‘Hold the flash on him while we take a look.’

The body looked as if it had been chewed up and spat out by a prehistoric monster. The corrugated legs were barely attached to an impossibly flat pelvis. The man was wearing a workman’s blue overalls with mitten-sized pockets that were indeed inside out as the sergeant had described; so were the pockets in the oily rag that was his twisted flannel jacket. Where the head had been there was now a glistening, jagged harpoon of bloody bone and sinew. There was a strong smell of shit from bowels that had been crushed and emptied under the enormous pressure of a locomotive’s wheels.

‘I can’t imagine what you’ve seen that could look worse than this poor Fritz,’ said Sergeant Stumm.

‘Me neither,’ observed Wurth, and turned away in disgust.

‘I dare say we’ll all see some interesting sights before this war is over,’ I said. ‘Has anyone looked for the head?’

‘I’ve got a couple of lads searching the area for it now,’ said the sergeant. ‘One on the track and the other down below in case it fell into the gasworks or the factory yard.’

‘I think you’re probably correct,’ I said. ‘It looks like a murder all right. Quite apart from the pockets, which have been turned out, there’s that hand we saw.’

‘The hand?’ This was Lehnhoff talking. ‘What about it?’

I led them back along the track to take another look at the severed hand, which I picked up and turned in my hands like it was an historic artefact, or perhaps a souvenir once owned by the prophet Daniel.

‘These cuts on the fingers look defensive to me,’ I said. ‘As if he might have caught the knife of someone trying to stab him.’