The Turning Tide by Brooke Magnanti Read Free Book Online Page A

of clothes. ‘At least I would have been able to make an informed decision.’
    ‘Now this,’ Rab said. The lottery ticket, and whatever else came with it, was technically as much hers as it was his.
    ‘Yeah, this,’ Erykah said. Maybe her plan could wait.
    ‘We don’t even have a prenup,’ he said.
    ‘We sure don’t,’ she smiled.

 
     
     
    : 4 :
    A few miles away from Morag Munro’s constituency office, the Cameron Bridge mortuary was bucking local trends. Business on the high street might have fallen to all time lows, but traffic through the morgue was very good indeed.
    The reason was accidents. Loads of them. Although the year-round local population was shrinking and few murders happened in town, the tourist trade in misadventure on the hillsides was booming. Keen walkers and climbers might have been giving the local shops a miss but they were falling off the mountains with a vengeance.
    Thirty-six people had met their ends in the vicinity in the previous year. The bodies were duly transported to a barn-like building tucked up one end of a glen like a dirty secret. Winter brought the ice climbers, the skiers, and many more. Avalanches claimed the greatest number of winter adventurers, followed by a couple of ice-climbing accidents, and one young woman on Hogmanay who reckoned that flip-flops and board shorts were appropriate climbing gear for January. Drivers as well, unused to icy conditions, often came a cropper.
    Today’s mortuary excitement was neither an accident-prone tourist nor a careless driver. For the helicopter team that had collected the bagged human remains found on the beach in Raasay, the Cameron Bridge facility was nearest. It was here the decomposing body in a bag first rejoined the mainland and here it would be autopsied.
    Mortuary assistant Iain Laudale opened up the post-mortem suite. The lights flickered to life one by one. Half a dozen stainless steel autopsy stations stood like monuments in the main theatre, each with an examination table, rolling cart for surgical instruments, and a tap and hose.
    Iain swung open the doors of the body refrigerator with a calm born of routine. He rolled a green trolley up to the edge and tugged on a handle inside the refrigerator, pulled a tray inside onto the trolley. On the tray sat a long white body bag. Whatever was inside was distinctly not body-shaped.
    The cavernous room was cool, almost too cold to work, but he was used to worse. Iain’s head nodded to the rhythm of a death metal mix CD playing in the background. The overhead fluorescent lights gave his buzz cut a greenish cast. His face had the etched look of a man who grew up fast and stayed there. His skinny arms were covered in tattoos, remnants of years on the terraces as a Rangers fan and, later, in the Army. It was the service that took a teenager with no skills, apart from tanning a bottle of Buckie, and gave him a vocation. They taught him how to collect up a body, to prepare it for what came next.
    But it also taught him cynicism. The hard way, looking at rows of bodies shrouded and waiting for the cargo plane. He learned that the slogans and songs on the terraces about honour and tradition were only songs and that the Army he’d idolised had an insatiable appetite for young flesh.
    Iain switched on an industrial-grade bug zapper and it flickered to life. Standard operating procedure with a decomp. No matter how well the morgue was cleaned after the autopsies, inevitably a few flies would escape, and maggots were a concern. Even in winter, even in the cold of Scotland’s west coast. The body had picked up a few sandflies when it washed up on that beach and probably worse.
    Iain hadn’t been squeamish to start with, but the stint with the Army had turned him into a hardened pro. After fishing parts of Omagh bombing victims out of gutters, anything else was easy by comparison. When he left the service he joined a forensic recovery company and did some airline crash and mass grave