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to be lying on her pillow tonight still breathing in the stench of death.
    ‘Judging by your
Calliphora vomitoria
, I’d say that three and a half days was about right,’ said the technician. ‘The weather hasn’t been too warm but it’s been long enough for them to lay their eggs and for their larvae to hatch out and the first batch to grow to maturity. They’ve plenty to feed on, after all. Flesh and faeces, their favourites.’
    They climbed the stairs, the technician leading the way and Katie following close behind him.
    ‘I’ve been in touch with Lisney’s,’ said Detective Horgan, as they reached the first-floor landing. ‘This whole property’s been empty for about a month. The downstairs was rented by the Hungarian Deli people and Clancy’s after tracing them now to see if they went back to Hungary or not. The two upstairs flats were both rented by some company called Merrow Holdings, based in Limerick.’
    ‘Any idea who’s behind them?’ asked Katie. The perfume inside her surgical mask was so strong she had to sneeze, twice. It made her nose run but she knew better than to take it off, so she sniffed.
    ‘Merrow Holdings? Not yet. But Lisney’s said they’d get back to me before the close of business.’
    The technician led them into the bedsit. It was lit so brightly with tungsten lamps that it looked like the set for a morning television show. The technician’s young assistant was down on his hands and knees with a Labino Nova torch light with a blue filter on it, searching for bloodstains or any stray fibres that might have been caught under the skirting board. He sat up on his haunches as they came into the room. He had such raging red acne on his forehead that Katie had always thought he looked as if he had been shot in the face with a pellet gun, but compared to the body on the sofa-bed his face was simply speckled.
    Katie stood beside the sofa-bed and stared at the body for a long time. He was very dark, with a slightly dusty look about his skin, so she guessed he was probably Somali or Nigerian, since they made up most of Cork’s African immigrant population. She could see that he had been shot twice in the face at point-blank range with a shotgun – possibly a double-barrelled shotgun – once in the right cheek and the second time in the left eye. Above his chin, with its precisely trimmed goatee beard, there was nothing but the concave red labyrinth of his sinuses. The technicians had cleared the mature bluebottles from the room, but there were still a few random maggots crawling around inside the victim’s face, like cave explorers.
    The man was very thin, though his stomach was hugely swollen with gas from his decomposing bowels. His bony right shoulder was covered by a tattoo of a black widow spider in its web, and his long flaccid penis was tattooed to resemble the head of rattlesnake, with scales and eyes, and even a forked tongue licking out of the side of it. The snake continued up through his woolly black pubic hair until it wound itself around his waist and its rattle finished up on his breastbone.
    A single brown star was tattooed on each of his knees.
    Katie leaned forward and stared at his face more closely. ‘His lip’s very
pink
,’ she commented. The technician came up behind her to take a closer look at it.
    ‘It is, yeah, I’d say it’s been tattooed that colour. It’s a bit of fashion, apparently, among the young Nigerians. They think it makes them more attractive to girls.’
    ‘What, bright pink lips?’
    ‘Oh yeah. A friend of mine works for Tattoo Zoo on South Main Street. He was telling me about them the other day, those Nigerians. They have a fad for having their mickeys decorated, too, like this feller.’
    ‘What about his hands?’ asked Katie, looking at the stumps at the ends of his arms. The bones that protruded from his left hand had been roughly and erratically sawn through at a right angle, while the bones of the right hand had been cut