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working in the area.’
    â€˜Just started.’ He glanced at Masson, who was clearly in no mood to stand idly by for a friendly reunion between old student chums. ‘I’ve heard your name mentioned a few times already, though.’
    â€˜If we could all get on with the task in hand,’ Masson said testily, at which Mark winked at me and said, ‘We’ll catch up later.’
    â€˜So, what have you got for me, Dr Bentham? The usual airy waffle that I get from all you pathologists?’
    It was clear that, although he might not have been around Masson for long, Mark had clearly already developed a certain degree of immunity to his waspishness. ‘Now, now, Inspector. If someone could get you all the information you need without having to have an autopsy done, I’d be out of a job, wouldn’t I?’
    Masson’s face did something that only an eternal, incurable and quite possibly terminally myopic optimist would interpret as a smile. ‘Can you tell me anything concrete at all?’
    Mark indicated Marlene Jeffries. ‘I can’t at the moment find any other significant injuries apart from those to her head. I’m not sure what was used, though. Curious, slightly curved shapes to some of the injuries.’
    â€˜Some sort of curved blade? Like a scythe?’ asked Sergeant Abelson, speaking for the first time. She had a slightly husky, soft voice.
    Masson grunted. ‘Are you suggesting,’ he enquired of his sergeant, ‘that Death himself was the killer?’ It was asked in a tone that might well have shrivelled a delicate flower.
    Dad, helpful as ever, was not backward in coming forward. ‘Or it could have been a very old farmhand,’ he offered.
    This contribution did not help the chief investigating officer cope with his customary incendiary temper, one that he appeared able to control only by several deep breaths and pulling so much air through his cigarette that it was in danger of imploding into his upper respiratory tract.
    Mark frowned. ‘Hardly anything like that. It wasn’t very sharp. These are heavy blunt injuries.’
    Abruptly Masson swivelled around to Abelson, a delicate pirouette that I thought he did rather well. ‘Any news on her personal circumstances?’
    She shook her head but did so almost defiantly and I found myself warming to Sergeant Abelson; she was not about to go readily into that good night. Although Masson was not happy, she did little in the way of flinching, even as he said, ‘Well, get some.’
    He then turned to us. ‘Thanks for your help.’ Which, it appeared, was as close as he came to a gentle dismissal. I smiled at Mark and then Dad and I trudged away; we had almost reached the doors when a cry came from our right, one that echoed around the vast room. Everyone turned. A middle-aged, emaciated man in plain clothes was calling from a side room. ‘Sir? We’ve found something.’
    Everyone converged, of course; Dad and I were quite close so we had a head start, but Masson did a bit of battling and pulling of rank so that he got to the front. We were crowded into a side room on the floor of which was a padded mat, perhaps used for judo or something; there was a trail of red – clearly blood – across the diagonal,
    At the back was an array of body-building equipment – dumb-bells of all sizes, medicine balls, complicated pieces of torture equipment – and a man and a woman were standing to one side at the end of the red trail across the mat. Masson walked a parallel line to the bloodstains as he crossed the mat; Dad and I, along with everyone else, walked around the edges.
    The exhibit?
    It was a small dumb-bell that seemed to have been dropped in a puddle of blood in the corner of the room. You didn’t have to try too hard to fit the curves of the weights to the curves in the head and face of Marlene Jeffries.

NINE
    T hat evening I took Max to the cinema