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seen anything,’ said Villiers.
    ‘She may have seen more than she remembers, I think.’
    ‘There’s no way we’re going to be able to trace anyof the people in those cars. Unless we put appeals out – local newspapers, social media? The trouble is, they could have been from absolutely anywhere.’
    Wayne Abbott, E Division’s crime scene manager, had taken the place of the forensic medical examiner and was writing notes on a clipboard. Abbott was a big man with a shaved head, which was revealed when he tossed back the hood of his scene suit. He looked up as Cooper and Villiers approached.
    ‘Gas,’ he said. He sounded oddly smug, as if he’d predicted it all along and was gratified to be proved right.
    ‘Gas?’ repeated Cooper.
    ‘It’s a popular choice.’
    Villiers covered her face with a gloved hand as she leaned in to look at the body. She must have thought Abbott was referring to the decomposition of the body.
    ‘What is that thing over his head?’ she said.
    ‘It’s for the gas. They call it an exit bag. It’s used for painless suffocation.’
    ‘An exit bag? Who uses a nickname for a suffocation device?’
    ‘You’d be surprised.’
    Then Villiers sniffed. ‘But you said gas?’
    ‘Helium. It doesn’t have any smell. Or taste for that matter.’
    ‘I was thinking carbon monoxide.’
    ‘Exhaust fumes? Yes, it used to be the traditional method, especially among depressed middle-aged men. A pipe from the exhaust into your car and the engineleft running. Carbon monoxide is extremely toxic in high enough concentrations.’
    Cooper remembered deaths from the inhalation of exhaust fumes. He’d come across one as a young PC and been struck by how peaceful the dead person looked. And he’d learned a strange and disturbing fact about the human body. Given a choice between carbon monoxide and oxygen, the haemoglobin in your blood would always choose carbon monoxide first and ignore the life-giving oxygen. It seemed a suicidal impulse had been built into the bloodstream of every human being.
    ‘The design of modern cars has spoiled all that business,’ Abbott was saying cheerfully. ‘Tighter emission controls, you see. That means modern engines produce too little carbon monoxide for the purpose. It’s good for the environment – but bad news for the would-be suicide. Of course, most of them don’t research their methods well enough in advance to realise they need to use an old car.’
    ‘So how does this work?’
    ‘An exit bag? It’s pretty simple,’ said Abbott. ‘You just have a plastic bag with a drawstring or some other type of closure. All you have to do is fill it with an inert gas like nitrogen or helium. You see, the gas itself doesn’t kill you. Its purpose is to cause painless unconsciousness before suffocation occurs. The victim actually dies as a result of the high levels of carbon dioxide breathed into the bag. It can be a bit dodgy, if you don’t do it right. If you change your mind at the last minute, for example, there’s a good chance you’ll end up alive but with serious brain damage.’
    Twoorange gas canisters stood in the footwell of the car, with tubing snaking up and across the body of the driver. Cooper could see that several inches of plastic tube protruded all the way into the bag, sticking up alongside the dead man’s head like a snorkel tube.
    Helium. The gas of fun and laughter. Party balloons and people speaking in funny, high-pitched voices. The depths of irony around suicide were limitless.
    ‘So why choose this method?’ asked Villiers.
    ‘It’s supposed to be the quickest way of killing yourself and the least painful, if it’s done right,’ said Abbott. ‘The right-to-die groups recommend it, I understand.’
    ‘I can see it would be better than drowning or hanging, or throwing yourself in front of a train.’
    ‘Some of those cases can get very messy,’ agreed Abbott. ‘With this method, the helium prevents panic and the sense of