‘Does he have favourite music?’ the nurse asked.

‘Snow Patrol,’ she said, and thought for a moment. ‘And the Eagles. He likes those bands.’

‘You could try getting some of their CDs and playing them to him. Have you got an iPod?’

‘At home.’

‘Why don’t you get it? You could get his wash stuff at the same time. Some soap, a facecloth, toothbrush, his shaving stuff, deodorant.’

‘I don’t want to leave him,’ Susan said. ‘In case…’ She shrugged.

‘He’s stable,’ Saleha said. ‘I can call you if I think you should get back here quickly.’

‘He’ll be stable all the time you keep the machines on, won’t he? But what happens when you switch them off?’

There was an awkward silence, during which both women knew the answer. The nurse broke it. She said cheerily, ‘What we have to hope is that there will be some improvement overnight.’

‘Yes,’ Susan said, her voice choking as she tried to hold back the tears.

She stared at Nat’s face, at his motionless eyelids, willing him to move, willing those eyes to open and his lips to smile.

But there was no change.

David Browne, the Crime Scene Manager, and James Gartrell, a police forensic photographer, had arrived a short while ago in separate vehicles. Browne, a lean, muscular man in his early forties, with close-cropped ginger hair and a cheery, freckled face, dressed in a heavy padded anorak, jeans and trainers, and Gartrell, burly and intense, with short dark hair, were busy on the main deck of the Arco Dee, photographing and videoing the scene.

Browne had agreed with Roy Grace that there was no useful purpose to be served in treating the ship as a crime scene, and none of the three men, or Lizzie Mantle, had bothered changing into protective clothing. Grace had merely secured the immediate area around the drag head with crime-scene tape.

The Detective Superintendent stood by the cordon now, gratefully cradling a mug of hot coffee, informally interviewing the captain and the chief engineer, whose comments were being noted down by DI Mantle, who was standing next to him. He glanced at his watch. It was ten past six.

The captain, Danny Marshall, wearing a high-visibility jacket over his thick pullover, was looking worried, and repeatedly checking his watch too. The chief engineer, Malcolm Beckett, dressed in a grimy white boiler suit and hard hat, was a tad less edgy, but Grace could sense both men were tense. Clearly they were upset about the body, but equally clearly they were worried about the commercial implications of the disruption to their schedule.

Another crew member came over to them, holding a sheet of graph paper on which was printed a set of coordinates, giving the precise position on the seabed where the body had been dredged up from.

Lizzie Mantle copied the information into her notebook, then slipped the square of paper into a plastic evidence bag and pocketed it. The body had been heavily weighted down, but even so, as Grace knew from previous experience, there were strong currents in the English Channel and bodies could get moved considerable distances. He would need to get the underwater team to calculate the probable dump site.

He was suddenly aware of the burble of a motorcycle, then his radio crackled and he heard the voice of the young female Police Community Support Officer he had posted at the bottom of the gangway to ensure that no unauthorized person came on board.

‘The paramedic’s just arrived, sir,’ she said.

‘I’ll come down.’

Roy walked across the deck and heard the motorcycle engine more loudly. A single headlight swept the quay. Moments later, under the glare of the ship’s spotlights, he saw a BMW motorbike, in paramedic livery, halt and the driver dismount and kick down the stand. Graham Lewis balanced the bike carefully, then pulled off his helmet and leather gloves and began removing his medical bag from the pannier.

However obvious it might be to an attending police officer that someone was dead, under the requirements of the Coroner, unless the remains were little more than bones, or the head was detached or missing, formal certifying of death had to be done at the scene by a qualified medic. In the past, a police surgeon would have been required to turn up, but in a recent change of practice it was now paramedics who performed this role.

Grace descended the perilous rope gangway to greet him, passing the PCSO at the bottom, and was glad to see that none of the local journalists, who usually got to murder scenes quicker than blowflies, had yet materialized.

The paramedic, a short, wiry man with curly grey hair, had the sort of kind, caring face that would give instant reassurance to any accident victim he attended. And he was irrepressibly cheery, despite all he saw daily in his career.

‘How are you doing, Roy?’ he greeted the Detective Superintendent breezily.

‘Better than the poor chap on the ship,’ Grace replied. Although not that much better if I don’t make it to the party before it ends, he nearly added. ‘I don’t think you’re going to be needing that bag. He’s about as dead as they get.’

He led Graham Lewis back up the wobbly gangway on to the deck, then along, under the glare of the ship’s lights, past the cable reels and orange rails of the conveyor belt, which would normally have been busily and noisily clanking away, shifting the cargo from the hold on to the chute, which would then discharge it on to the quay. But now it was silent. The paramedic followed Roy Grace to the far side of the ship.

The claws of the steel drag head, suspended a couple of feet above the deck, looked like a pair of gigantic, parallel crab pincers. Jammed between them was a parcel of black plastic tarpaulin, with several ropes wound around it. Several more lengths of rope, looped through eyeholes sewn into the tarp, were tied around a cluster of concrete breeze blocks, which now lay on the grimy, orange-painted metal of the deck.

‘He’s in the bag,’ Grace said. ‘They’ve cut it open but they haven’t touched him.’

Graham Lewis walked up and peered in through the long slit which had been opened up along part of the length. Roy Grace watched alongside him, horrified but deeply curious.

The paramedic pulled on a pair of latex gloves, then tugged the sheeting open wider, revealing the full length of the motionless, almost translucent, greyish-white body inside. It was a young man, in his late teens, Grace estimated, and from his condition he did not look as if he had been in the water for very long.

There was a strong smell of plastic, and a fainter reek of decay, but not the terrible, cloying, rotting-meat reek of death that Grace had long come to associate with a body that had been dead for a while. This person had been dead for only a few days, he guessed, but the post-mortem would hopefully give them a better steer on this.

The youth was thin, but from under-nourishment rather than exercise, Grace judged, noting the lack of muscle. He was about five foot seven or eight, with an angular, rather awkward-looking face and short black hair, some of which lay in a peak across his forehead.

The paramedic rotated his head slightly. ‘No immediate sign of any head trauma,’ he said.

Grace nodded, but his eyes – and his thoughts – were on a different part of the body. He was staring at the abdomen. In particular, at the neat vertical incision down the centre, from the base of the neck to below the belly button, stopping at the edge of the thick triangle of pubic hair, and the large sutures closing it up.

His eyes met the paramedic’s, then he looked down again. Stared at the incision. At the penis, almost black in colour, lying on top of the hairs, limp and wrinkled, like the cast-off skin of a snake. He could not help continuing to stare at it for a moment. The penises of dead men always seemed so profoundly sad, as if the ultimate symbol of manhood, through its motionlessness, became the ultimate symbol of death. Then his eyes returned to the incision.