‘Who was he, Rory? Who did you kill?’

The big man wrapped his arms around his own head and began to whimper. ‘No, no. I can’t. I didn’t do it. Stop blaming me.’

For the next ten minutes there was nothing intelligible. They tried waiting it out, but to no avail. Rory wouldn’t look at them, so they finished up and left with a mystery still unsolved. Who was the killer in that blood-soaked bedroom at Dove Cottage? And who was the victim?

Chapter Twenty-four

Monday

The mortal remains of an unknown murder victim looked more like pieces of a broken statue than anything that had been once human. Rissington Man was closer to a darkened plaster saint from a Catholic Church than a man who had lived, loved, and presumably had some kind of a job. Why was nobody missing him? Where amongst the legions of the vanished did his true identity lie? Gillard stared down at the wreck of humanity before him on the mortuary’s stainless steel slab, while the hospital technician pointed out the features that at least on paper he already knew: the fillings, composite and metal, which allowed them to be sure this was a modern man; the other removed teeth from whose root pulp DNA had been recovered, the missing fingers, since recovered from a separate grave; and the damaged neck, now separated to allow the removal of the weapon shard. The search for DNA within that rusted splinter remained the last untried forensic hope for identifying the culprit.

For Rainy Macintosh, no longer a junior doctor but still with boundless medical curiosity, the remains laid out on a mortuary slab were fascinating. In her few years in the police, this was only the second dead body she had seen, and she could barely restrain herself from prodding and poking. That morning’s visit to the hospital to see the cadaver had been inspired by two extra DNA tests whose mixed results had been sent to them. A familial DNA check had found no connection between this man and anyone else on the national DNA database. The reason for this was probably explained by the second result. The mitochondrial DNA tests showed Scandinavian and Eastern European origins.

‘I’ll home in on the two missing Eastern Europeans from our list,’ Rainy said, as she held up a small piece of the man’s jaw in her nylon-gloved hand.

‘I think perhaps we should expand the radius too,’ Gillard said. ‘All Scandinavian and EU foreign nationals registered as missing across the UK. We should start on the more recent ones, but still go back to 2012.’

‘Why 2012?’ Rainy asked.

‘That was the year the bloodstained book in Cleaver’s house was published.’

She snapped her fingers. ‘Aye, that’s a canny piece of evidence. Getting a match between the droplet on the book and on the walls of the room.’