Doctor Lamb looked at Clay, read her eyes, and glanced up at the faulty light above them. She turned to her ATP and said, ‘Harper, please turn that light off or we’ll all be going home with migraines.’

‘What did the pathologist from Warrington come up with, Doctor Lamb?’ asked Detective Sergeant Bill Hendricks from the theatre viewing gallery.

The intensity of light in the autopsy suite dimmed and Clay stood at the foot of the aluminium board on which lay Annie Boyd’s disfigured corpse.

Doctor Lamb looked at Hendricks, a tall man with dark cropped hair and eyes full of sharp intelligence, and addressed him.

‘First of all, whoever’s done this is skilled at what they’re doing. In the case of Sandra O’Day, the scalping and removal of facial tissue was done with infinite care and skill.’ Doctor Lamb shone torchlight over the dead woman’s jawline, at the cleanest of cuts. ‘Just like in this case. Cause of death, strangulation. There’s a note on Sandra O’Day’s autopsy report. An NB. Warrington Police know that she met the man who murdered her through an internet dating site called Pebbles On The Beach. They learned this from a forensic search of her laptop. Her iPhone was never recovered.’

Clay looked at the young woman and despite the faulty light now being off, she felt the sensation in her head tighten up a notch.

This raises the possibility, thought Clay, processing a jet-black thought, that there are other, undiscovered victims in the north-west of England. And most certainly, there will be more to come.

‘Doctor Lamb, if the person doing these scalpings was a football team, where would you place them?’

‘Top of the English Premiership, potential European champions.’

Clay made a mental note to ask DC Cole to trawl through the missing persons of other constabularies in the north-west of England in search of blonde females, in their twenties, who’d gone missing and had not reappeared.

‘Have you ever come across anything like this in the past, Doctor Lamb?’ asked Hendricks.

Doctor Lamb turned her torch off and looked to the viewing gallery.

‘I’ve seen countless body parts taken for trophies, some taken with care, many taken with savage brutality. But, no. I’ve never seen scalping and facial tissue removal on this scale.’

Doctor Lamb stooped and placed her face close to the discoloured marks that ran around the flesh on the woman’s throat just beneath the red raw muscle where her face had once been. Clay observed her counting down silently from five to one.

Standing to her full height, Doctor Lamb looked directly at Clay.