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quietly.
    Ian was taken aback by an unexpected surge of anger. He wanted to protest that the bundle of skin and bones on the table wasn’t a woman at all.

    The dead woman’s hair had been shaved to expose a nasty bruise on the side of her head where she had fallen, or been hit. Naked, she lay flat on her back, her eyes closed, her face a white mask of displeasure with the ends of her lips curved downwards, and her eyebrows lowered in vexation. Her chest had been cut open but she was otherwise intact.
    ‘We don’t have an identity yet,’ Millard went on in his low even voice. He could have been chatting about the weather. ‘Her clothes are casual but they look quite new, and she seems to have looked after herself. The chances are she had a regular dentist which means we should get a match with dental records before too long, hopefully before the end of the day. Is there anything from your end to tell us who we’re looking at?’
    Ian shook his head. There had been no reports yet of a missing woman matching the description of the body discovered on a park bench.

    ‘Is it safe to assume the cause of death was the stab wound in her chest?’ he asked.
    ‘Yes, death resulted from a stab wound, as you can see.’
    ‘She was attacked from the front?’ Ian continued, pressing the pathologist to reveal as much as he could about the nature of the attack.
    Millard nodded, his bald pate shining under the bright lights as he lowered his head.
    ‘Yes, although there’s no sign of any defence wounds, which is a bit odd given that her killer must have been standing in front of her.’
    Ian seized on the remark.
    ‘Odd in what way?’
    ‘You’d expect there to be some indication of a struggle, even if he took her by surprise. Yet there’s no evidence of any attempt to escape, either before or during the attack.’
    ‘It was night-time, and the park is poorly lit. Presumably she didn’t see him coming.’
    ‘She might have known him,’ Polly said.
    ‘True.’ The pathologist inclined his head. ‘It’s possible she was caught completely off guard, but even so, she didn’t die immediately. Why didn’t she react in any way? A scraping of skin or a speck of blood under her finger nails would have made our job so much simpler.’ He sighed. ‘She hasn’t made it easy for us.’

    ‘Talk us through how she died,’ Ian said after a brief pause.
    ‘She died within minutes from blood loss and shock.’
    The pathologist probed inside the woman’s chest with a bony finger. Glancing up, Ian saw that Polly’s eyes were glued to Millard’s skinny hand. She didn’t look at all perturbed.
    ‘It was unfortunate for the victim that the killer managed to drive the blade right between her ribs. It was a lucky hit,’ Millard went on.
    ‘What do you mean, lucky?’
    ‘Lucky for the killer, that is. Each rib being wider than the spaces between them, there was more than a fifty per cent chance the blade would have glanced off a bone instead of penetrating directly into the heart. Although we don’t yet have an identity for the victim, we can say for certain that she was in her mid-to-late fifties, five foot one in height, and slight. She was brunette, turning grey, and reasonably fit for her age. She had a child by caesarean section,’ he pointed to a line that ran across the lower part of her abdomen, ‘and she was married, or at least she had been.’
    Ian nodded. He had already seen the dead woman’s wedding ring. It had been removed, but the indentation was still visible on the ring finger of her left hand.

    ‘What about the attack? Is there anything else you can tell us about that? What about the wound itself?’
    ‘She was stabbed once in the chest with a blade with one sharp cutting edge. The other edge of the blade was blunt. As you can see if you come closer, the wound is sharper at one end than the other. This isn’t always obvious, as the blunt edge of the knife often splits the skin, making the laceration