‘What time was this?’

‘Around six thirty. And they were laughing, having a right giggle.’

Archer and Quinn pull on the white paper overalls. Archer covers the lower half of her face with the mask and fixes the white hood over her hair. They make their way down a narrow alleyway to the riverside where there is a fixed steel ladder down to the riverbank. Archer takes stock of the cabinets below. They are a different style to the three from The Connection at St Martin’s and from the Greenwich Peninsula. They are shiny and seem to glisten and sparkle against the black mirror of the snaking Thames. If she isn’t mistaken they don’t seem to be filled with formaldehyde. If looks more like the victims are packed in ice.

At the bottom of the ladder, Archer notices footprints in the mud. Quinn has seen them too.

‘Three different sizes and styles. Trainers by the look of it,’ says Archer.

They trudge across the muddy riverbank avoiding the footprints. As they get closer to the cabinets Archer can see clothed bodies wrapped in what looks like crumpled transparent plastic sheeting. It’s not ice as she had thought. It’s hard to make out faces or much else as the plastic has obscured the victims.

‘They don’t look like the expensive glass vitrines the killer has been using,’ says Quinn.

‘My thought exactly. They look plastic, flimsy and cheap.’

‘Perhaps that’s the style he’s going for.’

Uncertainty creeps over Archer.

She moves closer and sees unnatural beige skin tones on the hands of one of the bodies. She frowns. ‘They’re not real people.’

‘They’re shop mannequins in fucking wigs,’ adds Quinn. ‘Is he playing some sort of game?’

‘Or some jokers have pranked us.’

‘Fucking fuckers!’

Archer takes several shots despite being certain this nothing more than a sick joke and then trudges back to the ladder, climbing to the pavement above.

‘They could be pranksters or perhaps he’s throwing us off the scent.’

‘I’m not discounting anything. There are cameras everywhere here, which should make them easy to track down.’

*

As they arrive back at the station Klara beckons to them. ‘I’ve got CCTV on the Limehouse cabinets.’

Archer and Quinn gather around Klara’s monitors and watch footage of three men in identical dark hoodies carrying the cabinets from the back of a white van and down the ladder to the riverbank. The cabinets are plastic and with mannequins inside are clearly easy to carry. There is no secrecy or subtlety about what they are doing. She recalls the witness earlier saying the three of them appeared to be laughing. The three men hurry back to the van and one of them spots the CCTV camera and beckons to his friends. They approach the camera and reveal the front of their hooded tops, each of which has @NONYMOUS stencilled on the front in bold white lettering.