He looked down at the corpse on the table.

For Oliver, death held no mystery. He had become accustomed to it: so many dead over the years. He could still recall his first, how he had looked into her face and had seen the person instead of the flesh; someone with a history, who had had a life and a personality, who had dreamed and laughed and felt the sun on her face. He had seen the stretch marks of distant pregnancies, the scar on her knee from an even more distant childhood injury, the lines around her mouth from a lifetime of laughing. Then he had pushed his knife into her and had begun to cut her up and she had ceased to be a person. After her, after his first, it had become so much easier. He still looked at a face before he started to cut, but he never looked into one. Now they were all simply so much cold flesh: doubly chilled from death and from their refrigerated storage until Oliver was ready for them.

He drew a deep breath before starting. The dismemberment of a human body was much harder work, physically, than most people imagined. Deprived of its vitality, a corpse was a heavy, dead mass, its density varying radically from the almost liquid, to gristly, to the solid and unyielding. Organ and bone, skin and fat, cartilage and sinew: cutting through the material of a human corpse required robust tools, some even power-driven. Oliver had all he needed to hand. Breadknife. Electric saw. Hand-held saw. Shears. Scissors. Knife.

He started as he always did, walking around the table and observing the lifeless body. The dead man was still fully dressed and Oliver noticed that some of the material from his blood-soaked T-shirt and kitchen overalls had been forced into the deep gashes. Oliver counted the cuts out loud, some of which gaped open, exposing the subcutaneous layer of pale marbled fat and the darker, denser mass of sinew and muscle beneath. Some of the slashes exposed white bone and as Oliver leaned closer to examine the wounds he saw where the bone had been chipped by the cleaver, the primary evidence of sharp-force trauma.

There were two other men in the room; together they helped Oliver turn the cadaver onto its belly. He examined its back. There were fewer wounds there, but they were still significant.

‘Let’s get him undressed,’ Oliver said and the two other men helped him cut and remove the dead man’s clothes. After the body was naked, Oliver repeated his observational circuit of it, again speaking his thoughts out loud.