‘DS Kolla!’ he beamed, teasingly formal. ‘How nice to see you again.’

‘DI,’ she corrected. ‘I’ve been promoted.’

He raised his hands in mock horror at his gaffe. ‘Inspector! Of course, I did hear. And so very well deserved. I’ve told Brock often enough that you’re the only one to be trusted to do a decent job in that place. I’m so pleased he sent you. And who is this?’

‘Don’t flirt, Sundeep. This is DC Gallagher-Pip.’

‘How do you do, Pip.’ He shook her hand delicately, as if it might bruise easily, then gave them both visitors’ tags. ‘And why shouldn’t I flirt? Am I too old? Wouldn’t you call that discrimination, Pip?’

The usual patter, Kathy thought, but all the same she sensed his heart wasn’t in it. He was worried about something.

He led them over to the stairs and they descended to a corridor and an overpowering smell of fresh paint. It was sharply cooler down there, and somewhere up ahead a radio was playing tinny music. They reached a pair of double swing doors and Sundeep led the way into a brightly lit room in the centre of which was a series of stainless-steel tables. On the nearest a woman’s body was stretched out, naked and recently dissected, but not yet reassembled. Kathy sensed Pip’s stride falter at the sight. Her eyes moved from the woman’s opened abdomen to her scalp pulled forward over her face, the top of her skull neatly severed, the brain removed.

Kathy turned her attention to Sundeep, who offered her a photograph of a young woman, head and shoulders. Even without the stainless steel on which her red hair fanned, Kathy would have known that she was dead. Her green eyes were open but sightless, her flesh like yellow wax.

‘Her name is Marion Summers,’ Sundeep said. ‘She collapsed yesterday in the London Library in the West End.