She slurped down another forkful of sauce-sodden noodles, and shot a look at the swing doors leading to the mortuary. There were no windows, and yet she could somehow see them clearly. Not just the bags, all zipped up and labelled, but the bodies themselves, cocooned inside. The parents. The children.

She found herself imagining for the fifth or sixth time that day what they must have gone through, what they must have felt, and the raw horror of it turned her stomach.

Her Pot Noodle clacked down on her desk, barely half-finished. She glared at it accusingly, as if it had betrayed her somehow. She had been relying on it to delay her. Every second gobbling down those limited edition flavoured noodles was a second not standing over those children, not cutting into their flesh, not weighing and measuring their component parts.

But the thought of what that family had endured had soured everything. She couldn’t face another bite. Not now, not ever.

Well, OK, that was going a bit far. She still had a Bombay Bad Boy tucked away in the bottom drawer of her desk, and there was no way in hell she was letting that go to waste.

But for now, at least, eating was off the cards.

She slid down off her stool, crossed to the sink, and spent far longer than usual scrubbing up. Then, she made a stop at the PPE box, and broke her personal best for Most Time Spent Putting on Gloves.

That done, she put a hand on the door plate, but couldn’t quite summon the energy to push. Not yet. Not quite.

She was talking herself into it when the main office door opened behind her. A tall, angular man stood there, his grey pallor and sunken cheeks making him look for all the world like one of Shona’s former patients.

“I heard what happened,” he said, his voice like the crunching of dry leaves. “And I thought you might like a hand…”

Chapter Thirteen

The Big Board was filling up with scribbled Post-Its, as Sinead hurriedly jotted down the key points from Logan’s recounting of the morning’s events.

She thought of this as the ‘Brainstorming Stage’ where her job was to get as much information slapped onto the board as possible, which could then be picked apart, honed, and refined as the investigation developed.

So far, Logan had mostly focused on the where and the when of the family’s visit, which he’d gleaned from his interview (and near punch-up) with Rufus Boyle.

They had arrived one week ago—Monday evening—having booked online just a day previously. They’d tried to book an extra week, Rufus had told Logan, but there were other guests due in, and while the family had offered more than double the usual rates, the owner had held firm, being more concerned with his Airbnb review score and Superhost status than some short term financial gain.