He checks the horizon for cars. There’s nothing, six hours before daybreak. He opens the back of the van. I can’t see the body through the plastic sheeting, but I can tell it’s another big one. I don’t have room for three corpses in my freezer, let alone in my stomach. Of course, Warner only knows about two of them.

‘You reckon there’ll be a gap after this one?’ I ask.

‘Don’t know. You get his feet.’

I can’t tell which end is the feet until Sariklis lifts the head. He handles the heavy corpse with surprising gentleness, like a pallbearer, as we carry it down the hill. He’s more respectful than Francis ever was.

As we lower the body into the trunk, I realise that my clothes are still covered with insulation fibres. It seems impossible that Sariklis has missed this, but he says nothing.

‘Thanks,’ I say.

He nods. ‘Goodbye, pal.’

I shut the trunk and watch him trudge back up the hill towards the van. He never called me ‘pal’ before. After a minute, I realise that he probably wasn’t talking to me.

I open the trunk again, and peel back some of the plastic. Just enough to reveal the bloodied face of Francis.

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 16

By countless teeth is all my body lined, the forest sons I touch with bite unkind, and yet as I eat, I throw it all behind. What am I?

Two hours before dawn I’m at the college campus, hands in my pockets. Three hands. My left, my right, and Biggs’s left.

It’s December 9, and I’m out of time. I need to speed the investigation up, and that means changing Biggs from a missing person to a homicide victim.

I’m outside the fence line, well beyond the range of the security cameras at the corners of every building. My car is parked a long way from here. My breath comes out of my nose as puffs of steam. My fingers have gone numb. The hoodie does nothing to protect my ears from the biting wind.

I walk along the cycle path, hunched up like an armadillo. Another hundred yards and I’ll be able to see the math department on the other side of the chain-link fence. The campus looks different in the early morning. There are floodlights here and there, but all the windows are dark. With no young people around, it looks more like a deserted business park than a school. The classrooms could easily be conference rooms; the study nooks in the libraries could be cubicles. I wonder if the students suspect that they’re being trained for life as office drones.