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what?'
    'I'm not a fucking miracle worker,' Hendricks said. 'Arterial blood is brighter, and there's certainly enough of it, but it's impossible to tell from this. Like I said . . .'
    'Megapixels, right.'
    'I need to see the body. I'll tell you how many sugars he had in his tea if you let me have a look at him in the flesh. Or what's left of it.'
    Thereafter, the chat was more or less idle: Arsenal's recent lack of form; a vague arrangement to meet up for a drink later on. There was only one more reference to the picture and to the questions it posed. Hendricks sounded as serious as he had on Thorne's doorstep the night before; letting him know that, megapixels aside, one thing about the photograph had been clear enough. 'If it helps, I can see now why you'd want to know,' he said.
    When he'd hung up, Thorne sat around and let the clock run for a while. Aimless, he watched as Karim worked at the whiteboard that dominated one wall of the Incident Room: scribbling, erasing, updating the map of each outstanding murder where there was any change to be made. He listened as Andy Stone tried in vain to milk more laughs from his 'blood on the carpet' routine, and as Yvonne Kitson pestered the lab for news on the knife that might have killed Deniz Sedat.
    He didn't catch everything that was said. The previous night's lack of sleep had been gaining on him since six-thirty that morning - when he'd trudged towards the bathroom, dragging off a sweaty T-shirt, Louise still dead to the world - and four hours later Thorne was already feeling like he'd done a hard day's graft. Even as he looked up and grunted his response to Brigstocke, he was wondering if he might have nodded off at the desk for a few seconds.
    'When did you last check the bulletin?' the DCI asked.
    'About an hour and a half ago . . .'
    Brigstocke waved a piece of paper in front of him. 'This came in just after nine.' When Thorne reached up for it, Brigstocke snatched the sheet away and read, enjoying himself: 'Raymond Tucker. 32 Halifax Road, Enfield. Found by his mother around seven this morning. Victim appears to have died from massive head trauma . . . Signs of forced entry at rear of premises . . . Blah, blah, blah-di-blah.' He paused for effect. 'Sound good to you?'
    'Sounds possible .'
    Thorne moved for the paper again and this time Brigstocke let him have it. He carried on talking as Thorne read through the brief report. 'A team out of Barking caught it, so I called up the chief super over there, got the DCI's name, and faxed the picture across fifteen minutes ago.'
    Thorne stared up, waited, but not for long. 'Come on, Russell, fuck's sake . . .'
    'The man from Del Monte . . . he say "yes".'
    Thorne stood and started to move, Brigstocke following, towards his office. 'I'll ask Hendricks to meet us at the crime scene.'
    'I should skip that for now,' Brigstocke said, 'and get down to Hornsey Mortuary. When the DCI rang back about the photo, he said they'd be bringing the body out in the next half-hour or so.'
    Thorne nodded and pushed through the door, the tiredness shaken off and left for dead. He was already at his desk, leaving a message on Hendricks' machine, when Brigstocke, en route to his own office further up the corridor, stopped in the doorway.
    'When I spoke to the DCI, he also told me the body had been there for a while.' Brigstocke paused for a second or two, until he was sure Thorne understood the implications. 'Over a week, he reckoned.'
    The pictures in Thorne's head were less than lovely. 'I bet that carpet's fucked,' he said.
    By the time Karim was at the whiteboard again, marking out a new column in lines of black felt-tip and taping up the dead man's picture below Tom Thorne's name, Thorne and Holland were already in the car.
    Raymond Anthony Tucker had died two days shy of his fifty-second birthday. He'd run a small second-hand car dealership in Chingford, which had hardly catered to the top end of the market, but was nevertheless a notch or two