According to Bromley’s timeline, the murder had taken place in a fifteen minute window between when a couple of schoolkids had walked past the trees on their way to the leisure centre next to the church and a Mr Thomas Gantry had noticed Chuck, his Irish Setter, bounding towards him with what turned out not to be a stray leg of pork.

Chuck really hadn’t wanted to relinquish his prize, and finally had to be distracted with a piece of cheese to make him let go. Dr Jennifer Vaughan found the whole thing very educational.

‘I didn’t even know dogs liked cheese,’ she said, and took saliva samples from Chuck for elimination purposes.

In that fifteen minute window Aiden Burghley had been dismembered at every major joint – ankle, knee, hip, shoulder, elbow and wrist – leaving just his head and torso lying at the base of a tree. That part was still dressed in the jeans and sweatshirt he’d been wearing when I interviewed him. Later stress analysis determined that this was because his limbs had been torn out of their sockets by an extreme axial force strong enough to rip skin and snap tendons.

‘Not something that’s easy to do,’ said Dr Walid. ‘Particularly with a young person,’ he added, and then had a discussion with Dr Vaughan about whether the victim’s youthfully stretchy skin would have made that much difference to the level of force required.

Aiden Burghley’s head was a nightmare, the skin of the face having been neatly removed to reveal the dried-meat coloured muscles and tendons beneath. It looked almost surgical, although later microscopic inspection revealed that the tissue had been torn rather than cut. His face had then been mounted on a tree so that it looked out over the curving rows of identical semi-detached houses that stretched away to the horizon.

I sighted along the direction of his gaze, but saw nothing remarkable. It had been raining off and on, and the clouds were low, so the visibility was crap. The wind kept picking at the corners of the white forensic tents that the SOCOs were trying to jockey into position to cover all the bits.

‘I’m not sure I like the implications of this development at all,’ said Nightingale, and I knew he was thinking of Lesley’s new face and the medical miracle magic of the Viscountess Linden-Limmer.

‘This is him talking directly to us, you know,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Nightingale. ‘That’s what I don’t like.’

The Doctors Walid and Vaughan agreed that the Faceless Man might be showing off, especially when Dr Vaughan reported that the skin of the face had been fused to the bark. And, more importantly, that the wood itself had been subtly reshaped to substitute for the bones and cartilage that normally gives the face its shape.

‘Otherwise I seriously doubt you’d have recognised him so easily,’ she said.