Craig looked around him like he was a robber about to take money from a till. No one was watching him. He put his hand into the slit between the files marked by the yellow paper and pulled out what was attached to it.

A photograph. A yellowing ten-by-eight black-and-white photograph of a corpse. Craig held it for a moment, looked across at Becker’s closed door, then, leaving Hawk’s drawer open, he stood up with the photo held down at his hip and walked swiftly to his own office.

He closed the door and sat down heavily at the desk.

How did Daniel get one of the photos from the Stoke file into his own possession? Did he surreptitiously ask for it when they’d been there, or did he perform the unpolicemanly act of swiping it when Cochrane had left the room for a moment? More importantly, why?

Craig pushed the photo of the Kinchuinick corpse under the anglepoise lamp and turned on the light. He’d looked at this already.

It was the mid-shot of the body, a grisly snapshot of a mummified head and shoulders down to the chest, the skull grinning up at the photographer with that paper-thin, obscene sliver of dried skin between its teeth. The shot just showed the beginnings of the burst chest.

Craig looked at it again. Carefully and slowly. He ran his eyes over every detail of the picture, looking for something he may have missed when he glanced at it in Cochrane’s office in what seemed like a different lifetime, but was only days ago.

Then he saw it. Round the neck and on the collarbone. Craig opened his drawer and rummaged for his magnifier. He found it, slid it over what he’d seen and tilted the light.

It was faint, but distinct. There was a mark around the body’s neck that looked like a macabre suntan line, as though the wearer sported a pendant around his neck that had left its mark on the skin. Except this wasn’t a paler mark where the sun had been blocked from the skin by something solid. The opposite. It looked like whatever had been round the man’s neck had singed the skin like a brand.

Craig could make out the line on one side of the neck that suggested a thin string or chain, and then just below the collarbone was the faint but distinct mark of an irregular circle. It was like a hoop. Something almost round with a strangely-shaped hole in the middle like a crude letter O.

He stared at it for a minute, then sat back. Was that it? It was all Craig could see of interest that he’d missed first time, but it wasn’t exactly earth-shattering. So the victim had been wearing some sort of jewellery when he died. Had it been robbed by whoever killed him? Probably. So what?