Unti Lucy Black Novel #3 Read Free

very little damage,” Lucy observed. “To his face and that. You’d think he’d look worse if he’d been in the water a while. I wasn’t even sure he was dead until I felt his hand.”
    Elma frowned. “Yes. There’s very little visible bloating, so you’d think he couldn’t be dead that long. You know, he looks quite peaceful actually,” she added, stepping back a little and regarding the body.
    The victim was an elderly man, his hair, though muddied and entangled with weeds from the water, was undoubtedly graying. His eyes remained closed, his mouth pursed. Lucy could see now that, rather than wearing a suit, as she had told DI Fleming, the victim wore gray trousers and a dark green blazer, over a cream shirt and a green tie.
    â€œSo what do you reckon?” Lucy asked. “Suicide?”
    â€œPresumably,” Elma said. Suddenly, she leaned down close to the body, her attention caught by something just visible in the man’s nose. “Wait a minute.”
    She straightened and, moving across the room to one of the drawers, pulled out a pair of tweezers.
    â€œWhat are you doing?” Lucy asked, edging in closer.
    â€œHe has something in his nose,” the woman said. She held the tweezers between finger and thumb and, using them, reached up into the nasal cavity, gripped the edge of the object protruding from it and pulled. As she did so, a roll of dirty material emerged.
    â€œJesus,” Lucy said, her stomach turning. “What is that?”
    â€œCotton wool, I think,” Elma said, angling her head as she examined the material under the light before setting it down in a metal kidney dish on the bench next to her. She moved across to the body again, leaned down and shone a small pen torch into the man’s nostrils.
    â€œDo you know what?” she said, straightening up. “Not only is this man dead, but I think he’s already been embalmed, too.”

 
    Chapter Four
    â€œP LANNING YOUR OWN funeral is one thing, but going through with the thing before you throw yourself in the river? That’s a remarkable feat,” the doctor commented a few minutes later.
    The victim lay on his back on the table at the center of the room, stripped to his underwear. Several incision marks were evident on his trunk in addition to roughly stitched wounds inside his thighs.
    Elma pointed to them with a gloved finger as they examined the body. “They must have used the femoral artery for the embalming drain,” she’d said. “See?”
    Lucy nodded, not quite wanting to look too closely. Instead, she stared at the side of the man’s head, the slightly sunken cheeks creating the impression of a waxy hollow above his jawline. For a moment, she was reminded of examining her father’s damaged face only an hour earlier.
    â€œSo, not only was your victim already dead before he went in the water,” Elma said, peeling off the gloves now and dropping them in the waste bin by the table. “But he’d already been embalmed.”
    â€œAnd judging by his clothes, possibly waked and boxed, too,” Lucy added.
    It was traditional that, following death, the remains of the dead would be embalmed, then laid in an open coffin for a two-­day wake, before the funeral on the third day, so that mourners could pay their final respects before burial. Generally, the deceased would be well dressed. If that was the case here, Lucy reasoned, then the man had been dead for a few days at the very least.
    â€œSo, if he was waked, how the hell did he end up in the water?”
    â€œThat’s one question,” the doctor noted. “The other is ‘Who is he?’ ”
    Lucy nodded. “I’ll contact the local undertakers and see if anyone recognizes him. Any indications of how he actually died?”
    Elma shook her head. “Natural causes, by the looks of it.”
    â€œNo PM stitching?” Lucy guessed.