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inform Mrs Kynaston of your call, sir, and your consideration. May I show you out?’

    It took Pitt some time to find Zebediah Smith at his home, and confirm with him what the sergeant had told him. He was not surprised to learn nothing new. His real purpose was to satisfy his own mind that Zebediah was as straightforward as he seemed. The man was still visibly shaken when he told Pitt how he had set out for his usual walk, and in the darkness the keen nose of his dog had scented something different and gone to find it. Then it sat and howled until Smith had come up to it himself, and – in the light of his lantern – seen the pathetic corpse.
    He shook his head. ‘Who’d do that to a woman?’ he said miserably. ‘What kind of a … I suppose I gotta call ’im a man, although ’e ain’t human. ’Ceptin’ animals don’t kill their own for nothing.’
    ‘There’ll be a reason, Mr Smith,’ Pitt replied. ‘It’s my job to find it – when we discover who she is.’
    Zebediah looked up and met Pitt’s eyes. ‘Ain’t no reason to do that to anyone, sir, an’ I don’t care ’oo you are – government, police nor nothin’ – you find ’im, an’ when you do, God ’elp yer what you do to ’im.’
    Pitt did not argue. He was satisfied that Zebediah was telling the exact truth, and also that since he walked the same paths every morning, the body could not have been there twenty-four hours earlier.
     
    By mid-afternoon Pitt was in the morgue with Dr Whistler. There was no place he disliked more. Outside the wind had risen considerably. Gusting rain blew hard and cold one moment, then the next, in sheltered places, simply dripped with surprising power to soak through even the best coats. Now and then there were brief blue patches in the sky, bright, and then gone again.
    Inside the morgue it seemed to be always winter. The windows were high, perhaps to conceal from the passing world what happened there. The cold was necessary to preserve the bodies as they were wheeled from one room to another for examination. Those stored for any length of time were kept in ice chambers, the chill of which permeated everything. The smell was mostly antiseptic, but it was impossible to forget what it was there to mask.
    Whistler’s office, where he saw Pitt, was warm and – had it been anywhere else – would have been quite pleasant. Whistler himself was dressed in a grey suit and there was no outward sign of his grisly occupation, except a faint aroma of some chemical.
    ‘I’m not going to be very helpful,’ he said as soon as Pitt had taken a seat in one of the well-padded but still uncomfortable chairs. They seemed to have been constructed to oblige one to sit unnaturally upright.
    ‘Even the omission of something might be useful,’ Pitt said hopefully.
    Whistler shrugged. ‘She’s been dead at least two weeks, but I imagine you had worked that out for yourself, from the state of her, poor creature. It is as I said: that abomination was done to her face by a clean, very sharp knife.’
    Pitt said nothing.
    ‘I can tell you she was moved after she was dead,’ Whistler went on. ‘But you must have concluded that too. If she’d been lying there for a couple of weeks someone else would have found her before now. Apart from other people who walk their dogs on the paths across the old gravel pits, there’s Mr Smith himself.’
    ‘As you said,’ Pitt observed drily. ‘Not much help so far. I’ve spoken to Mr Smith. I agree, she wasn’t there yesterday. If she’s been dead a couple of weeks, where was she all that time? Do you know that? Or can you at least make an educated guess?’
    ‘Somewhere cold, or the deterioration would be worse than it is,’ Whistler answered.
    ‘Brilliant.’ Pitt was now openly sarcastic. ‘At this time of the year, that narrows it down to anywhere in England except somebody’s house who has decent fires in all the main rooms. Even then it could be someone’s