Perez and Ferrera were waiting for him in his office. Their eyes followed him as he went to the window and the first heavy drops of rain rapped against the glass. Contentment was a strange human state, he thought, as a light steam rose from the car park. Just at the moment life seemed boring and the desire for change emerged like a brilliant idea, along came a new, sinister vitality and the mind was suddenly scrambling back to what appeared to be prelapsarian bliss.

'What have you got?' he asked, moving along the window to his desk and collapsing in the chair.

'You didn't give us a time of death,' said Ferrera.

'Sorry. Forty-eight hours was the estimate.'

'We found the bins where the envelopes were dumped. They're in the old city centre, on the corner of a cul-de-sac and Calle Boteros, between the Plaza de la Alfalfa and the Plaza Cristo de Burgos.'

'When do they empty those bins?'

'Every night between eleven and midnight,' said Perez.

'So if, as the Medico Forense says, he died some time in the evening of Saturday 3rd June,' said Ferrera, 'they probably wouldn't have been able to dump the body until three in the morning on Sunday.'

'Where are those bins now?'

'We've had them sent down to forensics to test for blood traces.'

'But we might be out of luck there,' said Perez. 'Felipe and Jorge have found some black plastic sheeting, which they think was wrapped around the body.'

'Did any of the people you spoke to at the addresses on the envelopes remember seeing any black plastic sheeting in the bottom of one of the bins?'

'We didn't know about the black plastic sheeting when we interviewed them.'

'Of course you didn't,' said Falcon, his brain not concentrated on the details, still drifting about in his earlier unease. 'Why do you think the body was dumped at three in the morning?'