Walking into Kingston Hospital mortuary with DCI Gillard, she felt quite excited at the opportunity to deploy some of her medical knowledge, and to meet the rather forbidding Dr David Delahaye. A technician showed the two detectives into the examination room where the consultant forensic pathologist was bent over a gurney, looking into a partially opened body bag.

He looked up at their approach, brief introductions were made, and they turned their attention to the corpse that three days previously had been found washed up on an island in the Thames.

The photographs had not prepared Rainy for the shock of seeing the victim, cartoonishly swollen into an incandescent blimp of fury. She was astounded by the intensity of the cyanosis that still marked the upper body. The man’s chest, shoulders and face were a livid mauve overlaid with a regular purple diamond pattern, so precise it looked almost tattooed into the skin. His eyes were so swollen they had almost popped out of his face. Combined with eyeballs rimmed in blood from broken capillaries and the laugh-like grimace, he had a demonic appearance. The pathologist’s Y-shaped chest cut and the ear-to-ear scalp incision, performed as part of the post-mortem and now roughly sewn back, were bloodless by comparison.

‘So Ms Macintosh, in your previous life dealing with the living, have you ever seen anything remotely like this?’ Delahaye asked.

‘No, nothing.’

‘What actually causes these purple marks to remain in the skin after death?’ Gillard asked.

‘Thousands of ruptured capillaries, what we call petechiae. Leaking blood, basically. It produces a rather graphic lividity, doesn’t it?’

‘Designer contusions,’ Rainy said. ‘Even more impressive than my own varicose veins post-pregnancy. But I cannot imagine what crushed him to produce this.’

‘That indeed is the $64,000 question,’ Delahaye said. ‘The detective chief inspector and myself have been whizzing emails back and forth for several days on this very subject. I do think the idea of an industrial element is quite persuasive given the amount of force that must have been used. I’ve been reading around in the literature, and there are chest-compression injuries here that easily exceed those caused by Hillsborough, the crowd crushes at Mecca during the haj, and similar events.’

‘Have you been able to calculate the force?’ Rainy asked.

‘It is not so easy. Human ribs are not made in a factory, and do not have a standard tolerance. Detaching them through gradual pressure, as appears to have happened here, would depend on numerous bodily factors in addition to the force applied. However, I am reasonably confident that nothing less than half a metric tonne could do this damage. A car toppling from a jack, that kind of thing. Of course, that is most unlikely in this case. Very little car maintenance is undertaken in the nude, or so I am reliably informed.’ His eyes twinkled as he looked at Rainy.

‘What about this mesh suit he seemed to have been wearing?’ she asked.