Normally Inspector Jefe Javier Falcon had a mantra, which he played in the back of his mind when confronted by this sort of corpse. He could stomach all manner of violence done to bodies-gunshot craters, knife gashes, bludgeon dents, strangulation bruises, poisoned pallor-but this transformation by corruption, the bloat and stink, had recently begun to disturb him. He thought it might just be the psychology of decadence, the mind troubled by the slide to the only possible end of age; except that this wasn't the ordinary decay of death. It was to do with the corruption of the body-the heat's rapid transformation of a slim girl into a stout middle-aged matron or, as in the case of this body that they were excavating from the rubbish of the landfill site beyond the outskirts of the city, the metamorphosis of an ordinary man to the taut girth of a sumo wrestler.

The body had stiffened with rigor mortis and had come to rest in the most degrading position. Worse than a defeated sumo wrestler tipped from the ring to land head first in the front row of the baying crowd, his modesty protected by the thick strap of his mawashi, this man was naked. Had he been clothed he might have been kneeling as a Muslim supplicant (his head even pointed east), but he wasn't. And so he looked like someone preparing himself for bestial violation, his face pressed into the bed of decay underneath him, as if unable to bear the shame of this ultimate defilement.

As he took in the scene Falcon realized that he wasn't playing his usual mantra and that his mind was occupied by what had happened to him as he'd taken the call alerting him to the discovery of the body. To escape the noise in the cafe where he'd been drinking his cafe solo, he'd backed out through the door and collided with a woman. They'd said 'Perdon', exchanged a startled look and then been transfixed.