. It smelled rank: a mixture of a rancid, cheesy reek and, the worst smell in the world, a decaying human. Its tenant was named Ralph Meeks, and this was whom she
presumed, with revulsion tinged with sadness, she was now staring at. Like all G5s who had been dead for more than a couple of days, he looked more like a waxwork than a real human being. She
always found the total stillness of a cadaver both eerie and fascinating.
    His bulky frame was wedged between the walls. There were liver spots on his hands, the crimson and green blotches of advanced decomposition on his face and visible parts of his body. An
insistent swarm of blowflies crawled over his face and neck and hands, and buzzed around him.
    Folds of flesh hung from the man’s midriff, forming a canopy over his private parts. His dome was bald with little tufts of hair on either side, he had a hearing aid in his right ear, and
his mouth was frozen open in an expression of surprise, one that was mirrored in his startled, lifeless eyes. As if dying had not, she thought, irreverently, been on his list of
things to
do
that day, and certainly not in this undignified way.
    A television was on in the sparsely furnished living room, a daytime chat show on which, ironically, there was a discussion about the plight of the elderly.
    She glanced around looking for signs of anything personal. But there were no photographs, no pictures on any of the walls. She saw an ashtray full of butts, with a lighter and a packet of
cigarettes beside it, and a beer can with a half-empty glass tumbler. A small, untidy stack of old gardening magazines lay on the floor, next to a pile of
Daily Mirror
newspapers.
    Ralph Meeks had clearly been dead for a while, in here all alone. It was a sad but common story in cities. They were on the second floor of a low-rise apartment block. But Ralph Meeks had no
friends, no neighbours bothering to check he was okay, no one who had thought it odd that the post was getting more and more jammed in the letter box every day. Not until he had started to
decompose, and neighbours had begun to notice