Even now, I always see Jimmy’s face. I see it as clear as my own reflection when I look in the mirror. There were the three of us, up on top in the daylight. And him, down there in the dark, alone. Just a single shaft of light, falling on his face, gleaming on his glasses.

And then the falling, falling . . . It seemed to take so long, yet it must have been over in a second. His skull cracked like an egg.

One down. Two to go.

Chapter Seventeen

Thursday

DIANE FRY HAD never quite got used to stepping out of the real world, a world full of living, breathing people, into the cold, sterile environment of the mortuary. The postmortem room was all stainless steel and grey tiles, the smell of disinfectant barely even competing with the odour of carved flesh and exposed internal organs. Whenever she entered these doors, it was the smell that entered her soul.

The Home Office pathologist, Dr Juliana van Doon, was a cool customer herself. Fry supposed you had to be that way, to work in a place like this. For a while, there had been rumours that she was in a relationship with one of the senior CID officers in E Division, but the talk had died down. These days, Mrs van Doon was starting to look tired, perhaps slightly worn around the edges. The skin of her arms looked a little dry, the hair tucked behind her ears was in need of a colour rinse.

‘We have here a well-nourished Caucasian male; physical condition matches the given age of forty-four,’ said the pathologist briskly, when Fry called in on her way to West Street that morning. ‘Height one hundred and eighty-nine centimetres. That’s a fraction over six feet, for the metrically challenged.’

‘Oh, thank you,’ said Fry. ‘That’s a help.’

The pathologist’s tone made her tense up. It sounded like a challenge, and there was nothing wrong with that to start the day, in Fry’s book. For some reason, she and Mrs van Doon had never really hit it off. Maybe it was something Fry had done herself when she first arrived in E Division, but the hostility had never been far below the surface. Fine, if that was the way she wanted it.

‘His weight is eighty-eight kilos.’

‘Mmm. Fourteen stone?’

‘Very good, DS Fry.’

‘Actually, I was educated entirely in metres and kilograms. But I’ve learned to do the conversion the other way.’

‘A triumph of our modern education system,’ said the pathologist.

Fry gritted her teeth, but stayed calm. She tried to concentrate on the individual whose postmortem she was attending. The important person in all of this – the victim. A glance at the body on the stainless-steel table showed her that he was carrying a bit of surplus body fat, but his muscles were reasonably well toned. He had a fading tan that stopped at the waistband line. A holiday abroad not too long ago. His hair was dark, with hardly a speck of grey to be seen. Now that the area had been shaved and cleaned, the damage to the skull was very evident.