It was indescribably filthy. A one-time boiler room, now with the boilers removed, it was little more than a brick-lined hole under the ground, the rusted, broken piping suspended along its ceiling dangling with cobwebs and stuffed with rats’ nests, the walls caked with a black, greasy clag, a residue of the unimaginably disgusting process now employed there.

The air was so rank, so thick with fumes that it was toxic, so much so that the two people down there needed to wear full biohazard masks complete with panoramic visors and dual filters on their respirators, plus heavy-duty, plastic-based protective gauntlets and coveralls, just to be able to stand it for a few minutes.

One of the pair, whose suit was white, was seated on an old school-chair near the door, focusing through the mask’s polycarbonate visor on an iPad, where a game of Bejeweled was in progress.

The other, whose suit was yellow, stumped around the room with what a casual observer might consider a surly attitude, heading first to the corner, where a human form was slumped against the wall, swathed in brown paper and bound with long strips of duct tape. Such secure packaging didn’t offer much of a handhold, of course, so Yellow Suit had to crouch, wrap the figure in a kind of bear-hug and lug it across the room with back bent.

Who would have thought that a woman as trim and fit as Lorna Cunningham could be so heavy? When they’d first started watching her, it hadn’t looked as if there was an inch of fat on her. But then Yellow Suit remembered from studying human physiology that body-fat was lighter than muscle and bone. With many a grunt and gasp, the inert form was dragged across the cellar room in just under three minutes. But from here, it would get really difficult.

Two four-foot-tall plastic drums stood against the wall, both open to the air, but black and crusty with soot, and streaked down their sides with vile stains. The one on the left was filled almost to its brim with an odious brownish stew, but the other was only half-full, a transparent greenish liquid sloshing when Yellow Suit nudged it. The corpse was left lying while a plan was devised. Eventually, Yellow Suit squatted, reached underneath the parcelled figure, secured it around the hips and then, pushing upward from the thigh, levered the former athlete upright until she was half-standing but had flopped forward over one yellow-clad shoulder. With another grunt, Yellow Suit then raised the lifeless form in a classic fireman’s lift. White Suit glanced up from the iPad to watch as, slowly and warily, Lorna Cunningham was lowered feet first into the greenish fluid.