There was a terrible moment when Paula misunderstood what she was looking at. The shaggy blonde hair, the square shoulders, the legs that had always brought Anne Bancroft to mind; all markers for Carol Jordan. She’d never seen her naked except in fantasy, but her imagination was enough to blur the reality in front of her for a split second. Then she understood that the dead woman sprawled on the floor was not Carol Jordan. She was the wrong body shape. Too heavy in the hips and thighs, too squat in the torso. But it had been a head-swimming moment.

Fielding had caught it too, which wasn’t going to help her respect for Paula. ‘You all right, McIntyre? I’d have thought you’d be used to this by now.’

Paula coughed into her paper mask. ‘With respect, ma’am, I never want to be used to it.’

Fielding turned away with a shrug. ‘Fair enough.’ She took a couple of steps towards the body, stooping for a closer look. ‘He didn’t want us to recognise her, that’s for sure. Look at that.’ She pointed to the mash of flesh and bone that had been the woman’s face. The naked body was a mass of bruises and abrasions. Paula had seen plenty of victims of violence, but she couldn’t remember a body that had taken such a comprehensive beating.

Then another possibility flashed across her mind. She’d been slow to make the connection. But a description of this bludgeoned woman would also fit Bev McAndrew. Her breakfast coffee burned at the back of her throat and she sidestepped a CSI photographer for a better view. For the second time, relief made her weak in the knees. This wasn’t Bev. Torin’s mother was taller and slimmer, with bigger breasts. Whoever this woman was, she wasn’t the missing pharmacist.

Paula looked around the room. It was a dismal place to die. The walls were stained with damp and mould and the floorboards were filthy with ground-in dirt. A sagging sofa faced a scarred coffee table whose missing leg had been replaced with a pile of crumbling bricks. Beer cans were piled at either end of the sofa and three ashtrays overflowed with cigarette butts and roaches. Empty blister packs of over-the-counter painkillers were scattered around among crushed boxes that had once held pizzas and burgers. The stench was a gruesome mixture of all the things she wished she’d never smelled.

Paula turned back to stare bleakly at the murdered woman. She longed for Tony Hill’s facility for reading a crime scene and understanding something of the mind that had created it. But her skills were for interrogating the living, not the dead. She’d go through the motions at the crime scene, but she knew she’d always have to rely on other specialists for what it could reveal.