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heard the last squeak ofsome poor rodent as Metternich did his nightly rounds, smiled at the thought of the great black and white beast going soft. Even so, he was glad he and the baby got on. It would have been a shame if they had had to get rid of one of them. He’d got quite fond of little Nolan.

Chapter Three
    The breeze off the sea got colder as the night wore on. The SOCO team shivered as the sweat cooled inside their plastic suits, but they had to carry on. Despite the fact that the body was buried above the tide line, the sand of the dune was notoriously unstable; a windy night could destroy even more than Maxwell and Bill Lunt had already. So, they worked on, in the harsh light of the arc lamps, the fine sand stinging their eyes, searching for the tiny piece of evidence that might nail a killer.
    Slowly, the body belonging to the hand emerged. They had expected someone young – Maxwell’s estimate was correct; it was young. About twenty, as far as the SOCOs could judge, though with dead eyes obscured by the sand stuck to the once damp corneas and the frantic mouth filled with a silent scream of soft dune, it was at first difficult to tell.The sex could go either way, too; the chopped hair could belong to both. Then as their brushes revealed more, it became clear – their body was female, thin and unkempt, wearing the obligatory anorak, sweatshirt with a barely discernible logo, and jeans, worn away to strings at the hem, all stained now with blood from the stab wounds in the abdomen. On her feet, a pair of trainers two sizes too big. Across her shoulder, a bag of Big Issues ; the current copy, wet and mangled like old blotting paper only the oldest member of the team remembered from his childhood. Also in the bag, in a side pocket, was a stash of coins, clearly the takings of the day. The other stash, of some rolling tobacco and a small bag of cannabis, was irrelevant now. But it did show that this wasn’t a random mugging. The clothes didn’t look interfered with, so they started playing with the assumption that sex wasn’t the motive either. In fact, as one shrouded figure remarked to another, there was no reason at all for her to be here, buried and dead, on the dunes outside Leighford, beyond the sweep of Willow Bay. The one thing missing was her Big Issue ID. Then, even that wasn’t missing any more as the probing fingers of Brian Meredith found it, a tatty piece of laminated card, tucked into the back pocket of her jeans. He turned it to the light and squinted to read it.
    ‘Lara Kent,’ he read. ‘No address, though.’
    ‘I don’t expect she’s got one, has she?’ Henry Hall loomed behind the man, bending forward from the waist to see the card. ‘She was selling the Big Issue , for goodness’ sake.’
    ‘Yes, guv, but that’s no reason to suppose she’s got no address. If she’s selling the Issue , she’s trying to help herself at least.’
    ‘Don’t lecture me, Brian,’ said Hall. Sometimes, he felt as old as the hills and as right wing as Genghis Khan. And he was always surrounded by Pinko-Liberals , the new policemen of the new generation. ‘Is there a number or something on that card?’
    Meredith turned it over. ‘Yes, on the back, look.’ He held it up.
    ‘Right,’ said Hall. ‘As soon as you can raise someone, find out as much as possible about her. Meanwhile, get a copy of that ID photo. It’s probably the best picture we’ll get of her, at least for a while. If we can’t scare up some relatives or friends, we may have to go door to door.’
    A horrified gasp grabbed their attention. Alyson Sheridan, one of the team working off to the right of the burial site, nearer the sea, had jumped to her feet and was standing, staring at the ground, the back of her hand to her mouth. They all waded through the sliding dune to cluster behind her.There, emerging from the sand, was the body of a dog. Indeterminate of breed, it was, as Maxwell had foretold, a great big dog, thin as