It was cold and his breath puffed out of his mouth. He rang the doorbell and waited. No answer. Keen to get back into his van and out of the cold he knocked again, but still there was no answer. Seeing that there was a light on upstairs, he walked around the west wall of the converted barn and peered in through the window.

The room was dark, but he could just make out the silhouette of a body suspended in the air, lifeless. Dropping the package into the snow, the Polish man ran back to his van, nearly skidding on the ice, and put a call in to his boss to report what he had seen. Half an hour later an ambulance and police officers were at the scene.

Uniformed officers had been the first to arrive and break down the door of the barn. Inside they had discovered the body of a woman hanging from a beam. The rope was tied to the bathroom door handle and, when the officer realised that the small right-hand finger was missing, they put in a call to CID.

After racing to the scene Barrett and Palmer stood in the open-plan living area of the barn looking at the corpse.

‘Bugger,’ Palmer said feeling sickened by the frozen expression on the face of the victim.

‘Our victim is Wendy Matlock.’ Barrett turned to Palmer. ‘The officers who had to break into the barn will have left their bloody DNA everywhere. This is going to slow forensics down. Damn it.’ He huffed. ‘Where is Bob anyway?’ He impatiently checked the time.

‘I’m going to go back to the station,’ Palmer told Barrett, who looked surprised that his colleague didn’t ask permission. ‘We need to get onto this right away.’

‘Okay. I want the whole team looking into Wendy Matlock. This case has just taken a turn for the worse. See if you can find a link between the victims. Go back to square one and start from the beginning. Every piece of evidence, everything we know about Dennis Wade, needs to be looked at again with a fine-tooth comb.’

‘On it,’ Palmer said, grateful to be leaving the morbid scene behind.

‘But, Joe,’ Barrett called over his shoulder, ‘I didn’t say serial, you didn’t say serial. Understood?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Palmer pulled his coat collar up around his chin and stepped out into the cold wind.