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or two alone before you see the body?’
    ‘No.’ It seemed almost an afterthought, a gesture towards convention, when she said, ‘I’d like to get this over with as quickly as possible, please.’
    They had done a good job in the pathology lab in tidying up the corpse, using the girl’s plentiful hair to disguise the stitching at the front of the skull where the skin had been drawn back to allow entry to the head. The woman before them looked younger than her years, almost girlish in the absence of even the smallest of lines from the face. She looked, as Julie Wharton had said when she studied the photograph of the dead woman on the previous afternoon, almost as if she were asleep.
    The emotion which had been held in check in the mother for almost an hour did not burst through with the revelation of the corpse. Perhaps, Bert Hook thought with a chill, it did not even exist.
    The mortuary attendant drew the sheet back carefully from the dead face, careful not to expose the livid marks about the neck which gave the clue to how she had died. Bert Hook, standing unobtrusively behind the mother, did not hear the gasp of horror or distress he had expected. There was a slight tensing of the square shoulder blades in front of him, but no sound. Then Julie Wharton’s voice said calmly, ‘Yes. That’s Kate. I’ll sign those identification papers now.’
    She was, he decided, the calmest of the trio in that cold and silent room. She refused the offer to allow her a few minutes alone with all that remained of her daughter, turned away as the still face was covered again, signed the papers, refused the offer of a hot drink, and was back in the police Mondeo within five minutes.
    Neither of them spoke for some time as Hook drove her carefully home. Eventually he said, ‘It’s a distressing business, always, the identification, but it has to be done.’
    ‘I understand that.’
    He searched hard for some consoling words. ‘When it’s a road accident death, it can sometimes be really harrowing.’
    He wanted to bite his tongue off at the crassness of this, but all she said was, ‘I can imagine it would be.’
    He gave up any attempt to offer consolation and concentrated on the road. Just when he had decided she would not speak again, she said, ‘What about the funeral? Do I have to make arrangements?’
    A strange way of framing the question, he thought. Most relatives wanted to know when they could conduct the ritual of mourning which was the last gesture to the dead: this woman spoke as if it were some kind of imposition. He said, ‘I’m afraid you may not be able to arrange the funeral for some time, Mrs Wharton. There’ll be an inquest, and even then the coroner probably won’t release the body for burial or cremation. That usually has to wait until — well until —’
    ‘Until there’s been an arrest?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Why’s that?’
    ‘Well, the defence lawyers have a right to ask for a second post-mortem by their own pathologist, if they want to dispute the findings of the first one.’
    ‘I see.’ She nodded thoughtfully, seemingly not at all upset by the idea of the body being stored for months and then opened up again.
    When they drove into the row of neat, anonymous houses, she was out of the car before he could ease his own solid frame from the driving seat. She thanked him for the lift, as politely as if they had been out shopping.
    It was only after she had shut the door of the house behind her that he realized she had still not asked how her daughter had been killed.
    It was DI Rushton who took the call, sitting at his computer in the murder room beside the golf course. ‘They gave me the number at Oldford police station. Said you were the person I should contact.’
    The voice was confident, used to the phone, educated, without the local accent of Herefordshire or Gloucestershire, certainly without the thicker rural burr of the Forest of Dean. Rushton put on the interested but neutral voice he