he's been here a few hours,' Jenny said, familiar enough with corpses after a year as coroner not to recoil.
'Yesterday evening at the latest, I'd say,' DI Wallace replied.
The men in white overalls nodded their agreement, the larger of the two saying, 'Definitely twelve hours plus - you've only got to look at the colour of his skin.'
'Any idea of the cause of death?'
'Not yet,' Wallace said. 'Apart from the cross, there's no sign of any injury.'
'Who found him?'
'Couple of kids looking for somewhere to drink their cider. We found his clothes in the bin over there.' He nodded towards the corner of the church.
'Do we know who he is?'
'Not for certain, but a woman who lives a couple of miles down the road reported her husband missing this morning. Sounds like him - Alan Jacobs, thirty-five, senior psychiatric nurse at the Conway Unit.'
Jenny felt a cold tightness grip her chest. The Conway Unit was a secure psychiatric facility for the newly sectioned and acutely ill. At the height of her 'episode' she had once spent a single night there. Dr Travis had persuaded her it was for the best, but it was the closest thing to hell on earth she had ever known.
She looked again at the dead man. She didn't recall seeing him at the unit, though she could imagine him as a nurse. He was big, like so many of them were, but with gentle hands and a soft face.
'What do you make of the cross?' Wallace said, his tone softening a little now he could sense she wasn't vying for control.
Jenny shrugged. 'I'd say God was on his mind, or what was left of it.'
Wallace nodded, making no comment, then said, 'I've got a busy few days coming up - I persuaded the pathologist to come in and do him straight away. Is that all right with you?'
'Fine,' Jenny said, surprised he was troubling to ask. 'What's this, be nice to the coroner week?'
'You've earned yourself a reputation, Mrs Cooper,' DI Wallace said. 'And I'm trying to make Super'.'
'Right - hence the suit.'
He looked at her, puzzled, and pulled out his phone.
'Whatever . . .' She nodded at the body. 'I'll catch up with him later at the morgue.'
Leaving Wallace to his phone call, she made her way back across the churchyard.
She had a hectic week in store, too. There'd been a messy construction accident the previous Tuesday which had prompted five separate firms of lawyers to bombard her office with demands for all manner of forensic investigations to which her puny budget wouldn't stretch. The inquest, when it came, would last the best part of a month. Two workmen and a site supervisor had been crushed to death in a crane collapse, six others injured. Compared with that mess, dealing with a simple suicide would be a holiday.
She drove into the city for a light lunch at a new Italian cafe on the waterfront, sipped her mineral water like a good girl - she'd managed to stay dry since her little slip-up with Alec McAvoy - and headed out to the mortuary at Severn Vale District Hospital in time to catch the end of the autopsy.
Dr Andy Kerr was stooping across the steel counter when Jenny entered, picking over a portion of viscera. The radio was playing the same kind of tuneless R & B her teenage son inflicted on her every time they shared a car. Andy - he had somehow persuaded her not to call him Dr Kerr - was reluctantly creeping into his thirties and trying to turn the clock back. He'd recently added a gold stud to his left ear.
She tried not to look too closely at the corpse, which lay open from neck to navel on the autopsy table. 'Find anything?'
'Hold on . . .' Andy said, concentrating on his delicate task. With a pair of tweezers he lifted something tiny out from what she could now see was the dead man's stomach and placed it in a kidney dish. 'Looks like we might have a cause of death shaping up. He had a belly full of pills.'
'That makes sense. The police think he was a psychiatric nurse.'
Andy extracted another object, an undigested white tablet, and held it up to the light. 'PB 60. Phenobarbital, probably. Used to treat seizures. Depresses respiration and leads to a fairly painless death. And there's liver inflammation, which would be a side-effect of the overdose.'