Tom didn’t mention that despite the fact she had summoned him, Philippa had kept him waiting for ten minutes.

‘The gas analysis shows no sign of helium, but obviously we can’t rule out nitrogen, although it’s impossible to prove. The blood and urine results were confusing. There were traces of sedatives, maybe enough to make her compliant while she was killed, but insufficient to render her unconscious and definitely not enough to kill her. We don’t know what we’re looking at here, Philippa, and if Jumbo and Amy—’

Philippa held up her hand.

‘I know. They did a good job. I’m not saying stop investigating it, of course. What I’m saying is that I don’t think it should be your focus. Give it to DI Robinson and move on to some of the other cases.’

The subtext to this was that Philippa thought gang-related murders were more important than the death of a young woman who as yet had not been identified, suggesting she wasn’t missed. It had been several days now, and appeals for information were yielding nothing.

‘Just before we give up on this altogether, I want to delve a bit more deeply into the drugs,’ Tom said. ‘I haven’t had a chance to share this with Becky or the team yet, but the hair analysis shows that during the ninety-day window they were able to test she’d taken a very strange concoction – PCP, psilocybin and MDPV. That’s a weird mix of hallucinogens, dissociatives and synthetics.’

Even Philippa looked shocked. MDPV, commonly known as ‘bath salts’, could result in aggressive behaviour, while the other two were known to induce confusion, impair memory and cause no end of visual distortion. They needed to look at the results in far more detail before they could get close to drawing any conclusions.

‘Do you think she might have been trafficked? If she was being used in the sex trade, that might explain the mix of drugs.’

‘Dr Sanders said there were no signs of recent sexual activity – at least in the hours before she died – but it’s certainly something we should consider. There were traces of scopolamine too, but taken at the start of the ninety-day period, and it may well have been legit. Perhaps she’d been on a trip and it had been prescribed for motion sickness. Until we know who she is, it’s impossible to say.’