He followed Hamlet through the brightly lit corridors of the mortuary, wondering as he always did if the lighting was so intense because it was the only way to keep ghosts from creeping into the shadows. Or perhaps that was just him. If he was religious he might pause to reflect on all the souls that had passed through this building. Actually, that wasn’t right, was it? By the time you got here your soul had already departed. They were just bodies. Meat and bone and hair. Whatever it was that made you a person was gone, alive only in the memories of those left behind, in the genes you’d passed on.

He hated this fucking place.

‘My full report will be ready tomorrow, Detective Inspector,’ Hamlet said when they reached his office.

‘I understand.’

‘But we want to catch this bastard as soon as, don’t we?’

Patrick was taken aback. He had never heard Hamlet swear before, or show anger. He followed the line of the pathologist’s vision to a framed photo on his desk. A little girl with chubby cheeks and a grin that contained everything that was absent from this building.

‘We do.’

‘I watched a little of the press conference on the TV earlier. Looks like everyone in the country is rather keen for you to find them.’

‘What can you tell me?’

He laced his fingers together. The fingers that had wielded the scalpel that had cut a little girl open that afternoon. ‘There are no signs of external damage. No wounds. I checked her throat for signs of strangulation but there is no bruising.’

Patrick pictured an adult’s hand on a small child’s throat and shuddered, trying with all his mental strength not to connect this case to his personal life.

‘But her lungs tell us a story. They are spongy and contain water.’

‘She drowned?’

Hamlet inclined his head. ‘It’s exceedingly difficult to tell with certainty if a person drowned. If a body comes to me that was found in water, we might assume they drowned but it could be that the person, for example, suffered cardiac arrest. It’s possible that this child swallowed a large amount of water but then died by some other means.’

‘But in your opinion?’

‘She drowned.’ As Patrick thought about this and what it might mean, Hamlet asked, ‘When was she found on the traveller’s encampment, exactly?’

‘Last Monday, the third. At roughly ten in the morning, according to the idiot who found her.’

‘Hmm. You know that in cases like this, when days pass between death and the autopsy, it’s difficult to estimate the date of death.’