He excused himself from the conversation he was having and led me into the tent. 'It never gets easier, you know,' he said.

'The dead'll always keep dying, sir,' I told him.

'Perhaps, but do they have to die like this?'

I stopped and looked where he was facing. The girl couldn't have been more than eighteen. She was lying on her back in the paved alleyway between the two buildings, legs and arms splayed open in a rough star shape. Her throat had been cut so deeply that the wound had come close to severing her head, which was tilted at an odd angle to the rest of her; thick dried blood had splattered across her face and formed in irregular pools on either side of the body. Her black cocktail dress had been ripped badly around the chest area, exposing a small pointed breast. It had also been pulled up round her waist. She hadn't been wearing any underwear, or, if she had, she wasn't any longer.

There was also a lot of congealed blood around the vaginal area, suggesting that her killer had stabbed her there as well, although I thought immediately that this would have been done after death as there didn't appear to be any defensive wounds on her hands or lower arms. She had died quite quickly, I was sure of that. Her face was screwed up in pain and her dark eyes bulged out, but there was no fear in them. Surprise maybe, shock even, but no fear. She was still wearing one of her shoes, a black stiletto. The other lay on its side a few feet away.

'She must have been freezing dressed like that,' I said, noting that she wasn't wearing any stockings or tights, nor were there any in the vicinity of the body.

'Looks that way,' said Welland. 'She was partially covered with an old rug when we found her. It's already gone off to the lab.'

'What do we know so far?' I asked, still looking down at the corpse.