Ted stood back as an assistant finished opening the bag. A search of the contents would be carried out first. Post-mortems often took a few hours to complete on, say, an eighty-year-old woman who’d fallen over in a nursing home. However, the autopsy of a murder victim was the final opportunity for the dead to speak, and so Ted took his time. Kelly knew that he’d work straight until he was satisfied, and he’d be here for as long as it took. Everything was recorded methodically into the microphone almost touching his mouth, and secured around his head. Kelly found a chair and sat down. Mary was in the best hands, and Ted would flag up anything unusual. Kelly watched as he walked around the body, noting anything that stood out to him. He peered up close and stood back intermittently, curious and serious at the same time.

‘It looks like she was restrained.’ He pointed to contusions around her wrists. ‘There’s bruising around her mouth too, look: it sweeps up each side like the force of a gag. Remember I told you that bruises go on developing after death?’

Kelly nodded. It made her wretched with pity for the woman.

‘There might be some usable DNA in those cheek scratches,’ Ted said, nodding at the victim’s face. Deep welts penetrated the delicate skin. He examined them with a magnifying lens and removed some tissue with tweezers.

An assistant photographed the numerous wounds on her torso and Ted took a pair of scissors and snipped off Mary’s blouse. He stood back and put down the scissors.

‘I don’t think there was just one weapon.’

‘Really?’ Kelly went over to the table and tried not to look directly at the deep lacerations into the flesh, but she caught sight of the damage and winced. She’d seen stab wounds plenty of times before and it never got easier.

‘This one is slightly different in shape to, say, this one,’ he said, pointing to two vicious slashes in the victim’s chest.

‘I can’t see properly,’ said Kelly.

‘You see this one is nice and neat? It looks like a perfect shard of glass, like a fish’s mouth: it is larger in the middle and symmetrical.’

Kelly nodded. Her heart pounded.

‘Whereas this one is larger at one side and has left rather a hole shape here, then tapers off upwards.’

‘Oh, yes.’ Kelly did see now, but her head felt hot. ‘And what does it mean?’

‘Until I measure them and track the direction I can’t say, but what I can say is that two weapons were used. My technician said that a weapon remained in her chest when she was bagged. I had it removed.’

‘It was a standard kitchen knife.’

‘Agreed. It looks like it made these wounds: the ones tapering off to one side, like most kitchen knives are designed to do.’

‘Two killers?’