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when he comes in. But you’ve got a copy of the autopsy report, haven’t you?”
    “Yes, sir, I just …”
    “You just?”
    “Think better with the body in front of me, sir.”
    McCormack turned to the window and mumbled something that Harry construed as “fine.”
    The temperature in the cellar of South Sydney Morgue was 46 degrees, as opposed to 82 degrees on the street outside.
    “Any the wiser?” Andrew asked. He shivered and pulled his jacket tighter around him.
    “Wiser, no,” Harry said, looking at the earthly remains of Inger Holter. Her face had survived the fall relatively well. On one side the nostril had been torn open and the cheekbone knocked into a deep hollow, but there was no doubt that the waxen face belonged to the same girl with the radiant smile on the photo in the police report. There were black marks around the neck. The rest of the body was covered with bruises, wounds and some deep, deep cuts. In one of them you could see the white bone.
    “The parents wanted to see the photos. The Norwegian ambassador explained that it was inadvisable, but the solicitor insisted. A mother shouldn’t have to see her daughter like that.” Andrew shook his head.
    Harry studied the bruising on the neck with a magnifying glass.
    “Whoever strangled her used his bare hands. It’s difficult to kill someone with that method. The murderer must be either very strong or very motivated.”
    “Or have done it several times before.”
    Harry looked at Andrew.
    “What do you mean by that?”
    “She has no fragments of skin under her nails, she has none of the murderer’s hair on her clothes and she has no grazing on her knuckles. She was killed so quickly and efficiently that she never had a chance to put up much of a fight.”
    “Does this remind you of anything you’ve seen before?”
    Andrew shrugged. “When you’ve worked here long enough all murders remind you of something you’ve seen before.”
    No, Harry thought. It’s the other way round. Work long enough and you see the tiny nuances each murder has, the details that distinguish one from another and make each one unique.
    Andrew glanced at his watch. “The morning meeting starts in half an hour. We’d better get a move on.”
    The leader of the investigative unit was Larry Watkins, a detective with a legal background, on a swift upward curve through the ranks. He had narrow lips, thinning hair and spoke fast and efficiently without intonation or unnecessary adjectives.
    “Or social antennae,” Andrew said, not mincing his words. “A very able investigator, but he’s not the person you ask to ring the parents when their daughter has been found dead. And then he starts swearing whenever he’s stressed,” he added.
    Watkins’s right-hand man was Sergey Lebie, a well-dressed, bald Yugoslav with a black goatee that made him look like Mephisto in a suit. Andrew said he was usually skeptical of men who were so fussy about their appearance.
    “But Lebie isn’t really a peacock, just very
meticulous
. Among other things he has a habit of studying his nailswhen anyone talks to him, but he doesn’t mean it to seem arrogant. And then he cleans his shoes after the lunch break. Don’t expect him to say much, not about himself or anything else.”
    The youngest member of the team was Yong Sue, a small, skinny, pleasant guy who always wore a smile above his bird-like neck. Yong Sue’s family had come to Australia from China thirty years ago. Ten years ago, when Yong Sue was nineteen, his parents went back to China on a visit. They were never seen again. The grandfather reckoned the son had been involved in “something political,” but he wouldn’t venture any deeper. Yong Sue never found out what had happened. Now he provided for his grandparents and his two younger sisters, worked twelve-hour days and smiled for at least ten of them. “If you’ve got a bad joke, tell it to Yong Sue. He laughs at absolutely everything,” Andrew had told him.