Arbites officers were all around, but they hadn’t touched the discovery itself.

Mummified and shrivelled, these foetally curled, pitiful husks had been in the wall a long time.

‘What’s that?’ I asked.

Fischig leaned forwards for a closer look. ‘Adhesive tape, wrapped around them to hold them against the partition. Old. The gum’s decayed.’

‘That pattern on it. The silver flecks.’

‘I think it’s military-issue stuff. Matt-silver coating, you know the sort? The coating’s coming off with age.’

‘These bodies are different ages,’ I said.

‘I thought so too,’ said Fischig.

We had to wait six hours for a preliminary report from the district Examiner Medicae, but it confirmed our guess. All three bodies had been in the wall for at least eight years, and then for different lengths of time. Decompositional anomalies showed that one of the males had been in position for as much as twelve years, the other two added subsequently, at different occasions. No identifications had yet been made.

‘The warehouse was last used six years ago,’ Wrex told me.

‘I want a roster of workers employed there before it went out of business.’

Someone using the same m.o. and the same spools of adhesive tape had hidden bodies there over a period of years.

The disused tannery where poor Mombril had been found stood at the junction between Xerxes Street and a row of slum tenements known as the Pilings. It was a foetid place, with the stink of the lye and coroscutum used in the tanning process still pungent in the air. No amount of acid rain could wash that smell out.

There were no stairs. Fischig, Bequin and I climbed up to the roof via a metal fire-ladder.

‘How long does a man survive mutilated like that?’

‘From the severed wrists alone, he’d bleed out in twenty minutes, perhaps,’ Fischig estimated. ‘Clearly, if he had made an escape, he’d have the adrenaline of terror sustaining him a little.’

‘So when he was found up here, he can have been no more than twenty minutes from the scene of his brutalisation.’

We looked around. The wretched city looked back at us, close packed and dense. There were hundreds of possibilities. It might take days to search them all.

But we could narrow it down.

‘How did he get on the roof?’ I asked.

‘I was wondering that,’ said Fischig.

‘The ladder we came up by...’ Bequin trailed off as she realised her gaffe.

‘Without hands?’ Fischig smirked.

‘Or sight,’ I finished. ‘Perhaps he didn’t escape. Perhaps his abusers put him here.’

‘Or perhaps he fell,’ Bequin said, pointing.

The back of a tall warehouse overshadowed the tannery to the east. Ten metres up there were shattered windows.

‘If he was in there somewhere, fled blindly, and fell through onto this roof...’

‘Well reasoned, Alizebeth,’ I said.

The Arbites had done decent work, but not even Wrex had thought to consider this inconsistency.