‘The clothes torn and removed are attributable to what is known as paradoxical undressing,’ Elsa said. ‘When someone has profound hypothermia they remove their clothes as a response to what feels like extreme heat. When I was growing up in Norway, mountain climbers who died of cold would often be found in a state of undress.’

I remembered what the paramedics had told me in Chinatown.

‘You’re not dead until you’re warm and dead,’ I said.

Elsa nodded.

‘The cold makes the brain enzymes less efficient,’ she said. ‘Their cerebral metabolic rate drops rapidly with every degree of core temperature. At first you can’t think straight. And then you can’t think at all. You would struggle to recognise your mother’s face. Time would have no meaning. Blood thickens. Blood pressure drops. It’s a cruel delusion. At the moment the cold is about to kill you, you’re not hot – but you think you are. And then perhaps – right at the end – there would be a moment of terrible clarity.’

I took a step closer to Hana Novak. The skin on her hands seemed torn away. I noticed that a few of the victims had the same injury, as if they had been fighting off an attacker.

‘You say there are no defensive wounds, Elsa,’ I said.

‘That’s right.’

‘And you’re certain nobody attacked them? Nobody assaulted them? They didn’t fight anyone off?’

‘Correct, Max.’

‘Then what are those marks on their hands?’

Elsa picked up Hana Novak’s right hand and stared at the torn skin on her fingertips. I saw that there was also skin missing from the palms of her hand.

‘The abrasions on their hands are where they beat the door,’ Elsa Olsen said. ‘Those marks are from where they tried to get help.’ She struggled to control her breathing and I saw that the tall Norwegian pathologist had tears in her eyes.

‘Those marks are where they tried to stay alive,’ she said.

6

The locals were gone.

The pub at one end of the street was now a mosque. The church at the other end of the street was boarded up and used as a car park. The working-class families who had built their lives here had long ago moved out of this far-flung corner of east London to Essex and Kent and East Anglia. The only sign that they had ever been here were the net curtains that still hung in every single window.

‘My nan still has net curtains like that,’ Edie said as we sat in the BMW X5 outside the address we had been given for Asuman Jenkins, formerly Asuman Ata.