‘I am a clinician. This is supposed to be scientific, not emotional.’ He shrugged, doing his ‘helpless’ face. ‘But you’re right, it is cold. Would you prefer me to talk about “intersections”? That always sounds like a traffic report to me.’ He took the proffered photographs and slipped them out of the folder. In the dim light of the hallway, he flipped through them quickly, taking a first impression of the body and its surroundings. Then he tugged a pair of owlish black-rimmed specs from his inside pocket and put them on. ‘I’m getting old,’ he said. ‘I can’t see detail without my glasses.’ Taking his time, he studied each photograph from different angles. ‘I once had a tutor, quite a young bloke, who thought wearing glasses made people take him more seriously. One day, I was sitting behind him when he took them off to polish them and I realised they were plain glass. Whether it was vanity or insecurity that drove him to it, it cost him my respect. And because I was young and smart-arsed, I told my fellow students what I’d spotted. So the trick he’d used to earn gravitas ended up making him look a fool.’

‘And there endeth the sermon for today,’ Paula said. ‘What about my crime scene?’

Tony sighed. ‘I’m wasted here. All that hard-won wisdom, and where does it get me?’ He selected a full-length shot of Nadia’s body. ‘What did Grisha say about the damage to her body?’

‘He said he’d given her a good kicking. Probably with steel-toecapped boots.’

‘What about stamp marks? Did he say anything about that?’

‘He made a point of saying the killer got lucky because he couldn’t see any stamp marks.’

‘And that’s the dog that didn’t bark in the night,’ Tony said. ‘He didn’t stamp on her, which is the natural thing to do when you’re frenziedly attacking someone and they fall on the ground. You kick and you stamp. So right there, you’ve got a contradiction. Battering her face to a bloody pulp, to the point where she’s unrecognisable, that looks like frenzy. As if the killer is out of control. But the fact that he very carefully doesn’t stamp on her suggests his actions are deliberate. He’s thought this through. He doesn’t want to leave forensic traces. He doesn’t want to get caught.’

‘So why the overkill on the face?’