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to look with her mind, not her emotions. The neck of the bottle had been neatly inserted in the dead woman’s vagina.
    Samit continued his narrative. ‘There is a bottle between the subject’s upper thighs that appears to be intact and contains a clear liquid.’
    Grace could see that the bottle had been aligned so the label faced neatly upwards. The gaudy design of red and silver illustrated the name, Fire’n’Ice, and some of the letters had been written backwards in an attempt to suggest Cyrillic script. She glanced at Lance, who mouthed ‘vodka’ at her.
    Samit stood up to make room for the photographer and turned to Keith. ‘What’s your strategy?’
    ‘I’d like to remove the bottle now so we can get started on any fingerprints or DNA it might provide,’ Keith told him.
    Samit nodded. ‘Be better to remove the clothes in the mortuary, too, rather than on this rough ground.’ He crouched back down, examining the position of the bottle more closely. ‘I’m unable to see any blood or obvious wounds around the vagina. There are no visible marks to suggest a violent struggle, nor that she was dragged here.’
    ‘There’s no clear route in or out,’ said Wendy. ‘There’s no way of knowing whether this is the murder scene or whether she was dumped here.’
    ‘Nor how many people might have been involved,’ added Keith.
    Grace stared out at the jagged, uneven surface of broken bricks, tiles, glass, concrete and rubbish, heard in the near distance the build-up of morning rush-hour traffic, thought of the young woman she’d seen last night, attempting her drunken somersaults. She’d witnessed how easy it would have been to lead such a lamb to slaughter.
    ‘Sooner we get a starter for ten, the better,’ said Keith.
    Taking out a torch, Samit shone it into the eyes of the corpse, raising his chin to focus through the bottom of his varifocals. ‘Possible petechial haemorrhage suggests strangulation. Though it’s anyone’s guess what we’ll find beneath her.’ He straightened up. ‘She could have a bloody great knife stuck in her back for all I know,’ he commented drolly.
    As Samit stepped back, Grace was able to look straight down into the dead woman’s face. Her features were rounded, soft, childlike, jarring against the dark hair of her brutally exposed genitals. Grace could see now that the red garment placed carefully under her head was a folded-up woman’s jacket. Beneath her right ear something bulged under the fabric. Grace pointed to it. ‘That looks like a pocketbook.’
    Keith nodded approvingly. ‘Might give us an ID. As soon as you’re ready, Samit, I think we should move her.’
    ‘Right. Then I can do the PM immediately,’ said Samit.
    ‘Good.’ Keith turned to face them as best he could in the confined space of the tent. ‘The bottle goes to forensics, but what you’ve all seen here stays under wraps until I say otherwise, understand? Not a word of this leaks out to the media. No one outside the investigation is to know anything about it. No one. Right?’
    ‘Right, boss.’
    He waved Lance and Grace out of the tent, and they made their way to the edge of the inner cordon, where a CSI came to take their evidence bags from them.
    ‘This place is a going to be total nightmare,’ grumbled the CSI, surveying the rubble. ‘God knows how much material we’re going to have to take and preserve.’
    Grace and Lance stared at one another as they snapped off their disposable gloves and peeled the protective covers from their shoes. Despite the shock of what they had seen, the excitement of being handed a secret to keep had turned the investigation into an adventure.
    As Grace hopped about on one foot, pulling off her suit, she noticed Roxanne watching from the far side of the road. The reporter beckoned urgently, in defiance of the uniformed officers tasked with encouraging the few pedestrians out so early in the morning not to rubberneck. Handing her suit to the waiting CSI,