The two women closest to the back door were locked in an eternal embrace, like figures from the last hours of Pompeii. The way they clung to each made them look like sleeping siblings, although one of them was ebony black and the other had skin as white as milk.

I touched the wrist of the young black woman. Then I touched the wrist of the young white woman. And I could feel nothing but the cold.

‘No pulse rate,’ I told the paramedics.

One of them shook her head and cursed.

‘Leave it to us, will you?’ she said. ‘It’s different when they freeze, OK? Different to anything you’ve ever seen before. Their heart rate and breathing slow to next to nothing. Just because you can’t find a pulse doesn’t mean they’re dead.’

‘Can you wait on the street, Detective?’ the other one said.

I looked at the women with the clothes torn from their body.

‘It looks like they were attacked before they died,’ I said.

The paramedic who had told me to wait on the street did not look at me.

‘Chances are they did that to themselves,’ she said, more patiently now. ‘There’s an old saying about hypothermia – you’re not dead until you’re warm and dead. That’s what happens right at the end. They believe they’re burning up.’

I turned back to the two women curled up beside me.

The black woman’s eyes were open. But the white woman’s eyes were closed. I felt for her pulse again but I could feel nothing. Her skin was colder than the grave.

How old was she? Nineteen? Twenty?

I hung my head, feeling a wave of grief pass over me.

And her fingers reached out and took my wrist.

Then I had her in my arms and I was screaming for an ambulance and hands were reaching out to help me get her out of the back of that death truck and on to a stretcher that we loaded into an ambulance parked in the middle of Shaftesbury Avenue, the swirling blue lights piercing the frozen winter morning. We tore through the city, the sirens howling at the world, telling it to get out of our way.

‘You’re safe now,’ I said, trying to stay on my feet in the back of the rocking ambulance, squeezing her hands, trying to get some warmth back into them. ‘We’re getting you help. Don’t give up. Stay with me.’

She did not reply.

‘Don’t give up, OK?’ I said.

And she did not reply.

I had never felt anything colder than that young woman’s hands.

‘Will you tell me your name?’ I asked.

‘My name is Hana,’ she whispered.

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