‘None of them were fatal, they don’t go deep enough,’ Ted said. He took clippings of her nails and noted the bruising on her fingers and lower arms, indicating a good fight.

‘She was aware when she was set upon.’

‘She must have been terrified.’

Ted measured the bites carefully.

‘There are three different jaw measurements. That’s three animals, at least.’

‘But it wasn’t a frenzy, so maybe they were called off.’

Ted agreed.

Kelly avoided looking at the faces of those she saw dead, unless it was the initial crime scene investigation, because here, on the stainless steel slab, with no dignity left, and a trail of bereaved relatives waiting expectantly for the police to catch those responsible, she found it difficult to face them. They were so vulnerable, even in death, on the slab. It also brought home the terror they’d suffered before their last breath.

Ted spent a long time examining her neck and head, considering the statistic that most homicides involved blunt force trauma to the vital physical structures protected therein.

‘Come and look at this,’ he said, stopping his search. His face told Kelly that he’d found something important. She looked at the side of Carry’s neck, behind her ear. Crudely knifed into the skin was a rough tattoo, etched there in a sloppy, amateur fashion. The sides were encrusted and Ted wiped away the scabs to reveal an unskilful but indisputable carving of the Moon Goddess symbol. An untrained eye would have missed it but Ted’s experience and knowledge of the largest organ of the body – the skin – gave him the tools necessary to spot discrepancies such as this mark. It was red around the outside and an inky colour had been applied to it.

‘Was she alive?’

‘By the way the skin has reacted, I’d say yes.’

‘Oh God.’

It was photographed from all angles and entered into Ted’s oral record via his microphone. He carried on silently, and Kelly could tell that he was thinking about how this young woman suffered. She must have been severely disabled to allow such mutilation. Or scared beyond sanity.

‘I can’t see any evidence of swelling on the cranial surfaces, and there’s no evidence of ligature or other types of strangulation.’ Ted returned to his step by step process. That was his anchor. It was how he got through it: a trusty methodical approach that allowed him to concentrate on the evidence before him. Kelly realised that it wasn’t glaringly obvious how Carry Tomlin had met her end; just that, so far, she’d been set upon by dogs, and tortured. Whether that horrible experience was linked to her final demise was still unclear. It was also obvious that the young woman had been tied at the wrist. Like the Mary Hales murder, Kelly could see signs that the killer had enjoyed the ritual.