‘You’re just in time,’ Mallory said. ‘We’re about to begin. Welcome to Homicide.’

Friendly, but skipping all small talk.

The divisional surgeon was standing up.

‘He’s dead all right,’ he said, snapping his bag shut.

Mallory thanked him and gave me the nod. I stepped forward. ‘Come and have a look at our body, Wolfe,’ he said, ‘and tell me if you’ve ever seen anything like it.’

I joined DCI Mallory on the far side of the desk and we stood above the dead man. At first all I saw was the blood. Lavish arterial sprays with a man in a shirt and tie somewhere beneath it all.

‘The deceased is Hugo Buck,’ Mallory said. ‘Thirty-five years old. Investment banker with ChinaCorps. Body discovered by cleaning staff at six a.m. He gets in early. Works with the Asian markets. While he was having his first coffee, somebody cut his throat.’ Mallory looked at me keenly. ‘Ever seen one of these?’

I did not know how to respond.

The banker’s throat had been more than cut. It had been ripped wide open. The front half of his neck was cleaved away, sliced out with clean precision. He was flat on his back but it felt like only a bit of bony gristle was keeping his head attached to his body. The blood had erupted from his neck in great spurts; his shirt and tie looked like some monstrous red bib. I could smell it now, the copper stink of freshly spilt blood. I shut my mind to it.

Hugo Buck’s jacket was still on the back of his chair. Somehow the fountains of blood had not touched it.

I looked quickly at Mallory and then back at the dead man.

‘I’ve seen three cut throats, sir,’ I said.

I hesitated and he nodded once, telling me to carry on.

‘First week in uniform, there was a husband who saw a text message on his wife’s phone from his best friend and reached for a carving knife. Maybe a year later I attended a robbery in a jewellery shop where a gun failed to discharge and the thief produced an axe and went for the man who pushed the security button. And then there was a wedding reception where the father of the bride objected to the best man’s speech and shoved a champagne flute into his neck. Three cut throats.’

‘Did any of them look anything like this?’

‘No, sir.’

‘This is almost a decapitation,’ Mallory said.

I looked around.

‘Somebody must have heard something,’ I said.

‘Nobody heard a thing,’ Mallory said. ‘There are people around in a building like this even at that time of day. But nobody hears a thing when a man almost gets his head chopped off.’

He considered me with his pale blue eyes. But I didn’t get it.