He had the door open and was halfway out when he went a little still, his back to them, his hand on the door, facing out into the kitchen corridor, maybe feeling the two of them watching him silently.

He took a few beats, then turned back.

'What?' he said, looking from Dundas to Flea and back again. 'It's a suicide. What do you usually do with a suicide?'

'If we haven't got a hotspot? If we haven't got a witness?'

'Yeah?'

'We, uh, wait for it to float.' Flea went softly on the word 'float': in the team they used it so often they'd got easy with it, forgot sometimes what it meant: that a corpse had to get so full of decomposition gases it rose to the surface. 'We let it float, then do a surface snatch. In this weather that'd be in a couple of weeks' time.'

'That's what I thought. It's what they do in London.' He started to go again, but this time he must have seen Dundas throw a glance across at Flea, because he paused. He closed the door and came back into the room. 'OK,' he said slowly. 'You're trying to explain something to me. Only problem is, I haven't a clue what.'

Flea took a breath. She turned her chair, put her elbows on her knees and sat canted forward, meeting his eye. 'Didn't the CSM tell you? Didn't he say we don't think it's a suicide?'

'You just said you get a million suicides out here.'

'Yes — in the Avon. If it was in the Avon we'd understand it. But it's not. This was in the harbour.'

She got up and stood, half holding the chair as if it would protect her. She didn't show it, but she was conscious of the way he was tall and sort of lean under his suit. She knew if she got closer she'd stare or something, because she'd already noticed a few things about him — like the point above his collar where his five o'clock shadow started. 'We're not the pathologists,' she said. 'We shouldn't be telling you anything. But something's not right.' She licked her lips and glanced sideways at Dundas. 'I mean, first off it's been in the water less than a day. A body's not ready to come to bits in rough water until a long, long time after it's floated. This one's way too fresh for that.'