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legs apart?’
    ‘Precisely. Look … ’
    Ewers drew another diagram, two stick legs scissored open, the angle iron completing the triangle.
    ‘The train’s coming in this direction?’ Faraday drew a finger up through the triangle. ‘And takes him in the groin?’
    ‘That’s what it looks like.’
    ‘And he has maybe hours to think about it?’
    ‘All too likely.’
    Faraday nodded. It sounded inconceivably sadistic.
    ‘But what if he was dead already? Is that something you’ll be able to tell us? After the PM?’
    ‘I doubt it.’ Ewers shook his head. ‘You’ve seen what the train did. We’ve got the torso, but most of what was inside is all over the place - on the track, under the train, even on the tunnel wall. Just think about the forces involved. Situations like these, the body explodes.’
    ‘And the head?’
    As soon as he’d asked the question, the photographer was busy with the camera again. The head, according to Ewers, had been severed by one of the wheels and then sucked along by the passage of the train. Proctor had finally spotted it a further fifteen metres into the tunnel, lying between the rails on the other track. Faraday studied the proffered image. The face had gone completely, as if a child had daubed it with finger paints. The only thing that Faraday could be sure of was the colour of the hair. Blond.
    ‘Prints?’ Faraday was looking at Ewers again.
    ‘Unlikely. We might be able to recover a whorl or two but I wouldn’t bet your life on it.’
    ‘ID?’
    Proctor shook his head. ‘Nothing on him at all, sir. Nothing in his pockets. Nothing in his jacket. No mobile. No wallet. He didn’t even have a bunch of keys.’
    ‘Tattoos? Rings? Piercings? Birthmarks?’
    ‘Birthmarks, we can’t be sure, not yet, but no obvious tats or danglies. Mr Ewers here thinks we might be in with a chance with the teeth but we’ll have to wait and see.’
    ‘Sure.’
    Faraday stepped back from the bonnet and rubbed his face. Every particle of evidence from the scene told him that they were looking at a homicide. The lie of the body. The presence of chains and rope. The business with the angle iron. The total absence of ID. Someone had settled a debt or two and that someone had gone to enormous trouble to send a particular kind of message. You didn’t strip someone naked and then point his crotch at an oncoming train without good reason.
    Faraday turned back to Ewers. Forensic procedure could be strangely comforting at moments like this. He nodded at the diagram on the bonnet.
    ‘No problem with DNA, I take it?’
     
    By mid-afternoon, DC Paul Winter had boiled down Tracy Barber’s Misper list to just three names.
    Missing Persons had become a bit of a pain over the last couple of years. With family ties loosening by the month and the city full of semi-feral kids, it was all too easy to attach undue importance to an anguished mum thrusting photos of little Connor at the Desk Officer, or a drunken twenty-five-year-old lurching in from the street to report the absence of her partner. In both cases, there was often layer after layer of subplot, and hard-pressed coppers were increasingly reluctant to enrol themselves in yet another drawn-out domestic. Far easier to fill out the forms, ping the names through to the duty Inspector, and get on with the next job.
    Winter strolled down to the tiny kitchen at the end of the corridor and hunted for the biscuit tin while he waited for the kettle to boil. One of the names turned out to be an eighteen-year-old skate who’d allegedly jumped ship back in May. He’d been serving on HMS Invincible and had gone missing after a series of heavy mobile conversations with his girlfriend, up in Derby. The Naval Provost’s office had drawn the obvious conclusions, posted him absent without leave, and alerted Derbyshire Police. Winter had pressed the Provost’s office for more details and it turned out that the guy on the end of the phone had looked into the case