As he worked, Oliver thought back to his childhood and remembered his father carving meat. A long time ago. The technician swept a scalpel in a U-cut around the base of the scalp while Oliver began slicing a T-shaped incision into the body: one cut across the upper chest, from below the outer edge of one collarbone across to the outer edge of the other; then he made a long steady slice from the throat to the groin. He peeled back the skin and the subcutaneous tissue to reveal the ribcage. The process was a lot more awkward than usual because of the numerous other slashes that had been made to the body by the attackers. He also couldn’t free himself of the butterfly flutter in his chest whenever he thought about what had happened in the hotel. He picked up a pair of shears that looked as if they should be used to prune rose bushes and started to snip through the ribcage. Two cuts: one right and one left of centre along the mid-clavicular lines where the ribs were composed of cartilage. He lifted out the sternum and exposed the pericardial sac which he in turn cut open with the smaller scissors.

Oliver knew he would get caught eventually. He was an intelligent man, and his work brought him into contact with the police all the time. He knew they weren’t stupid, and he also knew that every time he did what he did the chances of arrest increased exponentionally. He used the long sharp knife, known as the bread knife, and cut out the heart. The pathologist assisting Oliver sucked out some of the blood from the heart with a syringe and placed it in a sample tub. Oliver eased back the skin of the neck. One of the blows from the victim’s attackers had sliced into his neck, so Oliver opened up the throat, cutting from the jugulum up to the chin. He could see where the cleaver had severed the sternomastoid muscle almost completely. Here lay the immediate cause of death. The victim had died by exsanguination, resulting from the multiple incised wounds, but the slice into the subclavian artery had been what had caused him to bleed out fast. Oliver imagined the death, something he was not normally inclined to do: the victim would have been in extreme shock, would have felt extremely cold, and unconsciousness and death would have come pretty swiftly.

Maybe the police already had their suspicions; maybe Oliver had said something or done something or had left something behind that would lead them to him. Maybe they were watching him. Waiting for him to do it again.