In the autopsy room, some police officers chose the pretence of graveside humour. That was not Tailby's style. He retreated instead behind a facade of silence and detachment, coated in a thin veneer of formal jargon and easily repeatable, meaningless phrases. In a way, he could be physically present, yet keep his feelings aloof from the things that had to be done. Tailby knew that he was already considered a cold and austere man by his colleagues and junior officers; some even said he was pompous and self-important. But it was a small price to pay to maintain your distance from realities that struck too close to home.

‘That's not to say the victim was unfamiliar with sexual intercourse,' said Mrs Van Doon. 'Not at all, not at all.'

‘No?'

‘I would say the young lady was far from being a virgin, Chief Inspector. Fifteen years old? Very promiscuous, some of these young people now.'

‘You'd think that the risk of AIDS would make them think twice, wouldn't you?'

‘This one won't be worrying about AIDS, in any case.’

The pathologist was dressed in a green T-shirt and baggy green trousers, with her mask hanging round her neck ready for work. With her hair tied back and her face devoid of make-up and harshly lit by the mortuary lights, the pathologist still looked striking. It was all down to the bone structure, thought Tailby. That, and the thoughtful grey eyes. He had once, as a young detective, harboured secret dreams about Juliana Van Doon. But time had passed and the feelings had faded. He had married and been divorced since then. And his feelings had died completely.

Tailby would have liked to have been able to leave the postmortem room before the pathologist reached the stage of opening the body and removing the organs. Before she used the stainless-steel saw to cut through the sternum, and before the electric trepanner sliced off the top of the girl's damaged skull. He told himself that there would be little to learn from the gory process in this case, except that Laura Vernon had died in perfect health.

‘The bruise on her leg?' he said.

Ah. Interesting, yes. Not unknown, I understand, in sexually motivated killings. You would be asking yourself why there is only this one sign of a possible sexual assault. Was the attacker interrupted? Yes, interesting.'

‘Not a bruise made by a blow, then. A hand gripping the leg? But I would expect two separate marks, at least.'

‘No, no, no,' said Mrs Van Doon. 'You misunderstand. If you look more closely, you will see small punctures where the flesh is swollen. This is not an injury caused by the bruising of fingers. I suspect these are teeth marks, Chief Inspector.’

Tailby perked up with sudden interest. 'Someone bit her,' he said. 'Someone smashed her skull, then bit her on the thigh.'

‘Possibly,' said the pathologist. 'Interesting?’

The detective peered more closely at the mark. It looked no more than a bruise to him.

‘Can you be sure?'

‘Well, no. I need to obtain the opinion of a forensic odontologist, of course. I have already contacted the University Dental School in Sheffield. We can get photographs and impressions, and excise the area around the bite to preserve it. And then we can compare the impression with a suspect's dentition. It's up to you to produce the suspect, of course.'

‘It's an odd place for a bite.'

‘Yes. They are usually on the breasts in these cases, rather than on the thigh. In fact, I saw a report recently about a research project conducted by a forensic odontologist. It was entirely concerned with how bite marks differ according to the shape of the victim's breast, the cup size, the age of the victim and even the amount of droop in the breast.’

Tailby was intrigued. 'How on earth did he manage all that?'

‘Designed a mechanical set of teeth and recruited twenty female volunteers — goodness knows where from.'

‘Students, I suppose,' said Tailby, reluctantly impressed. 'But I'm sure bites on the thigh are not unknown in sexual assaults either. In the absence of any samples for DNA analysis, Chief Inspector, this is probably the best you could have hoped for.’

Tailby stared at the pathologist. 'So, let's see. The attacker strikes her over the head two or three times. When she is on the floor he pulls down her jeans and her pants, then bites her once on the thigh.' It didn't quite ring true somehow, though he knew there had been far more bizarre and ghoulish cases, far more perverted killers who committed much worse acts on the bodies of their victims.

Ah, you would like to indulge in a little mutual speculation, Chief Inspector?' said the pathologist. 'On that basis then, why not consider another scenario? A voluntary sexual act. The bite on the thigh is someone's idea of erotic foreplay.'

‘Possible. Then something goes wrong.'

‘The girl objects to the bite, perhaps.'

‘Yes, she pulls away, changes her mind. They argue; he gets angry.'

‘Sexually fuelled frustration. A powerful force.'

‘I can buy that,' said Tailby. 'There's no way of telling which of those it was from the nature of the bite, I suppose?'

‘Mmm. A good odontologist may be able to reproduce the angle of the bite and the depth. He might suggest the position of the attacker's head at the moment the bite was inflicted.’

Tailby looked again at the naked limbs of the fifteen year-old girl. Her body was shockingly white except for the areas on her flank and the left side of her chest, where lividity had set in, the blood settling to the lowest point of gravity during the time she had lain dead in the bracken on the Baulk.

The bite mark was situated high on the inside of her right thigh, where the living flesh had been at its softest and most vulnerable. The picture suggested by Juliana Van Doon of the position of the attacker's head made Tailby feel more uneasy than anything else he had heard so far.

But the pathologist was fiddling with a table full of gleaming, sharp instruments, eager to get on with the next stage of the process of reducing Laura Vernon to her component parts. Tailby and his team had to do the same thing, in a way. That was the essence of victimology, the process of getting to know the intimate details of the victim as a means of establishing the connection to her killer.

‘If your scenario is correct,' he said. 'Laura's attacker will be much easier for us to find — he must have been known to her.'

‘Presumably, Chief Inspector. Yes, it's preferable to a random attack by someone from outside the area, isn't it?'

‘From our point of view, certainly.'

‘I hope that I am able to help you then.’

In the clinical atmosphere of the mortuary, Tailby felt able to voice the fear that he would never talk about much, even to his own staff. 'That's what I'm always afraid of, you know — a case that drags on for months, unsolved, because we can't even get a lead on a suspect. It's a detective's nightmare.'

‘You have in mind, of course, a recent case.'

‘The girl in Buxton, yes. There are similarities, aren't there? B Division's enquiry has been unsuccessful so far, after more than a month. The view is that the victim was chosen at random by her attacker. In those circumstances, it was only ever a matter of time before we had a second victim.'

‘It would be a tragic thing,' said Mrs Van Doon, flourishing a scalpel over the chest of the corpse, 'if the poor girl here were simply to be known as Victim Number Two.'

‘It would be even more tragic,' said Tailby, 'if we ended up with a Victim Number Three.’

10

‘OK, what have we got, anything?'

‘Cars, lots of cars. Most of them unknown. You have to expect it in an area like this.'

‘Tourists,' said DI Hitchens. 'They always complicate the issue.’

They were in the tiny beer garden at the back of the Drover, squashed round a table under a parasol that kept the sun off their plates of ham and cheese sandwiches and their slimline tonics. The only other customers outdoors were two workmen eating scampi and chips and drinking beer at a far table. Everyone else had chosen to sit inside the pub, in the cool rooms, or at the front, where there was a view of the road.