The case had been found a stone’s throw away from the Blagoveshchensky Bridge, first by a dog, and then by the man who’d been walking the dog. He’d made the mistake of opening it, hoping for treasure and instead receiving a lifetime’s supply of nightmares.

‘Has anybody else touched the suitcase?’ Volkov asked the uniformed police officer who’d arrived first on the scene.

‘No,’ said the officer, ‘only the man with the dog. The suitcase was open when we arrived. We secured the scene and called it in.’

Volkov moved in for a closer look. He saw a pair of scissors, a file and a couple of other bits and pieces on top of a pile of blood-spattered plastic bags. He couldn’t be certain, but it appeared as though most of whoever this had once been was in the suitcase.

The torso had been placed in the centre of the case and the other body parts arranged around it like a macabre jigsaw. The head was stuffed in one end, face up. He didn’t know what the two square chunks of meat next it were at first, but he worked it when he pressed against the plastic with a tool and saw the palm lines: hands. They’d been chopped from the arms at the wrist, and all the fingers and both thumbs had been removed. He couldn’t see the missing fingers in the butcher’s pile, but he figured they would be in one of the bags.

The body parts were taken back to the St Petersburg Central Intelligence Bureau, unbagged, tagged and laid out on a stainless-steel bench in the forensic centre in the shape of the original body.

‘No fingers?’ Volkov asked the medical examiner.

‘No,’ the examiner said. ‘No teeth either. Well, no complete teeth anyway. Looks like a hammer was taken to his mouth. Dental records won’t be much good and we won’t have prints unless the fingers turn up.’

A hacksaw, a cleaver and a reciprocal saw were laid out next to the scissors, the file and the metal tube on a table beside the body. There was also a pile of white mush that had perhaps been a book.

‘Any prints on the tools?’ Volkov asked.

The medical examiner shook his head.

‘Can we identify the victim through DNA?’ Volkov asked.

‘We have taken a skin sample,’ the examiner said. ‘We’ll have the results to you soon.’

VOLKOV read the report when it was sent through.

A corruption has severed the two polynucleotides strands of the deoxyribonucleic acid. The nucleotides have also been damaged by the introduction of a foreign body. No meaningful biological information can be recovered from the provided sample.

He made a printout before storming over to the examiner. ‘What the fuck does this mean?’ he asked, waving the pages.