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Andrew had delighted in spinning her yarns of Patrick’s idiosyncratic post-mortem habits. At the time she’d assumed they’d been exaggerating. Now she wasn’t too sure.
    ‘Did you remove the foot or was it severed?’
    Trevor asked.
    ‘Severed by burning. We had fun trying to assemble him. After intense fire it’s never easy trying to work out which bit is what, particularly if the body’s found in a crouched position as this was.
    Leg bones badly charred, virtually no flesh or muscle left, pelvic bones burned, but enough left to determine a male even without the foot. Torso…’
    Bill interrupted Patrick. ‘It looks like a rack of ribs my wife once cremated over a barbecue.’
    ‘Head, now that is interesting. The left-hand side has burned away, but not the right. The petrol was probably thrown in a haphazard fashion. Fire can be fickle. Petrol burns itself and whatever it comes into contact with, but it goes for the soaked bits first, and when the body was doused by the firemen the flames hadn’t reached one or two places. The foot, for instance.’ Patrick picked it up.
    ‘You said the body was crouched?’ Dan prompted.
    ‘One knee drawn to the chin, hands over the head which was face down, on the thighs.’
    ‘Sam said something about him moving his hands up to his head.’ Until that point Trevor had gazed at the remains with equanimity. But it suddenly struck him that a few short hours ago this had been a living, breathing man and anyone, himself included, was only a match and a can of petrol away from becoming just one more item in Patrick’s overcrowded work schedule.
    The pathologist indicated another bag on the slab next to those that held the hands and boot.
    ‘Cloth – thick enough to be the remains of a coat.
    Wool and synthetic mix, black, can’t tell you any more, but the forensic boys might be able to.’
    ‘Thanks,’ Dan said caustically. ‘Just about every vagrant in Jubilee Street wears a black overcoat. It seems to be the stock item of the charity shop.’
    ‘This is what I showed you on site.’ Patrick picked up a bag that lay next to the brittle remnants of the skull.
    ‘That the bit you said had knife marks?’ Dan rummaged in his pocket, pulled out a bag of peppermints and offered them round. Patrick and Bill were the only ones to take any.
    ‘Which makes me think our victim didn’t kill himself. We’ve had suicides who’ve torched themselves. There was a spate of them in the seventies and early eighties. We’ve even had a few who’ve mutilated themselves facially, but we’ve never had one who’s done both.’
    ‘There’s a first time for everything,’ Bill spoke with the air of a man who’d seen all life had to offer.
    ‘If he did it to himself, where’s the knife?’
    Patrick asked. ‘Even if the handle burned we should have found the blade. The marks are here, here and here.’
    Trevor, Bill, and Dan peered at the diagonal, gaping sloughs in the bone. Anna glanced at them from a distance. ‘There’s not much flesh adhering to this section, although it hasn’t been as badly burned as the rest. It’s my guess, that the flesh was scraped away before the fire started. I’ve X-rayed the cuts and I’d say they were probably made by a keen, honed, not serrated, hooked blade. Possibly a hunting knife.’
    Dan gazed at the fragment and put it into the context of a face. It took him a few moments to make out the beginnings of an eye socket at the top edge of the cheekbone. ‘Sam said the victim was screaming when he ran out into the street. Can you slice that much off a man’s face without killing him?’
    ‘Good lord yes. Cases have been recorded where men have lost their faces in accidents and not even realised for a few minutes what’s happened to them. These injuries could have certainly prompted the screams your witness heard.’
    ‘Would the injuries have killed him if the fire hadn’t?’
    ‘Impossible to say. There’s virtually nothing left of