Soon there will be a killing. It might happen in the next few hours. We could synchronize our watches and count down the minutes …

As she expected, the voice was distorted. The caller had done something to disguise it – not just the old handkerchief over the mouth, but some kind of electronic distortion that gave the voice a metallic sound, vibrating and echoey. The accent was local, as far as she could tell. But she hadn’t yet worked out the subtle differences between Derbyshire people and their neighbours in Yorkshire, let alone between North and South Derbyshire. There were some who claimed they could pin down an accent to within a few miles, but that was a job for an expert.

One of the most worrying things about the tape was that the caller seemed completely calm and under control. His delivery was very deliberate, with no signs of agitation that she could detect. As Hitchens suggested, he sounded convincing. In fact, he would come over well in the witness box.

…What a chance to record the ticking away of a life, to follow it through to that last, perfect moment, when existence becomes nothing, when the spirit parts with the physical …

Fry glanced at the courthouse again. Her appearance seemed to have gone well, and the CPS were happy. Barring any major disasters during the rest of the hearing, Micky Ellis would be going down for a few years. It wouldn’t do much good for Denise Clay, who had lain dead in her nightdress with her personal stereo on the bedside table and cigarette burns on the duvet. For her, justice would come too late. Denise was long since buried by now.

But it didn’t do to personalize things too much. Sometimes, the processes of the law needed victims to take a back seat.

… We turn away and close our eyes as the gates swing open on a whole new world – the scented, carnal gardens of decomposition. We refuse to admire those flowing juices, the flowering bacteria, the dark, bloated blooms of putrefaction. This is the true nature of death. We should open our eyes and learn.

Fry’s eyes had started to close, but a few minutes later they came wide open again. She looked at the cassette player in bewilderment. She stopped the tape, rewound it and played it again from the section about Freud and the death instinct. There were a few seconds of silence, then the voice started again, filling the car with its metallic echoes.

‘Damn it,’ said Fry. ‘Why did no one tell me there were two calls?’

And you can see the end for yourself. All you have to do is find the dead place. Here I am at its centre, a cemetery six miles wide. See, there are the black-suited mourners, swarming like ants around a decaying corpse.

We fill our dead bodies with poison, pump acid through their veins. We pollute the atmosphere with the smoke from their flesh. We let them rot below ground, in coffins bursting with gas or soaked in water like minestrone soup. But true death is clean and perfect. Lay them out in the sun, hang their bones on a gibbet. Let them decompose where the carrion eaters gather. They should decay in the open air until their flesh is gone and their bones are dry as dust. Or, of course, in a sarcophagus. Clean and perfect, and final.