The message, the traces left behind. He pictured words floating in the cold air around a corpse, readable for a time, but then fading.

The life once lived, now ruined and reduced to this, a lump of flesh.

Dead. Unmoving.

He had not yet taken a step. He stood there, perfectly still. Only his eyes moved, as they looked here and there, pulling in all the details, first from a distance.

Overview.

The body was lying face upwards in a tangle of weeds and brambles. The man’s arms were spread out on either side. The overcoat was ripped at one lapel. There was no jacket under the coat, only a cream shirt, a few buttons of which had popped open or been ripped apart. He was dressed for the weather: wet but humid.

A night stroll in the park?

Or a rendezvous under the trees?

OK, so the time of death was eight o’clock, approximate. Fairly dark by then. And not many lights around. A strange place to meet someone. Mind, that couple had been walking the dog, so people did come here this late.

His mind clicked back to the body and its immediate surroundings.

Move in, focus. Surmise. Put it together.

Plants trampled, bent over. Snapped at the stems.

Leaves crushed into the mud.

Broken twigs.

A struggle or a fight or an argument had taken place, right here, and one person had attacked another, and that person, a man, had fallen on this spot. Here, the final moments of his life had played out.

The rain hit again with a vengeance, playing a drumbeat on the canvas of the tent.

Hobbes shivered.

There were more footprints all around, churned up in the mud, and the mud drying now under the canvas, in the gathered heat: so many criss-crossing patterns.

Hobbes bent down close and looked at the man’s face.

Nicholas Graves. Sixty-two years old.

Son of Leonard Graves, recently deceased of this parish. Following unto death … and so on and so forth.

The damage to the face and head was total, and brutal, an attack of extreme passion. Broken skin, bones showing through, the bones themselves broken, especially around the left jaw. The eyes were glued shut with blood. The skull was crumpled in a number of places and the hair was black, filthy, matted with God knew what. The nose had been shattered and was bent out of shape. The mouth had also taken a blow and Hobbes could see the cracked teeth behind the peeled-back lips. Every wound was gritted with bits of stone and dirt.

Christ, but someone had really gone for him. One of those hard-driven attacks. Sudden. No planning. Slow to start maybe, but then very quickly leading into overkill as the anger burned and raged. Vengeance, maybe.

The murder weapon was lying on the ground to one side. A rock. One of many dotted around this area – he’d seen them on his way through the trees. Light grey, ornamental. Brought here specially, Hobbes thought, to set off the flowerbeds, or to emphasize the artificial wildness. It was covered with blood, clumps of hair and shredded skin. A weapon at hand: carefully chosen while waiting in the shadows, or grabbed in the moment?