He heaved the woman back up to her feet, which was no easy task considering neither of them had slept and she was determined to keep her heels on, and craned his neck to get a better look.

‘Holy crap.’ He stepped back. ‘Rob, come and have a look at this. It’s a body in the water.’

One of the women began to scream. ‘Do something, get her out!’ But another of the young men appeared and pointed out that the body was lying face down in the water and was bloated. The person was clearly dead.

‘It’s too late,’ one of the men, who was a medical student, confirmed. ‘Look at the state of her. We need to call the police.’

Within fifteen minutes the emergency services were at the scene. The girls, who were all shivering with shock, had been given foil blankets and were being comforted by ambulance workers, while the police cordoned off the area with crime scene tape. The young men stood, pale-faced, some of them smoking roll-ups, looking far less cocky than they had done twenty minutes earlier. This was not how any of them had expected to end their year at university.

It took a little while for the dive team to arrive and start making preparations to remove the body from the water, and before they did that, the group who had made the discovery were whisked away, and a tent was erected in which the body would be examined.

The divers entered the cold, still water in wetsuits, and proceeded to put bags over the head, hands and feet to preserve any evidence. It wasn’t clear whether the body was that of a murder victim, or some unfortunate soul who had fallen into the river and drowned by accident. But all the services involved thought the latter unlikely: the river was not fast moving, or deep, so it seemed improbable that this was misadventure.

The police and forensic teams knew the city would be waking up and they needed to act quickly. It was their job to protect the public from having to see such unpleasant things.

Once the body was in the tent, the dead woman was laid out on her back. Her face, wrapped in a plastic bag, was distorted, and straggles of long hair were snaked around her throat. From the state of her body it was clear she had been dead for some hours. What wasn’t clear at that stage, was how she had ended up in the river in the first place.

DI Palmer arrived at the scene tired and hungry.

‘Looks like you’ve got your hands full at the moment,’ the crime scene investigator said, looking down at the body.

‘Tell me about this one.’ Palmer let out a tired breath.