‘When shall we three meet again . . . blasted heath et cetera. Good morning, Inspector.’

‘Morning, Doctor Curt. What have you got for us?’

Curt removed his glasses and wiped spots of water from them. ‘Double pneumonia, I shouldn’t wonder,’ he answered, replacing them.

‘Accident, suicide, or murder?’ asked Rebus.

Curt tut-tutted him, shaking his head sadly. ‘You know I can’t make snap decisions, Inspector. Granted, this poor woman hasn’t been in the water as long as the previous one, but all the same . . .’

‘How long?’

‘A day at most. But with the weight of water and all . . . debris and so on . . . she’s taken a bit of a battering. Lucky she was found at all, really.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Didn’t the sergeant say? Her wrist caught in a dead branch. Otherwise, she’d almost certainly have been swept down into the river and out into the sea.’

Rebus thought about the direction the river would take, bypassing the only settlements . . . yes, a body falling into the stream here might well have disappeared without trace . . .

‘Any idea who she is?’

‘No identification on the body. Plenty of rings on her fingers though, and she’s wearing quite a nice dress, too. Care to take a look?’

‘Why not, eh? Come on, Brian.’

But Holmes stood his ground. ‘I had a look earlier, sir. Don’t let me stop you though . . .’

So Rebus followed the pathologist down the slope. He was thinking: difficult to bring a body down here . . . but you could always roll it from the top . . . yes, roll it . . . hear the splash and assume it had fallen into the river . . . you might not know the wrist had caught in a branch. But to get a body up here in the first place – dead or alive – surely you’d need a car. Was William Glass capable of stealing a car? Why not, everyone else seemed to know how to do it these days. Kids in primary school could show you how to do it . . .

‘Like I say,’ Curt was saying, ‘she’s been bashed about a bit . . . can’t tell yet whether post- or ante-mortem. Oh, about that other drowning at Dean Bridge . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘Recent sexual intercourse. Traces of semen in the vagina. We should be able to get a DNA profile. Ah, here we go . . .’

The body had been laid out on a plastic sheet. Yes, it was a nice dress, distinctive, summery, though torn now and smeared with mud. The face was muddy, too . . . and cut . . . and swollen . . . the hair drawn back and part of the skull exposed. Rebus swallowed hard. Had he been expecting this? He wasn’t sure. But the photographs he’d seen made him sure in his mind.