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one side, like this.’ She stopped, frowning. ‘But the cuts appear to me to be inflicted from random directions – from the sides, from the top, from the back, but not as far as I can tell from below.’ She sighed. ‘I’ve never seen anything quite like this before. I can’t yet tell what kind of weapon was involved. I’m not even sure it was a bladed instrument, in the classic sense.’
    ‘Were the wounds inflicted before death?’
    Jane nodded. ‘Oh yes. But not long before.’
    ‘And they were the cause of death?’
    ‘I’ll have to wait for the results to come back on the organs and tissues, but a few of these cuts intersected arteries. The poor girl would have bled to death.’ She shook her head. ‘It would have been painful, and it would have been slow, but it would have been certain. This was not an accident. This was deliberate and sadistic murder.’
    ‘Anything else I need to know?’
    Jane put her head on one side for a long moment. ‘The liver was unusually large. Hepatomegaly is the technical term. I will need to do some further tests to identify the reason.’
    A waiter appeared to one side and slid a plate of pasta in front of Doctor Catherall. It was coated in a red, creamy sauce that glistened just like the liver that she had been holding in her hands just an hour or so earlier. The pathologist hesitated, her fork poised. She glanced, bird-like, at Emma.
    ‘Go ahead,’ Emma said. ‘If I wasn’t hungry before, I’m definitely not hungry now.’

CHAPTER THREE
     
    Landing at Heathrow in the middle of the afternoon, Lapslie felt strangely displaced in time. He’d slept on the flight, and his body wasn’t sure what it should be doing: eating, sleeping or moving around.
    The light from outside was grey, and England was surprisingly noisy, smelly and dirty compared with Islamabad. The terminal at Heathrow, which had once looked so clean and cutting-edge, was dirty and frayed around the edges, and the walk from the disembarkation point to the luggage claim area was a long trek past threadbare seating, faded signs and stationary moving walkways. The place had an air of uncertainty and anxiety about it, absorbed into the walls and furniture from the millions of passengers who passed through every year. It didn’t advertise Britain well.
    The general low murmur of voices would normally have provided Lapslie with a running trickle of blood in his mouth, shot through with spikes of caramel when the tannoy announcements cut across everything, but the drugs and the coping strategies he was employing pushed everything to the edge of his awareness so that it was only there if he thought about it. He still wasn’t quite used to the freedom of being able to experience noise.
    He’d left his Saab in the long-term parking. While he waited in a dank concrete underpass for the coach to arrive to take him on the five-minute journey to where it sat, he turned his mobile phone on. No messages from Emma, but one from Charlotte saying she was working unexpectedly until early the next morning, and a text from Sean Burrows at the forensics laboratory asking him to pop in when he had a moment. He made a flash decision to head across straight away. With Charlotte working he had little reason to go home. He had a Synaesthesia Therapy Group meeting that afternoon at Chelmsford Hospital which he’d already said that he couldn’t attend, but now he might just be able to make it after seeing Sean Burrows.
    From Heathrow he drove counter-clockwise around the M25 towards Dartford. He briefly considered diverting to visit his old stamping grounds in Tower Hamlets and East Ham, but the flight and the wait at Heathrow had depressed his spirits and he didn’t want to lower them any more by seeing all the changes that time and the local council had wrought. Instead he kept driving towards the wooded and secluded location of the Essex Forensics Laboratory. By the time he parked his car outside the perimeter fence at