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respect but from a strange kind of fear. The mortuary, after all, was one vast memento mori, and what was about to happen to Jean Cooper’s body would serve to remind each and every one of them that if the body were a temple, then it was possible to loot that temple, scattering its treasures, revealing its precious secrets.
    A hand landed gently on Rebus’s shoulder, and he turned, startled, towards the man who was standing there. ‘Man’ was by way of simplification. This tall and unsmiling individual had cropped fair hair and the acne-ridden face of an adolescent. He looked about fourteen, but Rebus placed him in his mid-twenties.
    ‘You’re the Jock, aren’t you?’ There was interest in the voice, but little emotion. Rebus said nothing. FYTP. ‘Yeah, thought so. Cracked the case yet, have you?’ The grin accompanying this question was three-quarters sneer and one-quarter scowl. ‘We don’t need any help.’
    ‘Ah,’ said George Flight, ‘I see you’ve already met DC Lamb. I was just about to introduce you.’
    ‘Delighted,’ said Rebus, gazing stonily at the join-the-dots pattern of spots on Lamb’s forehead. Lamb! No surname in history, Rebus felt, had ever been less deserved, less accurate. Over by the slab, Dr Cousins cleared his throat noisily.
    ‘Gentlemen,’ he said to the room at large. It was little more than an indication that he was about to start work. The room fell quiet again. A microphone hung down from the ceiling to within a few feet of the slab. Cousins turned to the technician. ‘Is this thing on now?’ The technician nodded keenly from between arranging a row of clanging metallic instruments along a tray.
    Rebus knew all the instruments, had seen them all in action. The cutters and the saws and the drills. Some of them were electrical, some needed a human force to drive them home. The sounds the electrical ones made were horrible, but at least the job was over quickly; the manual tools made similarly revolting sounds that seemed to last forever. Still, there would be an interval before that particular shop of horrors. First of all there was the slow and careful business of removing the clothing and bagging it up for Forensics.
    As Rebus and the others watched, the two photographers clicked away, one taking black and white shots and the other colour, recording for posterity each stage of the process. The video cameraman had given up, however, his equipment having jammed irreparably on one of the bargain tapes. Or at least that was the story which kept him away from the mortuary.
    Finally, when the corpse was naked, Cousins pointed to a few areas meriting particular close-up shots. Then the Forensics men moved in again, armed with more lengths of sticky tape. Now that the body was unclothed, the same process as was carried out on the tow-path had to be gone through again. Not for nothing were these people known as Sellotape Men.
    Cousins wandered over towards the group where Rebus, Flight and Lamb stood.
    ‘I’d kill for a cup of tea, George.’
    ‘I’ll see what I can do, Philip. What about Isobel?’
    Cousins looked back towards where Isobel Penny stood, making another drawing of the corpse despite the welter of camera shots. ‘Penny,’ he called, ‘care for a cuppa?’ Her eyes opened a little and she nodded enthusiastically.
    ‘Right,’ said Flight, moving towards the door. Rebus thought the man seemed more than a little relieved to be leaving, albeit temporarily.
    ‘Nasty little chap,’ Cousins commented. Rebus wondered for a moment if he were talking about George Flight, but Cousins waved a hand towards the corpse. ‘To do this sort of thing time after time, without motive, out of some need for … well, pleasure, I suppose.’
    ‘There’s always a motive, sir,’ said Rebus. ‘You just said so yourself. Pleasure, that’s his motive. But the way he kills. What he does. There’s some other motive there. It’s just that we can’t see it yet.’
    Cousins stared