Having spoken to Roger Dexter, Geraldine went to his house, where the body had been discovered. One lane of the road leading to the allotments had been cordoned off, and constables were stationed around the open ground. Two forensic tents had been erected, one in an allotment beside the site where the body had been found, and the other in the garden itself, with a protective awning over the fence that divided them. The corpse itself was already on its way to the mortuary for a post mortem. Geraldine drove to the house and parked near the cordon that had been placed around the pavement outside. Pulling on protective clothing and shoe covers, she followed the common approach path along the side of the house and drew close to the spot where the body had been deposited.

There was a hollow in the flower bed, where a number of orange and yellow flowers had been flattened. Presumably the body had been left there in the early hours of Monday morning, under cover of darkness, when the allotments were deserted.

‘Have we established who he was?’ she asked a white-clad scene of crime officer who was crouching down studying the crushed vegetation.

He straightened up and shook his head. ‘At the moment we’re trying to work out how someone managed to get him over the fence,’ he replied. ‘We also need to establish how he was brought here, and where the killer went once the body had been successfully deposited.’

‘And we still don’t have any idea at all who the victim might be?’ Geraldine persisted.

‘Not yet. He had no means of identification on him, in fact, nothing in his pockets at all, and his face is hardly recognisable as human. If we have no match for his DNA on the database we’ll be in the dark about who he is, unless someone reports him missing and we find him that way. What I can tell you is that he’s been dead for at least a week, but he’s not been here that long. We think he was dumped here some time last night, at a time when the roads round about would have been fairly quiet, and the allotments would have been deserted.’

‘That ties in with what the householder said,’ Geraldine agreed. ‘Whoever left him here still took a risk though. Someone could have seen what was happening.’

A team of constables were questioning all the neighbours who had windows overlooking the allotments.

The scene of crime officer grunted. ‘There was no moon last night and someone could quite feasibly have thrown a corpse over the fence at this point without anyone seeing, if they were quick about it. It would have been risky, but they must have worked out it could be done without anyone observing what was happening.’

‘A calculated risk,’ Geraldine muttered. ‘So this was carefully planned.’