She peeled off her gloves and dumped them in the bin, then crept over to the other bones. The skull sat at the head of the table, missing the top set of teeth. The vertebrae were arranged in a line underneath, with gaps marking the ones that hadn’t turned up on Logan’s roof, but nearly all the rib bones were there, laid out in a disjointed fan down either side. Then the pelvis. And then the two femurs. Dr Graham pointed at the hands: thin cylinders of bone arranged on two sheets of paper, each bit fitting inside the wobbly biro outlines. ‘As far as I can tell, the fingers you found came from the same body. We’re missing the carpals and a couple of metacarpals. And there’s no distal phalanges at all, but fingertips are really small and fiddly so it’s possible they just blew off the roof. Or they were so mangled after being boiled in bleach they just fell apart.’

Logan pulled a photograph from his pocket and placed it on the table beside the skeletal hand. ‘Is this our necklacing victim? ’

‘Ah.’ She frowned at the picture of Anthony Chung. ‘Actually, if everything goes to plan I’ll get the epidermis on the reconstruction tomorrow. It would’ve been quicker, but I had to make the mould, and cast the skull, and examine the new skeleton. . .’

‘But it could be him, right? Isobel said the victim had liver damage – and this guy was a serious drinker. Bottle of vodka a day serious. Two: his girlfriend’s obsessed with a book where witch-finders execute people by necklacing them. And three: she suffers from psychotic episodes, and she’s been off her medication for weeks.’

‘Well. . .’ Her eyebrows and cheeks twitched, as if there was something wriggling around under the skin. ‘No. It’s not him.’

‘Are you sure? ’

Beneath his tabloid blanket, Dr Ramsey snorted and twitched, making the chairs creak.

‘Shhh. . .’ Dr Graham froze, staring at the duty doctor until he rolled over onto his back and the snoring started again. ‘Trust me: this isn’t our victim.’

‘But—’

‘If it was, I’d have expected rounder eye sockets and a flatter front to the skull as well. Plus there should be a rounded palate and the incisors would be shovel-shaped, but our victim’s teeth are spatulate. I know the body would have looked a bit – and I’m not meaning to be racially insensitive here – yellowy during post mortem, but that’s because the blood settles in the areas closest to the ground.’ She picked up the photo and handed it back to Logan. ‘He wasn’t from the Far East. And he wasn’t in his late teens, early twenties, either.’

‘Oh. . .’ So much for that theory. It wasn’t Agnes Garfield’s boyfriend. She wasn’t on a psychotic rampage.