Dr Piara Singh Deb, forensic pathologist, let out a long breath as he looked at these two young coppers and their intelligence analyst. He remembered the last time they had come to see him, when they had been driven, burdened, more passionately engaged with the Mora Losley case than was useful for them professionally. He had been pleased to hear the subsequent reports of them having succeeded in saving children from the fate of those whose skeletons he had examined for them on that occasion. Now they looked just as fraught, but in an entirely different way. The young woman had a terrible expression on her face as she looked at the body on the slab in the forensic laboratory. She kept her jaw tight shut as if she was about to explode with rage, and her eyes shone with it. He expected some variation: perhaps this was the prelude to tears, but none came. She didn’t talk at all as they viewed the body. The stockier black copper had a more conventional grief, which was somehow reassuring. He was pale, he hadn’t slept, you could feel the tension in his neck. Their DS did all the talking. He asked a lot of questions. He seemed determined to remain calm and businesslike – something Singh had seen a lot in the way police dealt with horrifying deaths. But he was talking a little too fast, there was a touch of desperation about him. He was playing host today, in these terrible circumstances, to a superintendent as well as the three of them. He suspected the deceased, James Quill, had also been a friend of hers. The last time Singh had seen him, he’d been suffering somehow, lost. Now he was lost completely.

‘The body was found at oh-four-twenty-eight this morning, having caught in the moorings of a tourist vessel near East India Dock. Exposure to the water indicates he can’t have been in there for more than about nine hours.’

‘That’s before when he was last seen alive,’ said the DS.

‘Various other tests concur that death might have occurred soon after he was last seen. You tell me these are the same clothes he left work in. He was dropped into the river from some considerable height. I wouldn’t be surprised if I was told that was off one of the major bridges upstream from where he was found. Needless to say, he was already dead.’ Singh moved to look into the dead man’s face, remembering how it had looked in life. ‘Cause of death: shock and massive blood loss due to repeated lacerations of the torso and gross injuries to the testicles and lower abdomen.’ The body was white, even the wounds pale. ‘These injuries are precisely in keeping with the MO of the suspect you are investigating in connection with the previous murders.’