The screen of his laptop was filled with an image from the River Irwell from the tail end of the previous summer, a picture of Sandra O’Day’s remains, her bloated body half in the water, the top half caught up on the bank, a dead woman without a face or a scalp.

‘What does he do with their faces and scalps?’ asked Stone.

‘Time will tell,’ replied Cole, focusing on the next job Clay had asked him to do as she stood in the mud on the bottom of the River Mersey: finding out if any women from Liverpool in their twenties to forties, blondes to begin with, had been reported missing in the last two weeks.

4

8.51 am

Edgar McKee turned back the left-hand sleeve of his white tunic and saw that it was getting on for nine o’clock. The time was near for two significant arrivals into the Stanley Abattoir.

The smudge of a cheap and ill-advised tattoo chipped into his line of vision and, not for the first time, he regretted having invaded his own flesh with ink and needle.

The noise of the machinery revving up for the day’s labour was deadened by the red ear defenders sitting either side of the mesh that kept his hair where it should be and off the flesh of the beasts he had to process that day. He scratched his head, felt the velcro-like hooks of the hairs on his scalp irritate his fingertips.

He looked out of the tall window overlooking Old Swan and saw the cattle truck turning into the abattoir compound from Prescot Road.

Breathing in the disinfectant that the night cleaners had doused the walls and the floors with, and the chemicals used to sanitise the equipment from the beginning to the end of the killing and carving process, he could smell yesterday’s butchery beneath the surface, and beneath that the butchery of decades.

As the cattle truck backed in to the reception area, Edgar removed his ear defenders and listened hard to what lay beneath the immediate noises around him.

He closed his eyes and pictured the scene, the job he had first worked on in his early days in the abattoir, the meet and greet role.

The tailgate opened and down the ramp came the first of the dumb cattle, eyes accustomed to open spaces and barns confused by the brick and concrete reception area. They lowed as the procession of flesh was sucked into the abattoir’s gaping jaws.

Edgar felt his pulse thicken and his heart beat faster as memory collided with the sound of the present, the cattle’s disharmonious voices in the distance beneath the immediate and insistent thrum of the machinery close at hand.