Blood & Ink by Brett Adams

Author:Brett Adams [Adams, Brett]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fremantle Press
Published: 2022-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

50

Phillip Lau cursed as he reached the automatic doors to the parking lot.

Through the rain-speckled glass he could just make out the dark form of his 2003 Toyota Solara. It had been parked open-air, in a drop-off bay since lunch. He would probably get a ticket. And its door seals leaked.

With a roll of the eyes, he jammed the last piece of sugary donut into his mouth, and returned to the elevator.

Inside, he extracted his keycard from its lanyard beneath his vest, and swiped it over the security pad. He caught a brief glimpse of his own photo beaming back at him from the scratched plastic. Phillip K.T. Lau, mortuary assistant. The photo was five years old, and in it his head sported decidedly more hair. He cursed again, and punched the button for level four.

The door to the coldroom was lit by the green glow of an emergency light. Stepping inside, his fingers scrabbled across the wall for the light switches. With a clack, banks of fluorescent tubes clattered to life.

He could do the less-used hallways of Queen Mary Hospital in semi-darkness, but he had to have light, lots of it, to look at the bodies. He thought, not for the last time, that his career counsellor had given him a bum steer. He’d liked biology class. Dissections were fascinating. But human bodies? They were altogether different. They looked too much like him. The power of his imagination was too strong—he saw twitching lips, eyes that flickered open.

He walked along the face of the cold stores, breath misting in the chill, trailing a finger beneath the labels, hunting for 34-B. It was 34-B, wasn’t it?

He recalled Connie’s orders, as she’d left two hours earlier. Clocking time, and gone for a weekend of depravity, probably. Lobbing make-work over her shoulder without a care for lower-pay-grade Lau. Yeah, no one else had a life. He thought again of his car sitting quiet and cold in the lot.

‘Before you leave,’ Connie had said, ‘can you check something for me? I got a call from a police detective. Wanted me to confirm there was no evidence of tampering with 34-B, that pretty young thing from Sai Ying Pun.’

The pretty young thing from Sai Ying Pun. Sounded like a song title.

Phillip’s insides squirmed. They were the worst. The ones that looked like they were asleep. Should be years from death.

His fingers found 34-B.

The latch was stiff under his fingers, but eventually it gave with a snap and he hauled the small fridge-coffin open.

34-B lay, asleep in death.

She appeared to be asleep, but—thought Phillip—thus far invisible to the naked eye, her cells were being broken down into their constituent proteins, eaten, and excreted by a riot of bacteria, despite the three degrees Celsius of the mortuary storage unit.

Hurrying now, he bent over her head, and probed her hair. He had to lean into the coffin and crane his neck. Inches below his eyes, her lips were pale. (Was that a puff of breath? No. Just cursed imagination.

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