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teenage girls and they al loved her. She made them feel safe.
    “Her son was a real dickhead,” said Elisa. “He slept with a shotgun under his bed and he thought he could have sex with any of us. Wanker! The first time Shirley took me out to work, she was saying, ‘Go on, you can do it.’ I was standing on Bayswater Road wearing my school uniform. ‘It’s OK, just ask them if they want a girl,’ she said. I didn’t want to disappoint Shirley. I knew she’d be angry.
    “Next time she took me out, I did some hand jobs, but I couldn’t do the sex. I don’t know why. It took me three months. I was getting too tal for my school uniform, but Shirley said I had the legs to get away with it. I was her Little Pot of Gold.”
    Elisa didn’t cal the men she slept with “punters.” She didn’t like any suggestion that they were gambling with their money. She was a sure thing. And she didn’t treat them with contempt, even if many were cheating on their wives, fiancées and girlfriends. This was purely business— a simple commercial transaction— she had something to sel and they wanted to buy it.
    As the months went by she became desensitized. She had a new family now. Then one day a rival pimp snatched her off the street. He wanted her for a one-off engagement, he said. He locked her in the basement of a house and col ected money at the door from the men who queued up. A river of skin, of al different colors, flowed across her body and leaked inside her.
    “I was their Little White Fucktoy,” she said, as she stubbed out another cigarette.
    “And now you’re here.”
    “Where nobody knows what to do with me.”
    “What do you want to do?”
    “I want to be left alone.”

    4

    The first law of the National Health Service is that dead wood floats. It is part of the culture. If somebody is incompetent or hard to get along with, promotion is an easier option than sacking.
    The duty supervisor at Westminster Mortuary is bald and thickset with pouchy jowls. He takes an instant dislike to me.
    “Who told you to come here?”
    “I’m meeting Detective Inspector Ruiz.”
    “I haven’t been told. Nobody made an appointment.”
    “Can I wait for him?”
    “No. Only family of the deceased are al owed in the waiting room.”
    “Where can I wait?”
    “Outside.”
    I catch his sour smel and notice the sweat stains under his arms. He has probably worked al night and is doing overtime. He’s tired and he’s cranky. I normal y have sympathy for shift workers— in the same way that I feel sorry for loners and fat girls who never get asked to dance. It must be a lousy job looking after dead people but that’s no reason to be rude to the living.
    I’m just about to say something when Ruiz arrives. The supervisor begins his spiel again, but Ruiz isn’t in the mood to be lectured by a low-ranking mortuary manager with delusions of power. He leans across the desk.
    “Listen you jumped up little shit! I see a dozen cars parked on expired meters outside. You’re going to be real popular with your workmates when we put a boot on them.” A few minutes later I’m fol owing Ruiz along narrow corridors with strip lights on the ceiling and painted cement floors. Occasional y we pass doors with frosted glass windows. One of them is open. I glance inside and see a stainless steel table in the center of the room with a central channel leading to a drain. Halogen lights are suspended from the ceiling, alongside microphone leads.
    Farther along the corridor, we come across three lab technicians in green medical scrubs standing around a coffee machine. None of them looks up.
    Ruiz walks fast and talks slowly. “The body was found at eleven on Sunday morning, buried in a shal ow ditch. Fifteen minutes earlier an anonymous cal was made from a pay phone a quarter of a mile away. The cal er claimed his dog had dug up a hand.”
    We push through double Plexiglas doors and dodge a trol ey being pushed by an orderly. A white calico