‘Not a nice way to go,’ Gillard said.

‘There aren’t too many of those,’ the pathologist said, peering over his spectacles. ‘Well, I tend not to see them anyway. This’ – he tapped the screen with a ballpoint pen – ‘would not be one of them.’

‘How long had she been in the water?’

Delahaye offered a weary look. ‘You know full well we can’t be precise about it, but unofficially I think we can bracket it. The corpse’s core temperature was similar to that of the water she was recovered from, so she must have been dead in it at least a couple of hours. But from these photographs, and a brief external inspection, I would hazard a guess that it was less than twelve hours. There are few observable signs of the deterioration that one would expect.’

‘One other thing,’ Gillard said. ‘I found some longish dark hairs entangled in the same vehicle, which are clearly not from this victim. I’ve asked the lab to copy you in on the DNA results.’

‘Thank you. We could do without any more victims.’ He paused and then asked: ‘Any luck with finding Beatrice Ulbricht?’

‘None, really. We’ve reached a hiatus. We know there was an impostor on the train, a woman who went to enormous trouble to draw our attention away from the Westmeare area of Surrey. We guess she had an accomplice too, although we’re still hazy about how that would work.’

‘I met Beatrice, two years ago,’ Delahaye said.

‘You did?’

‘Yes. She hadn’t yet set up the Lysander Quartet, but was one of those jobbing semi-professional soloists that village music societies rely on. She came down to play for us in Kent, and we put her up in the spare room. She is, and I refuse to use the past tense, an absolutely delightful woman. Funny, self-confident, charming, full of joie de vivre. And I have to say that the Bach solo violin sonata that she played, for all the fact that it was not quite technically perfect, was so beautifully cadenced emotionally that most of us were in tears.’ He blinked a few times. ‘If she is not found alive, I’m going to ask somebody else to do the post-mortem. I don’t think I could bear to do it.’

‘I’m so sorry to hear this, Ellen.’ Sam Gillard was on the phone to her friend, having seen a rather forlorn Facebook post after many days of no contact.

‘I don’t understand it. I did everything he wanted me to do,’ Ellen sobbed. ‘I knew he was always travelling, and I accepted that. I knew he could only come over one or maybe two nights a week, and I accepted that. I started going to the gym as he suggested, and dieting. I dropped two dress sizes. Even the sex stuff…’

‘What did he make you do?’ Sam asked, her interest piqued.

‘I don’t want to say. It didn’t feel right, but I was so… so, relieved that anybody wanted me after all this time.’