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see him,’ Rosa pointed out. ‘He knows you’re not supposed to be here.’
    ‘Who said I came to see him?’ Bryant’s aqueous-blue eyes were as innocent as a kitten’s. ‘I find myself inexplicably drawn to you. Every time I imagine you in that shapeless black whatever-it-is you’re wearing I get quite—’
    ‘Mr Bryant, will you please stop antagonizing my assistant?’ said Giles Kershaw, striding into the hall. Out of his lab coat and tucked into faded jeans, a crisp white shirt and a black waistcoat, he looked like a waiter for a once-fashionable restaurant rather than the guardian of the borough’s main mortuary.
    ‘We were just chatting about literature.’ Bryant produced a battered but extravagantly beribboned box of chocolates from his overcoat. ‘These are for you, Rosa.’
    She hesitated before accepting them, perhaps wondering whether they were poisoned, then wrinkled her nose.
    ‘Ah, yes. The cat peed in my pocket, but they should be all right,’ Bryant explained. ‘They’re your favourite, I imagine: hard centres. And you’re absolutely correct, of course. We avoid matters of importance and concentrate on the trivial. If we didn’t, the burden of life would simply prove too much for us.’
    ‘Spoken’, replied Rosa, ‘like a man without a god.’ She pointedly set the chocolates aside.
    ‘I think I know what you came for,’ said Kershaw hastily, flicking back his blond fringe and marching along the hall towards the main autopsy room with Bryant in his wake.
    ‘Oh, I’m not here for anything,’ Bryant explained. ‘I was just in the neighbourhood.’
    ‘So you didn’t know that Dan was here as well?’
    ‘Is he back from the Findersbury Bank already? Well, that’s a stroke of luck.’
    ‘I knew you wouldn’t be able to stay away,’ called Banbury, who was poking through the contents of an opaque green plastic bag on Kershaw’s counter. ‘There’s nothing more to see than this. He’s in a terrible state.’
    ‘I’ve probably seen worse,’ said Bryant.
    ‘I tell my students to detach themselves from the fact that this is a human body. If you really start thinking about it, you’ll realize that after all your years in the job you’ve looked at too many corpses, and there’s a lot of nightmare potential in that. Just don’t—’
    ‘I know – touch anything.’ He let Kershaw cut open the bag. ‘Well, that’s pretty disgusting. His viscera look cooked. How will you get anything out of them?’
    ‘In this job you need to have good visual acuity for pattern recognition. The ability to put together what’s been going on. Take a look at that.’ Without glancing up, Kershaw brandished a pair of tweezers in the direction of the steel tray further along the counter.
    Bryant went over to it and peered in. He saw a small metal rod with blackened ends. ‘What is it?’
    ‘An implant,’ said Kershaw. ‘Probably from his right foot.’
    ‘What kind of implant?’ He picked up the rod and sniffed it.
    Kershaw took it out of his hands. ‘What did I just ask you not to do? It looks like a titanium allogenic graft for segmental lengthening, to replace a part that was damaged. From the upper part of the foot. It’s likely he crushed a bone and had it replaced. These things are pretty common, but I thought it would help to narrow down the search field. Then I discovered that the newer models are etched with a unique serial number so that each one is registered to its owner. We’ll run a check tonight.’
    ‘Why can’t you do it now?’
    ‘The medical database requires search clearance. If that doesn’t work out, we’ll get him on dental records. If there’s time, that is. I’d rather not have to start trawling around the hostels. Link has slapped a limit on our billable hours. He wants this closed as quickly as possible.’
    ‘What about cameras? Don’t tell me you can’t track his movements?’
    ‘In and out of the street, certainly,’ said Banbury, ‘but