Brigadier Marijke van Hasselt wrinkled her nose. Not minding the dead was one thing; enduring the assorted stenches and sights of a postmortem was something that required rather more fortitude. The early stages had been fine. Nothing bothered her about the weighing and measuring, the freeing of head and hands from their plastic coverings, the scraping from under each individual fingernail, all meticulously recorded on audio and video tape by Wim de Vries, the pathologist. But she knew what lay ahead, and it wasn’t a prospect for the delicate of stomach.

At least de Vries wasn’t one of those who relished the humiliation of the police officers who had to attend postmortems. He never brandished organs like a gleeful offal butcher. Rather, he was calm and efficient, as respectful of the dead as the disassembling of their physical secrets allowed him to be. And he spoke plainly when he found something the attending officer needed to know. All of which was a relief to Marijke.

Delicately, he continued his external examination. ‘Some traces of froth in the nostrils,’ he said. ‘Consistent with drowning. But none in the mouth, which surprises me,’ he added as he shone a light into de Groot’s mouth. ‘Wait, though …’ He peered more closely, reaching for a magnifying glass. ‘There’s some bruising at the back of the throat here, and contusions on the insides of the lips and cheeks.’

‘What does that mean?’ Marijke asked.

‘It’s too early to be precise, but it looks as if something was forced into his mouth. We’ll know more later.’ Efficiently, he took a series of swabs from the body’s several orifices then began to pay attention to the external injuries.

‘The excision of the pubic hair is quite neat,’ he said. ‘Only a few signs of tentative cuts on the navel here.’ He pointed with a latex-covered fingertip. ‘You see? I’ve never seen this before. Pubic scalping, I suppose you’d have to call it. Your perpetrator has been careful not to damage the genitals themselves.’

‘Was he still alive when it happened?’

De Vries shrugged. ‘The scalping was done very close to death itself. He was either just dead or dying when it happened.’ He continued to examine the body, pausing at the left side of the head. ‘Nasty bump here.’ His fingers probed the lump. ‘Slight abrasion of the skin. Blunt force trauma. He took a blow to the head some time before he died.’ He nodded to the technician. ‘Let’s roll him.’