“Any chance he drowned?”

The doctor examined Luke’s mouth for signs of foam and his eyes for the telltale petechial hemorrhages associated with asphyxia, of which drowning is a form. He shook his head and turned back to Annie. “Hard to be certain. We’ll have a better idea when Dr. Glendenning checks the lungs and runs a diatomic analysis.”

Diatoms, Annie knew from her basic courses in forensic science, were microorganisms that lived in the water. If you drowned, you breathed in a lot of them with the water and they spread to every nook and cranny of your body, even your bone marrow; if you hadn’t drowned but were found dead in water, then a few diatoms might be found, but they would be nowhere near as abundant or widely spread.

Dr. Burns turned the body over and pointed to the back of Luke’s head. Annie could see the signs of a blow. “Would that have been enough to cause death?” she asked.

“Hard blow to the cerebellum?” said Dr. Burns. “Certainly.” He began to examine the body in more detail. “He’s cold,” he said, “and there’s no rigor.”

“What does that tell you?”

“Usually a body is cold after eight to ten hours in the water. I’ll have to take his temperature to substantiate this, of course, and we’ll need to know the temperature of the water, too. As for the rigor, given the obvious effects of water on his skin, it must have come and gone.”

“How long does that take?”

“In water? Anything from two to four days.”

“Not sooner?”

“Not usually, no. Again, though, I’ll have to make some temperature checks. It might be summer but we’ve hardly been enjoying seasonal temperatures of late.”

Two days, Annie thought. It was Thursday afternoon now, and the ransom demand had come two days ago, on Tuesday evening. Was Luke already dead by then? If so, his death had nothing to do with her rash actions. She began to feel a glimmer of hope. If that was the case, then the kidnapper was trying to cash in on Luke’s death, which could have come about for other reasons. Curious. She would have to begin casting about for a motive now.

The sound of an approaching van interrupted Annie’s stream of thought, and she looked across to the wall to see DS Nowak and his SOCO team jumping the stile one after another, looking like sheep in their white protective clothing. Well, she thought, maybe the experts would be able to tell her a bit more.

Banks arrived half an hour early for his meeting with Michelle, parked in the short stay round the back of the town hall and cut through the arcade to Bridge Street, where he nipped into Waterstone’s and bought a book called The Profession of Violence, the story of the Kray twins. As he walked up the busy street toward the square, he marveled at how much the city center had changed since his day. For a start, it was all pedestrian precinct now, not busy roads the way it had been when he lived there. And it seemed cleaner, the buildings less shabby and grime-coated. It was a sunny afternoon, and tourists wandered in and out of the cathedral grounds into the square to spend a while browsing through the shops. Banks found it all quite pleasant, which didn’t square with his memory of being stuck in a dirty, small-minded provincial backwater. Maybe it was he who had changed the most.