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Sheena but she had not been seen around her usual patch lately.
    ‘She’s got to be somewhere. Probably on an alcoholiday, swigging Strongbow outside Camden Town tube. Let’s keep on it. Any news on witnesses in or around the church?’
    Again he got a shake of the head. That surprised him in one sense: the churchyard was by no means secluded. It was on the top of a hill on a busy thoroughfare, enclosed by tall residential buildings.
    On paper, a terrible spot to dump a body.
    So why choose it?
    ‘I want us to go through every single piece of
    CCTV footage from every camera in Liverpool Street from seven p.m. last night. That’s where he usually got the tube home. Who knows, maybe he made it on to one. And let’s go through all the footage from Ladbroke Grove, too.’
    Suddenly Heather burst through the door, breathless.
    Foster looked for some sign of contrition, yet
    saw none.
    ‘Sorry, sir,’ she said. ‘Tying up the loose ends on the suicidal tramp.’
    The fate of the tramp found dangling from the
    frame of a park swing the previous Sunday morning had long since been superseded in Foster’s mind by the Darbyshire murder. He felt a wave of anger.
    ‘Give that bleeding heart of yours a rest. Put the tramp to one side and concentrate on this, please.’
    ‘The least we can do is find out who he is, and who his family are. He has every right to …’
    ‘Yes, he’s got every right to equal consideration.
    But that doesn’t mean he’s going to get it. I wish I could find the fool who invented the concept of rights, and deprive him of them. Violently.’
    Heather’s eyes, never docile, blazed bright with anger. Her face was always quick to express emotion, but Foster knew she would soon calm down. Having a go at her in front of the others was not the most politic thing to do, but her mission to turn detective work into another arm of the care services occasionally grated with him.
    The discussion moved on to the missing hands. A search of the scene had failed to find them, or a murder weapon. The team split into camps: those who thought they might be trophies; those who thought it was a way of avoiding detection; and a third camp who thought it was neither, that there was perhaps more to it than the obvious explanations.
    ‘What forensics do we have?’ Foster asked.
    ‘Initially, nothing really,’ said Drinkwater. ‘So far, the scene tells us nothing.’
    The room fell silent. It was rare for forensics to fail to provide them with a few leads. Foster nodded slowly. It was as if the body had fallen from the sky.
    But the lack of evidence or clues wasn’t insignificant.
    ‘What the crime scene tells us is that our killer worked very carefully, thought it through beforehand.
    And it confirms that our victim was killed elsewhere.’
    ‘Do we have any idea about motive?’ someone
    asked.
    Foster spread his hands wide; he had been giving this some thought. ‘We can rule out mugging because there was still a fair bit of money on his body. And his mobile phone, too. Of course, we don’t know the full story of his private life so there could be something there …’ His voice tailed off. Foster already knew that the motive for this was one his mind had not yet considered. Something told him it was beyond the usual mundane language of murder: drugs, money, rage and envy. ‘Have we got mobile phone records?’ he said, changing tack.
    Drinkwater told him they had retrieved the last ten calls dialled, received and missed from Darbyshire’s mobile phone. Most of them had been identified as friends, family or work-related. The only call made or received after seven p.m., when Darbyshire was last seen in the pub, was to a number: 1879. The time dialled was 23.45.
    ‘Have you spoken to pathology?’ Foster asked.
    ‘Carlisle reckons that Darbyshire was dead by
    then.’
    ‘Any theories about that number?’ It sounded to him like it could be for message retrieval, or the number for the network.
    ‘We rang it,