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already told them how and when: Rushton already suspected that the normally straightforward ‘Where?’ was going to give them difficulty. The SOC team had indicated as much to him before he came here.
    Saunders smiled grimly. ‘I can tell you where he didn’t die. In that churchyard at Broughton’s Ash.’
    ‘He was dumped there after death?’
    ‘Yes. A few hours afterwards, I’d guess.’ Cliff Saunders’ nose wrinkled in distaste above his neat mouth and carefully trimmed beard at the imprecision of this; he wasn’t a man given to guessing. ‘He’d been lying face down after death for perhaps two hours; there was discernible hypostasis on the front of the body. But he was moved before there was any rigor in the limbs.’
    ‘Presumably in a vehicle of some sort?’
    ‘Almost certainly, unless he was moved only a very short distance. But that is more your province than mine, Chris.’ Saunders had forced himself into the use of the forename, and it surprised both of them. ‘There were some scratches on the lower back which probably came from the top of that stone wall at the cemetery — as though he was levered on to it and then thrust over.’
    Rushton nodded. ‘The Scene of Crime team found some fibres from his clothing on the top of the wall. And he was lying almost against it.’
    ‘There are faint marks at the bottom of the shoulder blades which look like finger damage — consistent with someone having lugged him out of a vehicle by gripping him under the arms. There are no similar marks on the legs. Although we can’t rule out the possibility that someone else took hold of that end without leaving marks, it seems unlikely.’
    Chris Rushton made another note to be fed into his computer within the hour: probably only one person involved in the disposal of the body after the killing. Grudgingly, he gave back a little information of his own. ‘It seems the dead man was a schoolteacher at Oldford Comprehensive. An Edward Giles. Separated from his wife. Lived on his own. Is there anything else you can tell us which might be of interest?’
    Saunders pursed his lips. ‘All the detail will be in my report. There is one thing you might like to know immediately, though. Your Edward Giles had sex not long before he died.’
    ‘Lucky bugger!’ It was partly the automatic reaction of a policeman in a force which was still overwhelmingly male, partly the instinctive envy from a man living alone and still coming to terms with a divorce he had never wanted.
    Cliff Saunders gave him a mirthless smile, still mindful of the stainless-steel dishes with their covers in the room next door, each containing organs from the body he had so recently cut up. He had left them laid out methodically, like the dishes for some nightmare banquet.
    ‘He doesn’t seem too lucky to me,’ he said.

 
    Four
     
    Ted Giles’s flat was as neat and clean as that of a houseproud woman. The fitted carpets were newly vacuumed. The bed was neatly made. Even in the bathroom, that most revealing of sanctums for curious coppers, the porcelain shone, and save for a clean brush and comb, everything was neatly stowed away in the mirror-fronted cupboard above the washbasin. In the kitchen, there was not a cup nor a spoon to be seen on the neat white sink. But for an occasional drip from the cold tap, this might have been a show flat, still to be occupied, rather than one in which a man had lived for five years.
    Sergeant ‘Jack’ Johnson looked around this clinically clean residence with distaste. For police teams in search of pointers, premises like this were always the least rewarding. Filth, squalor, and sloppiness in living were the allies he and his team welcomed. You rarely found anything as helpful as the bloodstains Johnson had found on the walls and the floor of the house where he had worked last week, but that was only a straightforward ‘domestic’, where they had already made an arrest. Here, though he had his constables on