‘Best guess at this stage,’ Gates corrected her. ‘Morning, John.’

Rebus nodded a greeting back. ‘Dr Curt not with you?’

‘Phoned in sick. He’s been sick a lot lately.’ Gates was just making conversation while his examination continued. The body lay awkwardly, legs and arms all jutting angles. The gorse bushes next to it must have hidden it well enough, Rebus guessed. Combined with the long grass, you’d need to be closer than eight feet before you’d be able to make out what it was. The clothing helped with the camouflage: light green combat trousers, khaki T-shirt, grey jacket. The clothes Flip had been wearing the day she’d gone missing.

‘Parents informed?’ he asked.

Gill nodded. ‘They know a body’s been found.’

Rebus walked around her to get a better view. The face was turned away from him. There were leaves in the hair, and a slug’s shimmering trail. Her skin was mauve-coloured. Gates had probably moved the body slightly. What Rebus was seeing was lividity, the blood sinking in death, colouring the body parts nearest the ground. He’d seen dozens of corpses over the years; they never got any less sad, or made him any less depressed. Animation was the key to every living thing, its absence difficult to accept. He’d seen grieving relatives reach out to bodies on mortuary slabs and shake them, as if this would bring them back. Philippa Balfour wasn’t coming back.

‘The fingers have been gnawed at,’ Gates stated, more for his tape recorder than his audience. ‘Local wildlife most probably.’

Weasels or foxes, Rebus guessed. Facts of nature you didn’t find in the TV documentaries.

‘Bit of a bugger, that,’ Gates went on. Rebus knew what he meant: if Philippa had fought her attacker, her fingertips might have told them a lot – bits of skin or blood beneath the nails.

‘What a waste,’ Pryde suddenly said. Rebus got the feeling he didn’t mean Philippa’s death as such, but the effort they’d expended during the days since her disappearance – the checks on airports, ferries, trains … working on the assumption that she was maybe – just maybe – still alive. And throughout, she’d been lying here, each day robbing them of possible evidence, possible clues.

‘Lucky she was found so soon,’ Gates commented, perhaps to comfort Pryde. True enough, another woman’s body had been found a few months back in a different part of the park, hardly any distance at all from a popular path. Yet the body had lain there for over a month. It had turned out to be a ‘domestic’, that handy euphemism when victims were killed by their loved ones.

Down below, Rebus recognised one of the grey mortuary vans arriving. The body would be bagged and taken away to the Western General, where Gates would conduct his autopsy.