In her head, a clock started ticking, taking her into the recent past and a crime scene outside Liverpool that she hadn’t been directly involved in but one she remembered clearly.

Number two, she thought. But a first time outing in Liverpool for the perpetrator.

She looked back and saw Detective Sergeant Karl Stone, a tall thin man with prematurely grey hair slicked back, at the head of an advancing human triangle, the base of which consisted of Detective Sergeant Terry Mason and Sergeant Paul Price from Scientific Support.

A seagull landed close to the woman’s body, looked it up and down with jet-black eyes.

Clay quickened her pace in the direction of the body, deeper into the freezing mist that masked the Wirral Peninsula on the opposite bank of the River Mersey.

The destruction to the dead woman’s face was now clear to see.

Her eyeballs poked out of the sockets and her swollen and bitten tongue jutted out of her mouth.

Definitely number two.

Clay recalled an image from a local television news broadcast that had quickly progressed into the national media.

Sandra O’Day, a slim blonde woman in her mid twenties, slaughtered in the late summer twenty or so miles away in Warrington.

Clay looked down at what was left of the woman in front of her and thought, yes, the same again.

Where her shoulder-length hair should have hung down in sorrowful clumps, there was nothing except the side of her head, her left ear missing, leaving a pitiful hole in her face.

Clay stood where the seagull had just flown up from and looked at the body from the feet upwards.

Her feet were blue but there was no apparent damage to them.

‘Anything?’ called Stone.

‘She’s not the perpetrator’s first. I’m guessing she was a natural blonde,’ replied Clay.

‘How do you know?’

Her legs were slim and long, just like the other victim she knew of, and her face was a knot of purple muscle.

‘He’s skinned her face and scalped her.’

In the sky to the east, the first crooked finger of muddy light appeared, pointing down in the direction of the docks at Garston, and reminded her of just how close to home she was.

Clay pictured her son, Philip, asleep in his bed and her husband, Thomas, getting up in their bedroom, ready for the start of another day without her because she had been drawn away by the imperative of work.

She dismissed any notion of home as her eyes paused at the surreal sight of the woman’s limp hands, fingers floating strangely in the shallow pool around them, as if there was a semblance of life still in her.

What’s he doing with the part of you he removed? she asked herself, taking a series of deep breaths to bottle the sour emotion the question provoked and the bitter taste in her mouth that accompanied it.