He glanced at the first page of the trade magazine Promotions and Incentives and saw that one of his competitors, whose business was booming, was preparing for a stock market flotation. What was their secret? he wondered. What the hell had they done so right that he had done so wrong?

He took another bite, and watched the techie, Chris Webb, a tall, laconic forty-year-old with floppy hair and a solitary earring, who he called in for all his computer problems – and who treated him like a retarded child – prodding around with a screwdriver in the entrails of his Mac laptop. Every few moments Tom looked over at the blank screen, hoping against hope it would spring back to life.

And thinking about what he had seen last night.

He had not been able to get the image of the girl being stabbed out of his mind, and it had given him such a vivid nightmare he had woken screaming at three in the morning. It must have been a movie or a movie trailer of some kind.

But it had seemed somehow so damned real.

‘Your data’s gone, mate, I’m afraid,’ Chris Webb said, irritatingly cheerily.

‘Yes, that’s what I told you,’ Tom said. ‘I need you to retrieve it.’

As the techie busied himself with the machine again, Tom, feeling lost without his computer and unable to concentrate on the magazine, stared at the displays of some of his company’s products, thinking they were all looking a bit tired, had been there too long, needed sharpening up.

He studied the Team Jaguar glass showcase, displaying an anorak, baseball cap, polo shirt, ballpoint pen, key fob, driving gloves, tie and headsquare, all in the Jaguar livery. There were some newer designs they had produced which should be in there, he thought. Then he turned his attention to another display – of mouse pads, pens, calculators and umbrellas all bearing the Weetabix logo. That needed bringing up to date also.

Olivia, his secretary, an attractive twenty-something who lurched from one man-crisis to the next, came into the room holding a Pret A Manger bag, mobile phone pressed to her ear in deep conversation. Behind her empty desk sat his best salesman, Peter Chard, in one of his trademark sharp suits, his hair slick, a doppelgänger for the actor Leonardo DiCaprio, engrossed in a motoring magazine and forking his way through a pot noodle. At the desk next to him sat Hong Kong-born Simon Wong, a quiet, ambitious thirty-year-old, busy filling out an order form. It was a new client and a decent-sized order; some small cheer, Tom thought.

A phone started ringing. Olivia, still engrossed on her mobile, seemed oblivious to it. Peter and Simon didn’t seem to hear it either. Maggie was out of the office at lunch.

‘SOMEONE ANSWER THE FUCKING PHONE!’ Tom shouted.

His secretary raised an apologetic arm and strode over to her desk.

‘So talk me through exactly what happened again,’ Chris Webb said, sounding exasperated as if he were addressing the class imbecile.

Both salesmen looked at Tom.

‘I opened my computer on the train this morning and it wouldn’t boot up. It was dead,’ he said.

‘It’s booting up fine,’ the techie said. ‘But there’s no data, is there? That’s why you’re not getting anything up on the screen.’

Lowering his voice in an attempt to lose his audience, Tom said, ‘I don’t understand.’

‘There isn’t much to understand, mate. Your database is wiped clean.’

‘Not possible,’ Tom said. ‘I mean – I haven’t done anything.’

‘You’ve either had a virus or you’ve been hacked.’

‘I thought Macs don’t get viruses.’

‘You did what I told you, didn’t you – please tell me you did. You didn’t hook this up to the office server?’

‘No.’

‘Lucky for that – it would have trashed your entire database.’

‘So there’s a virus.’

‘You’ve got something in there. Nothing’s wrong with your hardware. I just can’t believe you were so stupid – putting in a CD you found on a train. Jesus, Tom!’

Tom glanced past him. The rest of his team seemed to have lost interest. ‘What do you mean, stupid? It’s a computer, right? That’s what it does. It’s got all the anti-virus software – which you installed. It plays CDs. It ought to be able to play any CD.’

Webb held up the CD. ‘I’ve had a read of this, away from any machine it could harm. It’s spyware – it will reconfigure your software and plant God knows what kind of stuff in your system. You found it on a train?’

‘Last night.’

‘Serves you right for not handing it in to Lost Property right away.’

Sometimes Tom couldn’t believe he actually paid this guy to help him. ‘Thanks a lot. I was trying to be helpful – thought I might find an address on it I could send it to.’

‘Yeah, well next time it happens send it to me and I’ll look at it for you. So, apart from this, have you opened up any attachments you didn’t recognize?’

‘No.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I never do – you warned me not to, years ago. Only the ones that come from people I know.’

‘Porn?’

‘Jokes, porn, the usual stuff.’

‘I suggest you wear a condom next time you surf the net.’

‘That’s not even funny.’

‘That wasn’t a joke. You’ve picked up a very nasty virus; it’s extremely aggressive. If you’d logged on to your office server this morning, you’d have wiped that clean, and all your colleagues’ computers as well. And the backup.’

‘Shit.’

‘Good word,’ Chris Webb said. ‘Couldn’t have put it better myself.’

‘So how do I get rid of it?’

‘By paying me a lot of money.’

‘Great.’

‘Or you can buy a new computer.’

‘You really know how to cheer someone up, don’t you?’

‘You want the facts, I’m giving them to you.’

‘I don’t understand. I thought Macs didn’t get viruses.’

‘They don’t very often. But there are some floating around. You might have just been unlucky. But most likely it’s from this CD. Of course there is another possibility.’ He looked around, found the mug of tea he had put down a while ago, and swigged some down.

‘And what’s that?’ Tom asked.

‘It might be someone who is pissed off with you.’ After a few moments, Webb added, ‘Flash tie you’re wearing.’

Tom glanced down; it was lavender with silver horses. Hermès. Kellie had recently bought it on the internet in some closing-down offer – her idea of economizing.

‘It’s for sale,’ he said.

Shortly after half past four in the afternoon, at the end of three hours of painstaking scrutiny, the dismembered remains of the young woman beneath the awning in the rain-lashed field of rape had come close to yielding as much as they were going to out here, the Home Office pathologist decided.

He completed the primitive but effective technique of pressing Sellotape against every inch of her flesh in the hope of trapping more fibres, tweezered off a few fibres that had lodged in her pubic hair, carefully bagging each of them, then ran his eye once more over the body parts and the ground immediately around them, concentrating fiercely, checking just one more time for anything he might have missed.

Grace would have preferred the pathologist to go straight to the mortuary and perform the post-mortem this evening, which was normal practice, but Theobald informed him apologetically that he was already committed to a PM in Hampshire on a suspicious yachting death.

In an ideal world all post-mortems on murder victims would be carried out in situ, as there was such a risk in moving them of losing some vital clue, perhaps invisible to the naked eye. But a muddy, wind-blown, rain-swept field did not constitute an ideal world. Bodies were seldom found in places that were post-mortem friendly. Some pathologists preferred to spend a minimal amount of time at the crime scene and return to the relatively pleasant working environment of the mortuary. But Dr Frazer Theobald was not one of them. He could be at a scene late into the night, indeed all through the night, if necessary, before declaring himself satisfied that the remains were ready to be removed to the mortuary.