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body?’
    ‘Certainly about the body. It is animal, vegetable or mineral? Can you eat it?’
    ‘Preliminary shufti suggests there’s just enough bits for one male Caucasian, rather small and slightly built, youngish. But it’s in a lot of pieces, so I’ll have to have time to lay them out before I can tell you any more about it.’
    ‘Have you got a head? If I can get a photograph right away—’
    ‘We’ve got a head, but I’m afraid a photograph won’t do you any good. It’s been rather heavily altered. The face has been obliterated.’
    ‘Obliterated?’
    ‘Removed,’ Cameron said uncompromisingly. ‘I suppose the bits may be in the sacks somewhere, but whether we’ll be able to make anything of them—’
    ‘Someone didn’t want him recognised, then.’
    ‘Right. And we haven’t found the hands, except for the one finger. Oh, and there’s no hair, either. The entire scalp has been removed. We may find that, of course, but—’
    He let the sentence hang for Slider, who would just assoon not have had it. Scalped? It sounded unpleasantly obsessive. Were they going to have to look for a homicidal Wild West fan?
    ‘I suppose the body’s badly decomposed?’
    ‘No, I’d say it was quite fresh. Probably not more than twelve hours old. I think you’re probably looking for a murder committed during the dark hours last night.’
    ‘Then it was the fish making the stink?’
    ‘Just the fish,’ Cameron agreed. ‘Ironic, isn’t it? If friend Atherton hadn’t been so fastidious, it might all have been carted away by the dustman and no-one any the wiser.’
    He turned to go again. A murder during the dark hours, Slider pondered. ‘Freddie, all this cutting up – wouldn’t it have taken a hell of a long time?’
    ‘Not necessarily. There was that case last year, don’t you remember, of the serial killer who dismembered his victims. The first took him thirteen hours, the second he managed in just two and a half. It all depends on knowing your way round a carcase. With a skilled hand and good sharp knives – and I’d say this was a skilled hand. There’s no haggling. The body’s been disjointed very neatly.’
    ‘What about the cause of death?’
    ‘Impossible to say yet. I’ll keep you posted.’
    ‘Okay. Thanks,’ Slider said absently. A skilled hand and sharp knives – the back room with its steel table and floor drain. And yet Slaughter had seemed genuinely puzzled by the finger. Well, yes, perhaps he was – puzzled by how he came to miss it. A lot of pieces, Cameron said – not surprising one went astray, perhaps. Fell unseen into the chip tub. And Slaughter opened up the shop again just as usual the next morning. He must be a cool hand – God, he had to stop using that word! But then what could he do but open up? Anything else would have been suspicious. And when the schoolgirl began shrieking, what else could he do but call the police?
    Step by step, landing himself in the soup. Or, as Atherton would undoubtedly say, the chowder.

CHAPTER 3
Definitely Queer
    POLLY JABLOWSKI, THE POLISH PLONK , was in Slider’s office putting a folder on his desk. Slider stopped dead just inside the door, feeling a nameless sense of unease, almost dread. Something was not as it should be. It was like one of those dreams where something enormously familiar, like the house where one was born, suddenly takes on an air of inexplicable menace.
    Atherton, just behind him, stopped perforce, and stared hungrily over his shoulder at Jablowski’s little spiky head and nude neck. The air crackled with impure thoughts; Slider’s ear grew hot.
    ‘Sir?’ Polish said, straightening up. Seeing Slider’s expression she said defensively, ‘I was just delivering this folder—’
    ‘Something’s wrong,’ he said. ‘This is my office, isn’t it?’
    She grinned. ‘The windows have been cleaned, that’s all. By order of Mr Barrington.’
    ‘Blimey, he moves fast,’ Atherton murmured. ‘And when we’ve