The pathologist was oddly chirpy, as Joanna found that pathologists often were when they came across something out of the ordinary. “He would have needed to salt them for a few months. I imagine he needed sacks of the stuff—the bodies would have been covered completely. In the bath, probably. To get all the moisture out, you see. The ancient Egyptians did something similar with mummification.”

“So he mummified them? Why?”

“I imagine it was so that the bodies didn’t start to smell and give themselves away. Ingenious, really.”

“I’m not sure I’d go that far. Sick, certainly.”

Both bodies were devoid of innards, hanging upside down from butcher’s hooks in the well-ventilated cavity, so that they had slowly dried out completely, finishing the job the salting had begun.

As for the man who’d killed them and stolen Franks’s identity, while it took a lot of detective work to determine exactly who he was, assigning him to crimes he’d committed was initially a much simpler affair. As well as the many unsolved crimes which could be matched to him from the national police database, his DNA and fingerprints were found all over a disused industrial building on the edge of town, owned by Gregor Franks. From the equipment he’d been stockpiling, it looked as if he’d been planning to use the building to dispose of a number of bodies, three in total. Or three to start with. Joanna hadn’t been part of the team who searched the building, and no one would tell her what exactly they’d found, but her imagination filled in the blanks. It made Jo angry all over again that he was dead because that meant she couldn’t kill him herself.

“What do you think he was doing, when he left us alone all those nights?” said Ruby.

Jo knew exactly what he’d been doing, from the information that had been found on his various phones and devices. When he hadn’t been building his body-disposal unit, he’d been stalking single gay men in neighboring cities, using online dating apps. He’d met several of them, but others he’d simply been watching, researching, finding out everything he could. He was hunting for his next persona, Planning to jump from “Gregor” into another lonely life via a little light murdering.

“I don’t know,” said Joanna. “Bad things, probably.”

“The worst thing is,” said Ruby, “that he knew I was there from the moment I moved in.”

Joanna was cooking for the two of them in her flat. She thought it was hard to choose what the worst thing was but that this was certainly among the top five.

“But he didn’t speak to me until August. I’d been there since February.”