Oxygen escaped from the flooded pothole and, to Clay’s ears, it sounded like the water was sobbing for the woman it had yielded to the earth.

Clay saw the tattoo on her wrist.

MAND-E.

‘Get a picture of her tattoo, Paul,’ said Clay.

Clay and Hendricks folded her arms at her sides and, as she zipped up the bag covering the woman’s dignity, she estimated that she was five feet seven in height.

MAND-E.

Clay wondered if her name was Mandy or Amanda.

Like the others, she thought, rising to her full height, you’ll be blonde. Pretty, no doubt. Lonely. Woefully unlucky.

She shivered as Harper and Kline lifted her from the ground in the body bag.

‘Where’s Doctor Lamb?’

‘Waiting for us in the mortuary.’

‘Bill, will you go with them, watch the autopsy and feed me any information as and when it crops up.’

Hendricks followed the APTs towards Menlove Avenue, the saddest of funeral processions.

Clay took out her iPhone, felt the dead woman’s skin on her palms and fingers as if she was still holding on to her flesh.

The rain began again. Ripples formed on the surfaces of flooded potholes and the wind pressed down on the back of Clay’s head as she trudged through a tunnel of misery.

20

4.45 pm

The Ghoul opened the door and stepped into the next room.

The basement was red and black.

From the ceiling, the red glow from the faulty fluorescent light was broken up by flashes of stuttering darkness that plunged the space into night.

There was writing on the wall facing the beds, words they could read over and over and trigger wonder as to their meaning.

The bare brick walls that held up the weight of the house were textured with blood and tears, human excrement, sweat and urine, physical outpourings of misery in a space with no window, a space that had never seen the light of day.

Against the left- and right-hand walls, at the furthest point from the wooden steps leading down into the basement, were two narrow beds, their thin mattresses coated in the same cocktail of substances that covered the walls. Attached to the walls alongside the beds were heavy chains, piled up on the mattresses as their former guests no longer had need of the shackles.

The Ghoul’s condensed breath looked like a haze of blood in the moments when the red fluorescent light poured into the space and the engines of the coolers that kept the room at freezing point whirred like mythical birds sent down to earth by angry gods to punish womankind for her heinous sins.

Between the beds, at the dead centre of the basement, was a metal table on wheels, loaded with surgical implements, hypodermic needles and clear and coloured chemicals in plastic containers.