Grabbing her bag, Geraldine hurried away, relieved that her friend was no longer upset with her. She wondered if she was unnatural in caring more about her friend’s opinion of her than the prospect of viewing a dead body but, unlike some of her colleagues, Geraldine had never been disturbed by the sight of cadavers. On the contrary, she found them fascinating, not out of some existential curiosity about death itself, although that was a question that troubled her when she had nothing else to occupy her thoughts. What she appreciated about attending a post mortem was the evidence a murder victim unwittingly revealed about how he or she had died.

The blonde anatomical technology assistant, Avril, greeted Geraldine with a weary smile.

‘Looks like another one for you,’ she said, handing Geraldine a mask. ‘This one doesn’t smell too fresh, I’m afraid.’

‘Do they ever?’ Geraldine replied.

Avril wrinkled her nose. ‘She’d been in the water for a while when they found her.’

Geraldine nodded. The victim could have been in the water far longer if she hadn’t chanced to be spotted by a passerby taking a walk along the towpath by the river. Still, it made no difference to the dead woman now. With a nod to Avril, she went in to see the pathologist. In her early forties, Geraldine was only a few years younger than Jonah Hetherington, yet she found him reassuringly avuncular. It could have had something to do with his being married, and the father of a teenage son, while she was single. He brushed a curl of ginger hair from his face with the back of a glove, leaving a faint red smear of a stranger’s blood across his forehead. Had he been tall and blond, like Ian, the marking on his face might have given him the appearance of a warrior from a previous age, perhaps a Viking preparing for battle. As it was, he more closely resembled a clown, with his plump face and wispy hair, below which his blue eyes twinkled in greeting.

Geraldine waited good-naturedly for him to crack one of his usual jokes. ‘We must stop meeting like this,’ or ‘What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?’ or even, ‘Of all the bloody joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.’ But on this occasion, he merely nodded at her without speaking.

‘Was this an accidental drowning, or do you think we need to investigate?’ Geraldine asked.

Jonah raised his eyebrows, oddly orange against his pale freckled face. ‘What would you say if I told you she didn’t drown?’

‘I’d ask you how she died,’ Geraldine replied, with exaggerated patience.