I could not believe the comforting clichés we tell ourselves about death. She looked like someone else, someone other than the young woman who had spoken to me to tell me her name in the ambulance, someone other than the young woman who I saw fight for her life in the Royal Free. Whatever spark had made Hana Novak the person who climbed into the back of that lorry in search of some better life, it had gone forever. This was not Hana Novak any more, although perhaps it was the shadow of who she had once been. I thought for a moment about her brother, wondering how old he could be, knowing that whatever age he was, he was far too young to come to this place to look upon the shell of his sister.

‘It’s a hell of a thing,’ Elsa said to herself in the clipped English of a Norwegian who had spent most of her adult life in London.

She walked between steel tables, a tall dark woman in a white coat and latex gloves, as each of our team stood at the end of one of the lines, wearing blue scrubs and hairnets. Whitestone and Edie and Billy and me. DCI Whitestone, our Senior Investigating Officer, wanted all our team to witness what had been done to the women we found in Chinatown.

So we stared at the bodies on the steel tables, and it seemed as if the victims came from every race on earth and from every corner of the planet.

‘Despite some abrasions, there are no defensive wounds or signs of violence on the victims,’ Elsa said. ‘Therefore I looked at three possible causes of death.’ She counted them off with a nod of her head. ‘Asphyxiation due to lack of oxygen. Carbon monoxide poisoning due to inhaling toxic fumes. And multiple organ failure due to fall of body temperature.’ She looked at Whitestone. ‘And I am satisfied that the cause of death was multiple organ failure due to stage four hypothermia – profound hypothermia.’

‘So it’s as we thought – they froze to death,’ Whitestone said.

Elsa nodded.

‘We call it freezing to death although there’s no precise core temperature at which the human body can no longer survive. It’s what the exposure to sub-zero conditions does to the internal organs that causes death. And it was cold enough in the back of that lorry to kill anyone.’ She glanced at Hana Novak with something like fondness. ‘It is a miracle that they didn’t all die before you found them.’

‘Some of them had their clothes torn off,’ Edie said. ‘Indicating some kind of assault before death.’