‘DI Stephens, it’s Jack Ledford.’

‘Jack, good news I hope?’

‘Good? Detective, I’ve been dissecting human corpses this morning. Young people whose lives were taken away from them quite cruelly. I’m not sure there’s much good about that.’

Why did he always have to twist the meaning of her words like that?

‘But I do have some results for you.’

‘I’ll be there right away,’ Dani said, before ending the call. ‘I need to go to the mortuary,’ she said to Easton.

‘You want me to come too?’

Dani looked at her watch. ‘No. You’ve got a lead here. Drop me at the mortuary then pick someone from HQ to accompany you and go find Ethan Grant. You’re happy handling that, aren’t you?’

‘Of course. Sounds better than spending the rest of the afternoon with a stinking corpse, to be honest.’

‘DS Easton, that’s no way to talk about Birmingham’s finest pathologist.’

Dani looked over at Easton and he gave a cheeky smile.

The traffic was kind to them and not long after, Dani stepped from the car outside the mortuary. She took a deep breath of fresh air then headed inside, working her way through the corridors of the building to where she knew Ledford was located.

With each step she took the air felt heavier and the smell of rot and death and decay grew. No matter how much bleach, industrial cleaner and air freshener was used, there was simply nothing that could be done to mask the grotesque smell of a morgue – a smell that infected every pore of Dani’s body whenever she visited.

She’d only been a fresh-faced DC when she’d witnessed her first post-mortem. She’d felt queasy from the moment the procedure had started but had held firm, trying to be strong and to see the ordeal through. She hadn’t managed it. At the point the bone saw crunched its way through the dead woman’s skull, Dani had gagged. When the pathologist had then removed the skull cap with a sickly squelching and sucking sound, exposing the cadaver’s shrivelled brain, Dani had been physically sick right there on the spot, in the middle of the examination room. The thick lumpy vomit had covered herself, the floor and the pathologist’s trouser legs.

That had not gone down well.

Dani had been the butt of jokes for quite a while after that, and she felt like it had taken equally long to get rid of the smell. She’d showered as soon as she could when she’d got home, and three times more that day, but the godawful smell lingered for weeks.

She’d never become used to post-mortems, and didn’t know how any person could willingly do that for a job, but as an experienced DI she could at least now bear the sight of someone’s brain being removed without spewing her guts.