Empty crisp packets, cigarette butts, and plastic fizzy-juice bottles were piled up in little drifts on the stairs. Logan picked his way through them then punched his ID into the keypad. ‘The Kintore body was lying in the middle of a magic circle identical to the one witch-finders use in the book. All the cuts – that was Agnes looking for the Devil’s mark, that’s in the book too. There was a knot of bones outside the back door, like the ones outside my house: they’re in the book. Of course it’s her.’

Inside, the hum and roar of the extractor fans made the ceiling tiles rattle.

Logan stuck his head into the staff room, but it was empty. The pathologists’ office too. The red light was on above the cutting-room door: probably still working on the poor sod who’d ended up tried for witchcraft on a kitchen floor in an abandoned house.

Steel slapped him on the shoulder. ‘You know what this means, don’t you? If you’d no’ farted about and actually done something about finding her, none of this would’ve happened! She’d be banged up in the loony bin, and those poor sods would still be alive.’

‘Think I don’t know that? ’ He pushed through the door into the viewing area – a small room with two seats and a heavy red velvet curtain down one wall. He pulled at the cord behind it and they creaked open.

Dr Graham was on the other side of the glass, where the bodies were normally displayed, hunched over her clay-covered skull, tongue sticking out the corner of her mouth. She looked up and smiled at them. Then turned the reconstructed head around and held it up.

Steel squinted at it. Took a step forward until her nose was pressed up against the glass. ‘Does he look familiar to you? ’

‘Who the hell are you? ’ Steel picked up the reconstructed head, turning it back and forth while the kettle boiled.

The staff room was just cold enough to be uncomfortable. Half-size lockers took up most of one wall, each of them decor-ated with stickers and bits cut out of newspapers. The one with the ‘SHEILA DALRYMPLE’ nameplate was covered in My Little Pony stickers and unicorns and teddy bears in tutus. A lime-green Post-it note glared out from the saccharine montage, with ‘STOP STEALING MY BLOODY JAFFA CAKES!!!!!’ scrawled across it in angry letters. A faint whiff of ruptured bowel and rotting meat oozed in through the gap under the staff-room door that led out onto the ‘dirty areas’, the parts of the mortuary members of the public weren’t allowed to see. The places where the bodies were loaded, stored, and dissected.

Logan dumped teabags into mugs. ‘Maybe he’s one of Agnes Garfield’s teachers? Or a friend of the family? ’