Sandra Birley’s body lay face up in the conservatory. She appeared to have fallen on to the raffia matting from just inside the sliding doors. Blood had soaked into the matting from a serious head wound. Well, at least one wound. Of course, the amount of bleeding from the scalp could be out of all proportion to the seriousness of the injury. But the main source of the blood seemed to be an area just above the left temple, which had left Sandra’s hair almost as thick and matted as the raffia she lay on.

‘She was in the dining room when she was struck,’ said Abbott. ‘See the blood splatter on the glass panels of the door? That splatter is on the inside. So it looks as though the victim was standing on the carpet, about here. When she was hit, the blood sprayed in this direction, on to the glass. She staggered back a few steps, probably tripped over the runner, then fell backwards. There’s more blood on the wall of the conservatory, see. But it’s low down, near the floor. That’s secondary splatter – spray from the impact of her head on the matting.’

‘Do we have a weapon?’ asked Fry.

‘We certainly do. A wooden carving of a dolphin. Here we are – it’s made of some kind of tropical wood. Very hard, and very heavy. Nicely balanced for a good swing, too. It looks as though the dolphin probably stood on this table right here, near the fireplace.’

‘That’s right, it did.’

Abbott looked at her in surprise. ‘Oh, you’ve been in the house before? I don’t suppose you can tell us if there’s anything missing, then?’

Fry gazed around the Birleys’ house.

‘Yes, there is,’ she said. ‘The husband.’

When her mobile phone rang, it sounded embarrassingly loud inside the house.

‘How’s it going down there?’ asked Gavin Murfin.

‘Don’t ask, Gavin. What do you want?’

‘I’ve got some news. I think you might be going to curse the experts again.’

‘Oh? Who this time?’

‘The anthropologist that we sent the cremains to for analysis.’

‘Surely he can’t have produced a report yet, Gavin?’

‘No, just an initial finding that he thought we might want to know about.’

Fry felt her heart sink. ‘What?’

‘Well, apparently he sifted the ashes and found a few teeth.’

‘But that’s what we were hoping for. It gives us the possibility of an identification through dental records, like the one we got for Audrey Steele.’

‘Yes, but that’s what he was so keen to let us know. A bit too keen actually, if you ask me. Cheerful, he was. Like he wanted to rub it in.’

‘Spit it out, Gavin. There aren’t enough teeth left intact for us to use, I suppose?’

‘Plenty of them. The trouble is, these teeth aren’t human.’

Cooper recalled that he had never actually been inside Tom Jarvis’s house. He wondered if he was going to be invited in now, to get out of the wet. But he only got as far as the porch, where a couple of old beech carver chairs stood near a window. From this elevation, he could see a small mound of fresh earth to the side of the house, dark from the continuing rain.