I didn’t have time to get my head around the involvement of the Lord Chancellor because I was suddenly assailed by the smell of decaying flesh. It was overpowering, and coming from up ahead. I caught up with the female officer who had shouted and whose torch was spotlighting a bare leg. The skin was white and the toenails were painted red.

‘Oh, Jesus Christ,’ said Bancho.

It was a bloodbath. Her chest was gaping and she’d been butchered. Her Burberry raincoat lay sideways beneath her like a blanket. The left side draped down over her head and the right tucked up between her legs.

‘Are you sure it’s her? The woman you’re looking for?’ I asked Bancho.

‘I recognize the coat,’ he said dully.

I shone my torch on the body as he donned latex gloves and peeled the coat away, bottom flap first, to see if she had been stripped or violated. Then, much more quickly, he flipped back the fabric covering her head and let out a relieved groan. Whoever had once lived and breathed in this body, it was clear from his reaction that it wasn’t DI Sam Jones.

‘I’ll speak to you in a minute,’ he snarled at me before moving off into an urgent huddle with the other officers.

No, he wouldn’t. It would be much later. I looked at my watch and realized Marshall’s six hours were up.

Bancho would have to wait.

Chapter Forty-Four

I slipped away and made my way back to the bike, intending to head straight to St Leonards, but there were two messages and two missed calls, all from Agnes Sampson, the procurator fiscal, on my mobile. The messages demanded a reply, regardless of the hour. I took her at her word, and was amazed when she picked up straight away. ‘This is quite a surprise,’ I said. In nearly ten years at the bar, a head fiscal had never phoned me out of hours.

‘The dean wanted to call you, but I thought it might sound better coming from me.’ How odd, I thought. The dean of the Faculty of Advocates hated me; he wasn’t ever polite or even civil to me, and he thought I didn’t know he referred to me as Arbuthnot’s bastard’. My back was up at the mere mention of his name. ‘This suggestion might have been best coming from your grandfather, but he is unavailable,’ she said. I nodded. It was well known he could emotionally blackmail me into doing almost anything he wanted, so I said a prayer of gratitude that he was on his cruise.

‘I know it’s the middle of the night, but I’m rather busy, Agnes. Just spit it out.’

‘Do you recall the Matthew Cook case?’ she asked.