Randall paused. "I didn't know who she was," he said, "but I suppose one couldn't help but notice her."

"Oh?" said Wilson. "In what way, sir?"

"Well, the way she was dressed, for a start. Like a common trollop. All that bare leg and tummy. If you ask me, girls who dress like that are asking for trouble. You might even say they deserve what they get."

"Is that why you lied about ogling her in the first place?" Banks said. "Because you thought if you admitted it, it would seem suspicious that you also found her body? Was it you who gave her what she deserved?"

"That's an impertinent question, and I won't dignify it with an answer," said Randall, red-faced. "I've had enough of this. I'm leaving."

"Are you sure you didn't follow Hayley Daniels around for the rest of the evening and somehow lure her into your storeroom, where you knew you'd be able to have your way with her?" said Wilson, an innocent and concerned expression on his young face. "Maybe you didn't mean to kill her, but things just went too far? It could go in your favour if you told us now."

Randall, half standing, gave him an et tu, Brute look and collapsed back into the chair. "What I've told you is the truth," he said. "She was in the pub with a group of friends. That was the first and last time I saw her. I didn't pay her any special attention, but now you mention it, I'll admit she stood out from the crowd, though not in a way I approve of. I didn't mention it at first because I know the way your minds work. That's all I have to say on the matter." He glared at Banks. "And I am leaving now."

"As you wish," said Banks. He let Randall get to the door, then said, "I'd appreciate it if we could get a set of your fingerprints and a DNA sample. Just for the purposes of elimination, you understand. At your own convenience. DC Wilson will sort out the consent forms."

Randall slammed the door behind him.

4.

Annie was in her office at the squat brick-and-glass building on Spring Hill early on Monday morning feeling a lot better than she had on Sunday. Even the weather seemed to echo her lift in spirits. The rain had passed and the sky was bright blue dotted with fluffy white clouds. The usually grey North Sea had a bluish cast. There was a chill in the wind, but by mid-afternoon people would be taking their jackets off on the quays and piers and sitting outside at the pubs. It was almost spring, after all.

The "Wheelchair Murder" had hit the local papers and TV breakfast news, and Superintendent Brough had scheduled a press conference for later that morning. Luckily, Annie wouldn't have to attend, but he would expect her to give him something to feed the hungry mob with.

Annie felt another quiver of guilt and self-loathing when she thought about Saturday night. Behaving like a randy teenager at her age was hardly becoming, she felt. But it had happened; now it was time to follow the old Zen lesson and let go with both hands. Life is suffering, and the cause of suffering is desire, so the Buddhists say. You can't stop the desires, memories, the thoughts and the feelings, the teaching went, but you didn't have to grasp them and hang on to them to torture yourself; you could simply let them go, let them float away like balloons or bubbles. That was what she did when she meditated, concentrated on one fixed thing, her breathing or a repeated sound, and watched the balloons with her thoughts and dreams inside them drift away into the void. She needed to get back to it regularly again. Anyway, it wasn't as if she didn't have plenty of other things to think about this morning.

Like Karen Drew, for a start.

The first detail Annie read from the files Tommy Naylor had brought from Mapston Hall shocked her: Karen Drew had been only twenty-eight years old when she died. Annie had thought her an old woman, and even Naylor had pegged her age at around forty. Of course, they only had the bloodless, shapeless lump under the blanket in the wheelchair with dry, greying hair to go by. Even so, Annie thought, twenty-eight seemed terribly young. How could the body betray one so cruelly?

According to the records, Karen's car had been hit by a driver losing control and crossing the centre of the road six years ago. She had been in a coma for some time and had had a series of operations and lengthy spells of hospitalization, until it became apparent to every medical expert involved that she wasn't going to recover, and that the only real option was full-time care. She had been at Mapston Hall for three months, as Grace Chaplin had said. That wasn't very long, Annie thought. And if Karen couldn't communicate, she could hardly have made any enemies so quickly. Passing psychopaths aside, it seemed all the more likely that the reason for her murder lay in her past.

Medically, the report suggested, there had been no change in her physical condition, and there never would be. When someone is as limited in self-expression as Karen Drew was, the slightest hint of progress tends to be hailed as a miracle. But nobody had really known what Karen was thinking or feeling. Nobody even knew whether she wanted to live or die. That choice had been taken out her hands, and it was up to Annie to find out why. Was it a mercy killing, as Naylor had hinted at, or did someone benefit in some way from Karen's death? And if mercy was the motive, who had shown it to her? These were the questions she would like answered first.

One thing Annie noticed about the files was that they told her very little of Karen's life before the accident. She had lived in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, but there was no specific address listed, nor any indication as to whether she had grown up there or moved from somewhere else. Her parents were marked as deceased, again without details, and she apparently had neither siblings nor anyone especially close, like a husband, live-in partner or fiance. All in all, Karen Drew hardly appeared to have existed before that fateful day in November 2001.

Annie was chewing on the end of her yellow pencil stub and frowning at this lack of information when her mobile rang shortly after nine o'clock. She didn't recognize the number but answered anyway. In the course of an investigation, she gave her card out to many people.

"Annie?"

"Yes."

"It's me. Eric."

"Eric?"

"Don't tell me you've forgotten so quickly. That hurts."

Annie's mind whizzed through the possibilities, and there was only one glaringly obvious answer. "I don't remember giving you my mobile number," she said.

"Well, that's a fine thing to say. Something else you don't remember, I suppose, like my name?"

Shit. Had she been that drunk? "Anyway," she went on, "it's my work number. Please don't call me on it."

"Give me your home number then."

"I don't think so."

"Then how am I supposed to get in touch with you? I don't even know your last name."

"You're not. That's the point." Annie ended the call. She felt a tightness in her chest. Her phone rang again. Automatically, she answered.

"Look," Eric said, "I'm sorry. We've got off to a bad start here."

"Nothing's started. And nothing's going to start," Annie said.

"I'm not proposing marriage, you know. But won't you at least allow me to take you out to dinner?"

"I'm busy."

"All the time?"

"Pretty much."

"Tomorrow?"

"Washing my hair."

"Wednesday?"

"Tenants' association meeting."

"Thursday?"

"School reunion."

"Friday?"

Annie paused. "Visiting my aging parents."

"Aha! But you hesitated there," he said. "I distinctly heard it."

"Look, Eric," Annie said, adopting what she thought was a reasonable but firm tone. "I'm sorry, but I don't want to play this game any more. It's not going to happen. I don't want to be rude or nasty or anything, but I'm just not interested in a relationship right now. End of story."

"I only asked you to dinner. No strings."

In Annie's experience, there were always strings. "Sorry. Not interested."

"What's wrong? What did I do? When I woke up, you were gone."

"You didn't do anything. It's me. I'm sorry. Please don't call again."

"Don't ring off!"

Against her better judgment, Annie held on.

"Are you still there?" he asked after a moment's silence.

"I'm here."

"Good. Have lunch with me. Surely you can manage lunch one day this week? How about the Black Horse on Thursday?"

The Black Horse was in Whitby's old town, on a narrow, cobbled street below the ruined abbey. It was a decent enough place, Annie knew, and not one that was frequented by her colleagues. But why was she even thinking about it? Let go with both hands.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"I'll be there at noon," Eric said. "You do remember what I look like?"

Annie remembered the young face with the slept-on hair, the stray lock, the night's growth of dark beard, the strong shoulders, the surprisingly gentle hands. "I remember," she said. "But I won't be there." Then she pressed the end call button.

She held the phone in her shaking hand for a few moments, heart palpitating, as if it were some sort of mysterious weapon, but it didn't ring again. Then a very unpleasant memory started surfacing into the light of consciousness.

She had only had her new mobile for a week. It was a BlackBerry Pearl, which combined phone, text and e-mail, and she was still learning all its bells and whistles, like the built-in camera. She remembered that Eric had the same model, and he had shown her how to work one or two of its more advanced features.

Hand trembling, she clicked on her recent saved photographs. There they were: her head and Eric's leaning towards one another, touching, almost filling the screen as they made faces at the camera with the club lights in the background. She remembered she had sent the photo to his mobile. That would be how he had got hold of her number. How could she be so stupid?

She put the phone in her handbag. What was she playing at? She ought to know she couldn't trust her judgment in these matters. Besides, Eric was just a kid. Be flattered and let go. Enough of this crap. Why did she even let her behaviour haunt her so? She picked up a slip of paper up from her desk. Time to talk to the social worker who had got Karen Drew placed in Mapston Hall. The poor woman had to have had some kind of life before her accident.

Dr. Elizabeth Wallace's post-mortem approach was far less flamboyant and flippant than Glendenning's, Banks discovered in the basement of Eastvale General Infirmary late that Monday morning. She seemed shy and deferential as she nodded to acknowledge Banks's presence and made her initial preparations with her assistant, Wendy Gauge. They made sure that the equipment she would need was all at hand and the hanging microphone on which she recorded her spoken comments was functioning properly. She seemed to be holding her feelings in check, Banks noticed, and it showed in the tight set of her lips and the twitching muscle beside her jaw. Banks couldn't imagine her smoking the way he and Glendenning had, or making bad jokes over the corpse.

Dr. Wallace first performed her external examination in a studied, methodical way, taking her time. The body had already been examined for traces and intimate samples, and everything the doctor and the SOCOs had collected from Hayley Daniels and her clothes had been sent to the lab for analysis, including the leather remnants that had been stuffed in her mouth, presumably to keep her quiet. Banks glanced at Hayley, lying on her back on the table, pale and naked. He couldn't help but stare at the shaved pubes. He had already been told about it at the scene, but seeing it for himself was something else entirely. Just above the mound was a tattoo of two small blue fishes swimming in opposite directions. Pisces. Her birth sign.

Dr. Wallace caught him staring. "It's not unusual," she said. "It doesn't mean she was a tart or anything. It's also not recent, not within the past few months, anyway, so the killer can't have done it. Tattoos like that are common enough, and a lot of young girls shave or get a wax these days. They call it a Brazilian."

"Why?" said Banks. "It must be painful."

"Fashion. Style. They also say it increases pleasure during intercourse."

"Does it?"

She didn't crack a smile. "How would I know?" she said, then went back to her examination, pausing every now and then to study an area of skin or an unusual mark closely under the magnifying lens and speaking her observations into the microphone.

"What's that brown discolouration below the left breast?" Banks asked.

"Birthmark."

"The arms, and between the breasts?"

"Bruising. Pre-mortem. He knelt on her." She called to her assistant. "Let's get her opened up."

"Anything you can tell me so far?" Banks asked.

Dr. Wallace paused and leaned forward, her hands on the metal rim of the table. A couple of strands of light brown hair had worked their way out of her protective head-cover. "It certainly appears as if she was strangled manually. No ligature. From the front, like this." She held her hands out and mimicked the motion of squeezing them around someone's neck.

"Any chance of fingerprints from the skin, or DNA?"

"There's always a chance that some of the killer's skin, or even a drop of blood, rubbed off on her. It looks as if he cleaned her up afterwards, but he might not have caught everything."

"There was something that might have been semen on her thigh," Banks said.

Dr. Wallace nodded. "I saw it. Don't worry, the lab has samples of everything, but it'll take time. You ought to know that. Fingerprints? I don't think so. I know it's been done, but there was so much slippage in this case. Like when you open a doorknob, your fingers slip on its surface and everything gets smeared and blurred."

"Did she struggle?"

Dr. Wallace glanced away. "Of course she bloody did."

"I was thinking of scratches."

Dr. Wallace took a deep breath. "Yes. There might be DNA in the samples the SOCOs took from under her fingernails. Your killer might have scratches on his forearms or face." She paused. "Frankly, though, I wouldn't hold out a lot of hope. As you can see, her fingernails were bitten to the quick."

"Yes, I'd noticed," said Banks. "And the bruising?"

"As I said, he knelt on her arms, and at one point on the centre of her chest, probably to hold her down while he used his hands to strangle her. She didn't have a chance."

"You're sure it's a man?"

Dr. Wallace gave him a scornful glance. "Take it from me, this is a man's work. Unless someone's girlfriend did the strangling after the boyfriend raped and sodomized her."

It had been done, Banks knew. Couples had acted in tandem as sexual predators or killers. Fred and Rosemary West. Myra Hindley and Ian Brady. Terry and Lucy Payne. But he thought Dr. Wallace was probably right to dismiss it in this case. "Were all the injuries inflicted while she was alive?"

"There's no evidence of post-mortem maltreatment, if that's what you mean. The bruising and tearing in the vagina and anus both indicate she was alive while he raped her. You can see the marks on her wrists where he held her. And you can see her upper arms, neck and chest for yourself, as well as the bruising on her thighs. This was a rough and violent rape followed by strangulation."

"How did he restrain her while he was raping her?" Banks mused out loud. "He couldn't have done it with his knees on her arms."

"He could have had a weapon. A knife, say."

"So why not stab her? Why strangle her?"

"I couldn't tell you. He may simply have used threats to control her. Isn't it often the case that rapists will threaten to kill their victims if they don't cooperate, or even to hunt them down later, harm their families?"

"Yes," said Banks. He knew his questions might sound crude and insensitive, but these were things he had to know. That was why it had always been so easy with Dr. Glendenning. Working with a woman pathologist was different. "Why kill her at all?" he asked.

Dr. Wallace looked at Banks as she might a specimen on her table. "I don't know," she said. "To shut her up, perhaps. Maybe she recognized him or could identify him. That's your job, isn't it, to figure out things like that?"