She placed the cleaned skull on a little plinth, slotting it onto a rod set into the base. ‘Resin cast. Dr McAllister wouldn’t let me use the real one for the facial reconstruction. It’s a bit of extra work, but on the plus side it no longer counts as human remains, so we can forget all that rubbish about having to be supervised by a “registered medical practitioner with five years’ experience”. . . As if I’m going to take a can opener to someone’s skull, or use it as a football.’

Logan leaned against the cold stainless-steel surface. ‘So what’s the diagnosis? ’

‘Well, he’s definitely dead.’ She grinned. Then cleared her throat. ‘Sorry. I’ve mapped out the tissue depth and cut the markers, so all I need to do is apply them and I can get on with the real work. . .’ A little crease appeared between her eyebrows. ‘You didn’t put ice on that, did you.’

‘Didn’t have any. And fish fingers didn’t work.’

‘No, probably not.’ She pulled over a small metal tray, laid out with discs of pale rubber, as if she’d cut them off the end of pencils – each one marked with a number in black ink. ‘You know, with bones we can tell almost everything about a person: what they ate, where they lived, where they lived before that, height, weight, sex, ethnicity. . .’ A dab of glue went on the end of a disc, then she fixed it right in the middle of the skull’s forehead.

‘What happened to Dr Dempsey? ’

‘Sulking. Threatening legal action.’

‘You hit him first? ’

A shrug. Marker number one was joined by two and three. ‘He pushed me.’

Logan nodded up at the shiny black globe hanging from the ceiling over the central cutting table, like a store security camera. ‘Tell him it’s all on film.’

‘Your victim was male, Caucasian.’ Four, five, and six followed the ridge of the eyebrows. ‘To be honest, he’s been spoiling for a fight for years, ever since I got sent to Iraq instead of him. Said he should be the one digging bodies out of mass graves, not me. . .’ She sat back and tilted her head to one side. ‘Blue, brown, or green? ’

Shrug. ‘Blue? ’

‘Brown’s more neutral.’ Dr Graham dipped into her massive handbag and pulled out a wooden box, a little bigger than a pencil case. When she opened it, three pairs of glass eyes stared back at Logan. She plucked the brown eyes from the box, then fiddled around with rubber batons and glue until they were staring out from the skull instead. ‘There we go, much better.’

Seriously? It looked like something out of a cheap horror film.

‘Can’t you just do all this on computers? ’