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alongside her.
    ‘Doctor Catherall.’
    Jane Catherall glanced up at Emma. ‘Detective Sergeant Bradbury, how pleasant to see you here, at the edge of the known world. Is DCI Lapslie also around?’
    Emma gazed down fondly at the pathologist. She knew, from what Lapslie had told her, that Jane Catherall was one of the last people in the UK to have suffered badly from polio as a child. As a result, her back was twisted, her torso malformed and her eyes protuberant. And she was simultaneously the sweetest person and the most fastidious pathologist that Emma had ever met.
    ‘No, the DCI is sampling the local food in Pakistan under thepretence that he’s attending a conference on law enforcement and counter-terrorism.’
    ‘And they’ve let you out alone?’ Her eyes twinkled. ‘How lovely for Mark. I do hope the sound of the jet engines won’t set his synaesthesia off.’
    ‘He’s actually being treated for it at the moment. He’s happier than I’ve ever seen him.’
    Jane Catherall smiled, and her face transformed. ‘Good for him,’ she said.
    Emma watched as the body was carefully transferred into a black bag and from there onto a wheeled stretcher. ‘When can you get around to doing the post-mortem?’
    ‘I’ve actually got a space now. I’ll start straight away when we get back.’
    ‘In that case, I’ll come with you.’
    She crossed over to where Sergeant Murrell was standing and told him that she would be back later, and that he was in charge while she was gone. ‘Get all the balls from the ball pit individually sealed in plastic bags, tagged and sent to Forensics,’ she added.
    ‘Are you joking?’ he asked, looking at the thousands of balls. Noticing the look on her face, he added, ‘No, you’re not.’
    Following the stretcher outside to where the unmarked pathology van was parked, she watched it pull away, then got into her Tigra and followed.
    The drive back to Braintree took over an hour. Emma resisted the temptation to overtake and zoom ahead at speed; all that she would accomplish would be to guarantee herself an hour’s wait in the mortuary car park. As she trailed the van through traffic, past people-carriers and white vans, down streets lined with neat, semi-detached houses and past rows of local shops, she was struck by the fact that nobody they passed knew howclose they were to a mutilated dead body. And after half an hour of thinking that, she started wondering what other secrets were lying in the vans and the houses that she was passing, and she shivered.
    At the mortuary, Doctor Catherall’s assistants laid the body carefully on one of the massive, lipped, stainless-steel tables. After they had washed it and catalogued it with a series of photographs, Jane stepped forward, moving slowly around the table and examining each wound, each slash, each exposed area of muscle, tissue and bone with equal care, murmuring all the time into a digital voice recorder. It occurred to Emma that it was like some strange modern dance, with all the participants knowing their motions but where the audience had to interpret the meaning of what was being done on stage.
    After opening up the body she cut through the ribs with a pair of medical shears, then moved forward again and lifted the breast bone free. The remnants of the ribs hung down from her hand like the legs of some stark, white spider. Putting the breast bone to one side, she proceeded to remove every organ from the body cavity, meticulously weighed it and then put it to one side for later analysis.
    She paused when she came to the liver. At least, Emma assumed it was the woman’s liver. Whatever it was, it was dark red and glistening, and it flopped over both of Jane Catherall’s hands. The pathologist gazed at it for a few moments, weighing it in her hands before placing it to one side. She spoke quietly into the digital recorder for a minute or so before continuing with the autopsy.
    After finishing with the organs in the chest cavity