“Nobody knows anything about her. She checked in under a pseudonym. Might have been a hooker but wasn’t a regular. We brought her out here to let the experts at her. They haven’t gotten around to her yet — there’s always a backlog at the Fridge. She wasn’t supposed to be a priority but now she is — word leaked and we’ve gotta take her back.”

“Back?”

“To the Skylight. A cop phoned Tasso. Said someone told him what happened. We have till midnight to return her and report her murder or he sweeps in with his men. If she ain’t there, he’ll go to the press.”

“So? Kill the cop, can the story. That’s SOP, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Vincent said. “But it’s simpler to let the cops have her now that they know about her.”

“Won’t the state pathologist figure out how long she’s been dead?”

“That asshole drives a BMW,” Vincent said with a wink. “Gets a new model every year on his birthday. Gratis. He sees what we tell him to see.”

The Fridge looked innocuous from the outside. Set close to the docks, it was a huge dilapidated building, broken glass in the windows, a couple of lights shining to deter tramps, graffiti scrawled by design across the lower walls. We parked down a side alley and let ourselves in. A short stroll down a corridor, through a splintered door, and suddenly we were face-to-face with a vast, whitewashed, stone monstrosity.

The entire interior of the old building had been hollowed out and this enormous box had been constructed inside. Or else they’d built this first, then placed the frame of the older structure around it. I never did think to ask.

Vincent made his way to one of the entrances and tapped in the security code. The door hissed open and a cold blast of air swirled around us. Vincent shivered. “Should have brought my long johns,” he grumbled.

We entered.

This section of the Fridge contained nothing but coffin cubicles. Cold, metal containers, inside which, on ice-cold slabs, rested the dead. They stood in rows of a hundred, five cubicles high, twenty long. There were six floors of scaffolding above this first level, all stacked similarly, staircases and catwalks running around them.