Archer was still whimpering, incredulous. 'You broke my f.u.c.king nose.'

Delaney ignored him, 'Come on, Sally.' He walked across the car park to their car.

DC Cartwright looked down at Archer who was staring at the blood on his hands in shock and utter disbelief. 'I'd get a plaster for that if I were you. They should have one in there.'

She jerked her thumb towards the hospital entrance and walked after Delaney.

Sally Cartwright adjusted the rear-view mirror watching the man Delaney had decked as he hobbled, clearly in pain, to the hospital entrance, a b.l.o.o.d.y handkerchief held to his nose. She turned the ignition key and looked across at Delaney, a slight frown creasing her neatly shaped eyebrows. 'Seat belt, sir.'

Delaney rolled his eyes and pulled his seat belt across, snapping it into place. 'Just drive, will you, Constable?'

'Sir.'

She slipped the clutch out and pulled the car smoothly out of the exit; no gravel flew behind them as she indicated left and headed towards the south part of Hampstead Heath.

After driving in silence for a couple of minutes she flicked a glance at her boss. 'What was all that about, do you reckon, sir?'

'I have absolutely no idea, Sally.'

'She seemed pretty upset.'

'Yup.'

'Do you think he'll make a complaint against you?'

'He doesn't know who I am.' Delaney shrugged and went back to staring out the window. Sally raised an eyebrow again and concentrated on the road ahead.

When he was sure the detective constable wasn't looking, Delaney rubbed his left hand over his right knuckles and winced. He had no idea what was going on with the man he had punched, or what he had to do with Kate. He had probably broken the man's nose who, after all, was right, it had been none of his business. It had felt good though, for all the wrong reasons. It had been a morning of frustrations, getting so close to discovering the ident.i.ty of his wife's killers, only to be thwarted at the final hurdle. And he wasn't so unaware as to not realise he still had issues with Kate Walker. He had punched the man half out of anger, half out of a desire to impress her. He had told Kate that he didn't have room in his life for her, and it was true. He had too many unresolved matters to set straight. But if he had no room in his life for her, then why was there such a great hole in it?

Kate Walker's hands were still shaking as she slipped the gear into fourth and stepped on the accelerator pedal. Shaking, she realised, with shock and anger. Of all the people in the world she didn't want knowing about last night and what had happened to her, it was Jack Delaney. What on earth was the man doing there, for G.o.d's sake? It was bad enough that he had humiliated her yesterday, broke her heart and made her so depressed that she went to chase her blues away with vodka. If it hadn't been for him she would never have gone to the Holly Bush, would never have let a complete stranger chat her up at the bar. She wasn't a student, she wasn't a silly young girl who didn't know any better and didn't realise the dangers. In fact, she knew the dangers better than most, but had still let the man under her guard. Just like she had let Delaney under her guard, and look what had happened there. And, of course, he just had to be there when she confronted Paul Archer, making a fool of herself. She slammed the palm of her hand down hard on her horn, the hooter blaring out loudly and causing the cyclist she was overtaking to wobble dangerously to the side of the road.

She fought to calm her anger, steady the adrenalin coursing through her veins. But the truth was she was getting angrier by the minute. She had seen it in Paul Archer's eyes. He was amused. He was mocking her. There was a cold chill in those eyes. He had raped her. She absolutely believed it now. Believed it with a cold certainty in the heart of her soul. But she had absolutely no idea what she was going to do about it.

Paul Archer held a water-soaked handkerchief to his throbbing nose and wiped away the last vestiges of blood. The pain was like a thin spike driven into his forehead. He looked at his face in the mirror and turned left and right to look at each profile. As far as he could tell, and he was pretty qualified to tell, his nose wasn't broken. He put his hands under the cold water, watching as the deep red blood became thinner and paler as it swirled away. He scooped some of the cold water into the palm of his hand and held it against his forehead for a moment or two, waiting for the pain to ease.

Stepping away he s.n.a.t.c.hed a paper towel and rubbed his hands dry as he walked across to the window, fumbling open a pack of Demerol and swallowing a couple. He looked out at the car park below and beyond. Puddles of rainwater, like irregular-shaped, murky mirrors, reflected the dark clouds, scudding in the skies above. There was nothing reflected in Paul Archer's eyes though. They stared ahead with a blank, cold certainty.

When he was nine years old, a couple of older boys at school, brothers, had bullied him. Making him drop his packed lunch of cheese and piccalilli sandwiches on to the rain-soaked tarmac of the playground. Kids didn't like other kids who were different and these two reckoned Paul Archer fancied himself as better than them because he didn't have to eat school lunches. As Paul watched his sandwiches soak up the muddy rain he didn't fight back, he didn't say a word, just picked up his Tupperware box and walked away, not even hearing the laughs and insults that were shouted after him. Paul was too intent listening to the cool voice of reason inside his head. The one that said no slight should go unpunished. And if he wasn't big enough or strong enough or old enough to make them suffer then he would hurt the thing they loved. He waited three weeks and then very early one Sat.u.r.day morning he climbed over the fence of their back garden, rolled a lawn-mower against the door of the kennel where their pet dog, a Staffordshire bull terrier, slept, poured petrol he had taken from his dad's shed all over it and set it alight.

The adult Paul Archer held a hand to his throbbing nose again; there were many things he knew now that he hadn't as a child, but one thing that hadn't changed was that certain knowledge of the joy of retribution. He knew it as surely as night follows day. As death follows life. As pleasure follows pain.

Someone was going to pay.

In the front part of the head, in the roof of each nostril, lies a group of mucous-covered sacs. The olfactory epithelium. About five square centimetres in size and containing about ten million receptor cells. Using these receptors the human nose can differentiate, it has been claimed, between four thousand and ten thousand different odours. Odour is at the very genesis and denouement of human existence. A smell receptor has been identified in human sperm a the sperm literally smells its way to the egg. And death, as any policeman or mortician knows, is certainly no friend of the olfactory organ. However, the unmistakable smell of a deceased and decaying body had had no time to develop that morning and PC Bob Wilkinson reckoned his young colleague was as glad of that fact as anyone.

PC Danny Vine had already thrown up twice within the s.p.a.ce of half an hour and Wilkinson, taking pity on him, had sent him to the front of the path to prevent anyone from disturbing the crime scene. Move along please. Nothing to see here. Only, of course, there was. There was plenty to see. But none of it pleasant.

The mechanics of investigation had already been set in motion. A large section of the surrounding area had been cordoned off with yellow tape stretching from tree to tree in a rough diamond shape, covering about a quarter of an acre. The yellow tape with 'police do not cross' written upon it, the yellow tape that unfailingly attracted the prurient attention of the scandal-hungry public, just as the scent of another dog's waste always attracted canine interest. The sort of thrill-seeking interest the public had in other people's misfortune and pain, feeding off it like some kind of sick parasites. Road crash syndrome.

Police vans had been parked outside the cordoned area and uniformed police and white-suited scene-of-crime officers, SOCOs, went about containing the integrity of the site. Aluminium telescopic poles had been snapped open and joined together to form a skeletal framework which was positioned over the area immediately surrounding the body. Plastic sheets had been run over the frame so that the structure took on the appearance of a wedding marquee. Only within the frame, there was no cheery fiddle music, there was no three-tiered cake on a stand, no punchbowl, no laughing guests, no nervous best man and certainly no blushing bride with a blue garter on her stocking and a hungry husband by her side. Inside was the dead body of a woman in her mid-twenties, with black hair, black lipstick and black blood crusting the edges of the deep slash wounds to her chest, throat and abdomen.

Delaney and Sally Cartwright nodded at PC Danny Vine as they ducked under the tape and headed towards the murder scene. Danny responded with a half-hearted smile.

'You all right, Danny?' Sally asked.

The constable nodded again, unconvincingly. 'Something I ate.'

'You still on for tonight?'

The constable smiled again, more warmly this time. 'Yeah, I'll be there. Bells on.'

Sally flashed him a quick smile and hurried to join Delaney.

'Something I should know about?' he asked.

'Sir?'

'Poster boy back there. You and he sharing handcuffs?'

Sally coloured lightly but laughed out loud. 'A few of us are meeting up for drinks, that's all.'

Delaney nodded, not entirely convinced. 'Right.'

'You're welcome to join us.'

Delaney nodded again. 'If you say so.'

'Anyway. It wouldn't be a crime, would it?'

'Not in my world.' Delaney's brief moment of good humour curled up and died as he walked forward and saw the dark-haired woman standing outside the scene-of-crime tent.

'Dr Walker. Nice scarf.'

Kate turned and looked at him, and cursed inwardly, as she took her scarf off and pulled the protective coverings over the work boots she had changed into. She should have known Delaney would turn up. He was, after all, less than a mile away, just like her, when the call had come in.

'Inspector.' She was surprised at how calm her voice sounded, how cool.

'Have you got anything for us?'

'Like you I've only just arrived. From what I've seen from here, a young woman, I'm guessing mid-twenties.'

'No ID?'

PC Wilkinson stepped forward. 'Nothing yet, sir. We're going to finger-search the area but there was nothing on her person. She had a handbag but it was empty apart from some condoms and a tube of KY jelly.'

'Nothing else?'

'She had a Tube ticket.'

Delaney nodded. South Hampstead Tube station was a stone's throw from the edge of that part of the heath.

'Who found her?'

Wilkinson nodded over to the path where the nurse, Valerie Manners, stood, sipping shakily from a cup of tea as a female PC talked to her.

'I'll want to speak to her next. Make sure she stays here, Bob.'

'Boss.'

Delaney moved to the entrance of the tent. 'Let's have a look.'

Kate Walker followed him in. The small s.p.a.ce was already bustling. SOCO had cleared the overhanging undergrowth, carefully cutting away the branches and shrubbery that had partially hidden the body. A video-camera operator was filming the scene, while a photographer, blond-haired and in his twenties, was doing the same. The bright flashes poked needles in Delaney's sore eyes.

Kate looked down at the woman. She had black boots on her feet, calf-length and high-heeled, black leggings, a short black, leather skirt with an ornate, silver buckled belt. She was naked from the waist up. Her long hair was dyed deep black, and she was wearing black eyeshadow and lipstick. A goth. Kate felt the irony of it. A subculture that had death as part of its make-up, no pun intended. She would have laughed if it wasn't so pitifully sad. The woman was beautiful, in a painted-doll kind of way, with a full, voluptuous figure. Kate had to blink tears away as she looked at what had been done to her.

A bruise ran along the lower part of the dead woman's jaw on the right side of the face. The purple mottling even more obscene against the deathly white of her skin.

On the opposite side her neck had been slashed from ear to the larynx. Below her neck, a knife had opened up a circular hole, ripping down and exposing the bones of her spinal column. The large blood vessels on either side of the neck had been slashed, and blood had run down her semi-naked body in jagged sheets. The heart had been pumping when the wounds were made, spraying the blood outward with considerable pressure and telling her that the cuts had been made pre-mortem.

Kate turned to Delaney who was standing beside her and, thankfully, holding his counsel for once. 'Whoever did it, I'd guess, used a large, relatively sharp blade, wielded with great force. He was full of rage, out of control I'd say. There are no defence wounds on her hands or arms so I would surmise the woman may have known her attacker.'

'Was she killed here?'

Kate nodded. 'Going by the arterial spray on the ground and undergrowth around her.'

She looked down at the young woman's body again. Was she right? Had she known the man who had done this to her? Or was it a random attack? Kate's gaze ran across the woman's mutilated body, past the slashes on her neck and down to her lower abdomen where a jagged cut ran across it. As if the man had held the knife down in a grip and had sawed through, like a huntsman gutting a deer. That could have been her, she realised, last night. Drugged, raped, she could have been mutilated too and dumped in the woods. Suddenly, the pinp.r.i.c.ks in her eyes started in earnest and she could no longer hold back the tears. She felt her stomach lurch and knew she had to get out of there. She turned, pushed past Delaney, and ran through the opening of the tent. Ducking under the tape cordon she staggered into a wooded area away from the shocked looks of the police, fell to her knees and threw up. She bent her head low, holding her long dark hair away from her face, and threw up again. She put one hand on the wet ground to balance herself, weak with despair, and retched again painfully. She gulped in some ragged breaths of air, her throat cramping, and ran her hand over her forehead, now damp with perspiration. Her voice was a rough whisper as she swore through her panted breath.

It wasn't the Hippocratic oath.

Back in the scene-of-crime tent Delaney turned to Sally Cartwright. She had offered to go after the doctor but had been told her to stay where she was. 'I guess a lot of people ate something dodgy this morning,' Delaney had said.

Sally looked down at the dead goth's mutilated body and felt queasy herself. 'I can't say I blame her.'

But Delaney was puzzled. Kate Walker was a consummate professional, had seen more dead bodies than even he had. Something was clearly up with her and he couldn't help wondering if it had something to do with the confrontation he had witnessed in the car park of the South Hampstead Hospital just a short while ago.

Kate Walker stood up. She took the bottle of Evian water she always kept in her handbag and took a swallow, rinsing the water around her mouth a few times and then spitting it out. She did it once more and then took a long swallow of the cold water. She poured a little more on a handkerchief and wiped her brow and lips and took a couple of deep breaths, willing her heart to slow down. She placed a hand against the damp bark of a tree and forced herself to breathe evenly.

Since an early age ambition had been Kate Walker's middle name. At school she had come top of her year seven years running. Unlike many of her peers she hadn't been distracted by boys or music or become fanatical about sports, she wasn't obsessive about ponies and didn't have a crush on her French teacher, she didn't spend hours shopping for outfits, had no fascination with shoes or handbags or jewellery or make-up, she didn't take an interest in anything, in fact, that wasn't going to further her academic career. As a young girl in prep school she hadn't been like that, she was a bit of a tomboy. She was as interested in climbing trees or playing cricket as any of her boy cousins. Her favourite novel was Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons and a day cooped up inside on a fine summer's day was torture to her. All that had changed, however, one summer when she was eleven years old and her outer life became driven inward. It was a solemn-faced and earnest girl who went to St Angela's for Girls, keeping her dark thoughts behind her dark lashes. If the eyes were the window to the soul, Kate Walker's were tinted gla.s.s. St Angela's was for the wealthy and gifted children of the south London suburbs whose parents couldn't bear to send their daughters further south to Redean or west to St Helen's. Kate's studies became her life, and she quite literally lost herself in books. She might not have lost her love for Arthur Ransome but the adventures took place in her imagination now. As a fresher at university she ignored all entreaties to join societies that were about fun and not study. Most people went to university to play hard and work hard, a few went to party. Kate went to work hard and that was it. She got a first and went on to become an exemplary medical student. As a qualified doctor she wasn't content with the prospect of general practice. She took courses and the extra work as a police surgeon. It was while doing that, and working closely with the police, that she became fascinated with forensic anthropological science and the work of pathologists. One dealt with bones, the other with soft tissue. She had gone back to medical school, qualified and became a forensic pathologist. Overall it had taken over twelve years and it was all she ever wanted. And she was good at it, already targeted for the head of her department and beyond. Her future was as plotted out for her and as detailed as an Ordnance Survey map.

Today, though, as she looked across at the blue lights that were flashing through the trees and undergrowth ahead like a carnival for lost souls, she put a hand on her sore stomach, aching with the cramps of throwing up, and thought about the ravaged body of a woman just starting out in life, an unfinished symphony cut tragically short, about the horrible waste and the madness of it all, and she realised suddenly that she was sick of being a pathologist. She was sick of the blood and the pain and the daily reminder of the absolute evil that mankind was capable of. She was sick of dealing with the hard-headed cynicism of people like Jack Delaney and his ilk. Sick of death, in fact.

Sick to her stomach.

As she walked back to the crime scene she realised she had already come to a decision. She was going to phone Jane Harrington to see if the general practice position in her clinic attached to the hospital was still available. She had been offered the post a few weeks before and this time she would take her friend up on the offer. She'd have her resignation in to her boss by the end of the day. She had one last case to deal with first, though. She didn't know who the young girl in the woods was. She didn't know how she had died. But she would give her all finding out how and why she had died. She gave the unknown woman her oath on that much.

A blood oath.

Delaney tried to look sympathetic as the nurse, Valerie Manners, recounted the morning's events. 'I'm sure it was all very traumatic for you.'

'Traumatic isn't the word. I'm used to traumatic. You work enough shifts on the accident and emergency unit at a large hospital and you get used to trauma.'

Bob Wilkinson spoke out. 'What would you call it then?'

Delaney threw a 'leave it out' look to the constable who was standing by Sally as she took notes.

Valerie Manners was a bit taken aback by the question and had to think a little, giving up after a few moments of struggle. 'Well, very traumatic I would say.'

Delaney nodded, again with sympathy. The trouble all too often with the public when they were caught up in a crime, was to make too much of everything. The answers to solving a crime were all too often in the everyday, mundane, prosaic details, not in the dramatic and the astounding. Many of the witnesses he had interviewed over the years had a tendency to vicariously sensationalise their own drab lives by way of someone else's tragedy. Memories became embellished with imagined detail. But Delaney was a seasoned enough copper to know how to winnow the wheat from the chaff. At least he hoped he was. 'Go back to the beginning, Mrs Manners.'

'It's Ms Manners.'

'Back to the beginning then please, Ms Manners.'

'I had stopped to catch my breath, leant on the tree over there-'

Delaney interrupted her. 'Before then?'

'When I saw the flasher?'

'Before that.'

'Back to leaving hospital?'

'Yes.'

The nurse looked at him perplexed, like he was an idiot. 'Is it relevant?'

Delaney sighed and looked at her, any sympathy he had for her draining fast. 'I'll tell you what, Ms Manners, let's make a deal. I won't tell you how to dress a wound or change a bedpan, and you let me decide what details are important or not in a particularly brutal murder case.'

'All right, no need to get snitty. I can get that kind of att.i.tude any day of the week, if I want it, from the consultants who think they're better than good G.o.d Himself.'

Delaney ignored her. 'What time did you leave work this morning?'

'I left the hospital about eight o'clock.'

'And you always cut through this part of the heath?'

'Yes. It takes me about fifteen minutes to walk home. And a bit of fresh air never hurt anyone. I've learned that much in my job.'

Tell that to the woman in the scene of crime tent, thought Delaney, but didn't say it. 'And you didn't see anything out of the ordinary?'

'I saw a man wagging his p.e.n.i.s at me! I'd count that as a pretty unusual event, wouldn't you?'

'Can you describe it?'

'The p.e.n.i.s, or the event?'