Barolli had disappeared to the toilet; she had no idea where Langton had gone.

‘You’re replacing Danny, aren’t you?’ Lewis panted as he reached the top of the flight of stairs.

‘I think so,’ she answered.

‘He got some kind of stomach bug. One minute he was fine, next buckled up in agony. I thought it was appendicitis, but it’s some intestinal bug. Did you know him?’ Now Lewis was barging down the narrow corridor.

‘No,’ she said, trying to keep up.

Lewis reached double doors at the end and banged them open. The doors swung back and Anna would have been clipped if he had not grabbed a door in time.

‘Sorry,’ he said absent-mindedly.

Anna had not anticipated the number of people she found working on a case where the body had only just been discovered. Eight desks were lined up, four to four on either side of the room. The desks were manned by male and female uniformed officers and two clerical workers. There were stacks of filing cabinets, overflowing files and masses of paperwork. Running along the length of one wall was a whiteboard covered in dates and names scribbled with felt-tip pen by various hands. Besides this was the unnerving display of numerous mortuary and life shots of the different women.

On one desk was a missing persons file. Anna opened it and found herself staring at a photograph of a stunning-looking young woman, Melissa Stephens — age seventeen, last seen in early February. There was a list including her eye colour, clothes she was last seen wearing and other details.

‘Has the victim from this morning been identified?’ she asked Mike Lewis. He was sitting on the edge of a desk, talking to one of the female officers.

‘Not yet,’ he replied over his shoulder, then went back to his conversation.