Death

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The dead woman’s face was white, as bloodless as china. Only the veins, blue beneath the skin, provided any colour, a perfect match for the duvet under which she lay. She looked blankly out of the ground floor window of the bungalow’s main bedroom, and DI Peter Shaw thought that was the saddest detail: that she died contemplating a field of sunflowers, rather than with her eyes turned to the wall. It implied, it seemed, so much: that she’d been able to make a decision, even in the last few seconds of her life, to take with her that gold and black shimmering image of mid-afternoon summer heat. She wouldn’t have suffered. That’s what they’d tell the relatives, at least today, while they waited for the coroner to finish the tests on the body, tests on the pills beside the bed, tests on the glass of water. She wouldn’t have suffered. It was a form of words, a term of art which created a comforting image: the human body tucked up, snug, warm and at peace, which is why they wouldn’t let the relatives see the body, at least not yet. The reality of death was always shockingly unambiguous: the victim’s hand was not like any living hand, the fingers flexed up like the legs on a dead spider. And the bone structure of the woman’s face was just that, bone structure, as if the skull was already beginning to emerge from the skin. But the deadest thing of all was her left eye, the one he could clearly see, turned to the window, catching the light like a cold mirror.

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