The figure remained where it was.

Peabody was angry rather than alarmed. Primarily at himself. He’d stayed as sharp as he could, and he’d still let this creep sneak up on him. Not only that, he’d told him to get his arse out, and the guy wasn’t moving. Did he carry such little authority?

‘PC Peabody!’ he said, tromping uphill, his heavy feet crunching the trash.

The figure still didn’t move, though now the torch was picking him out. Peabody saw a grey suit, a white shirt, a green tie, dark hair – and a weirdly marked face.

‘What the …?’ he breathed. And then he smiled to himself.

This was a wind-up of some sort.

Back when he’d been a probie, he’d been subject to all kinds of mickey-taking, as they all were, of course. There was never a trick too nasty or scary for older coppers to play on younger ones, or that they didn’t find hilariously funny afterwards. He’d hoped all that was past him now, but apparently not. Except that he’d be surprised if anyone found this situation amusing, and the higher up the slope he ascended, the less amusing it seemed. Because the thinner and stiffer the watching figure seemed to be, the darker its eyes, the more weirdly streaked its face, and … the redder its mouth.

‘What the fuck?’ Peabody said again, this time aloud.

For half a second, he had the horrific notion that a corpse had been propped up. But over the last two or three yards, he realised the truth.

It was a shop mannequin, its suit ragged and filthy, its white shirt not a shirt at all but the mannequin’s own polystyrene flesh, its tie a piece of fuzzy-felt, its hair a ratty wig, its face gruesomely plastered with women’s makeup.

Peabody halted a couple of feet below the static figure. He half-expected a sniggering copper to come out from behind it. But no one did. The only sound was the rustling and flapping of the forensics tent down in the dip. Cautiously, almost gingerly, he scrambled up the remaining distance until he was face to face with it. When he looked down, he saw that its feet were embedded amid broken, twisted branches.

Okay, so it hadn’t happened by accident; someone hadn’t just discarded this thing. No doubt there were dozens of such objects scattered across the landfill, but someone must have set this one up deliberately. And in the last half hour or so, because if there was one thing Peabody was certain about, it had not been here earlier.

He circled around it to check the terrain, his light roving down another tilted moonscape. Rusted bikes, thrown-away prams, more newspapers, more bags of household waste. Nothing unexpected. He circled back to the front, staring at the figure’s luridly painted features.