Marijke looked past him as he moved towards the staircase. ‘Any idea on the cause of death?’ she asked.

‘There’s only one wound that I can see.’

‘I know. But it just seems …’ Marijke paused.

Maartens nodded. ‘Not enough blood. He must have been castrated around the time of death. We’ll see what the pathologist has to say. But for now, we’re definitely looking at a suspicious death.’

Marijke checked her boss’s dour face to see if he was being ironic. But she could see no trace of levity. In two years of working with Maartens, she seldom had. Other cops protected themselves with black humour, an instinct that sat comfortably with her. But comfort was the one thing that Maartens seemed inclined to prevent his team ever experiencing. Something told her they were going to need more than Maartens’s austerity to get them through a murder as horrible as this. She watched him descend, her heart as heavy as his tread.

Marijke crossed the threshold of the crime scene. The recherche bijstandsteam had a fixed system, even though murders didn’t happen often enough on their patch to be routine occurrences. Her role while Maartens briefed the forensic team and the pathologist was to make certain the crime scene remained secure. She took latex gloves and plastic shoe covers out of the leather satchel she always carried with her and put them on. Then she walked in a straight line from the door to the desk, which brought her level with the dead man’s head. This study of the dead was her job, the one Maartens always avoided. She was never sure if he was squeamish or simply aware that he was better occupied elsewhere. He was good at putting people to tasks that suited them, and she had never flinched at the sight of the dead. She suspected it was something to do with being a farm girl. She’d been accustomed to dead livestock since early childhood. Marijke really didn’t care how much noise the lambs made.

What she cared about was what this body could teach her about victim and killer. She had ambition; she didn’t intend to end her career as a brigadier in Hollands Midden. Every case was a potential stepping stone to one of the elite units in Amsterdam or Den Haag, and Marijke was determined to shine whenever she got the chance.

She stared down at the corpse of Pieter de Groot with a clinical eye, one fingertip straying to touch the distended abdomen. Cool. He’d been dead for a while, then. She frowned as she looked down. There was a circular stain on the polished surface of the desk, forming a nimbus round the head as if something had been spilled there. Marijke made a mental note to point it out to the scene-of-crime team. Anything out of the ordinary had to be checked out.