I reached down and tugged on the top shoe, thinking as I did, What's the point of this? What are you going to find out from an old shoe? Maybe I was drawn to it because it was the same make I favored; I could tell from the sole, barely worn, the mark still clear: Church's English Shoes. Not the same shoe; I wore black wing tips, this had a buckle, and it was burgundy, a Blenheim, I thought, no, a Beckett, the last thought before my hand tugged on the shoe and what was in the shoe, and what was in the shoe gave against my hand. I flinched and yelled out and snapped my hand back as if I'd just tugged on a live rat, and I tumbled down the banked side of the dump and let gravity take me to the shore of the reservoir. I could hear the water lapping gently, as if that could distract me from what I'd just disturbed: not a rat, a foot, visible from where I stood, a foot attached to a man's corduroy-clad leg, protruding from the mound of garbage and then slowly collapsing, like a guttered-out candle subsiding into a ruined cake.

All I could hear now was my blood pounding out a funeral rhythm in my brain, and through the beats a calm, measured voice that said: "Call the Guards. Wait until they get here. Explain what you were doing. Tell them everything. All will be well." What the voice said made sense, but I didn't listen. It didn't sound like me.

The victim was a well-or at least, expensively-dressed man, unusually lean and wiry, about five foot three, with a weather-beaten face and blond hair, possibly dyed, aged anywhere from twenty-five to fifty. He wore a kind of gentleman-farmer costume: rust-colored corduroys, olive-green sleeveless pullover, small-check shirt, brown wool sport coat. He'd been here-or dead, at any rate-at least two days, but not much longer: rigor had departed the body, but there was no sign of the abdominal staining or distension associated with further putrefaction. And there was no sign so far that the rats or birds had got to him. He'd been strangled, possibly by a ligature and by hand: there was a clear furrow around his neck, but a mess of bruising also; his eyes had been closed and it looked as if his mouth had been cleaned: there were no bloodstains. If I had to guess, I'd've said he'd been murdered elsewhere and the body had been dumped here within the last few hours-or possibly the last few minutes, courtesy of my friend in the white Transit van. I found four further things of note. The first three were a tattoo, a shredded slip of paper that looked like a betting slip and a small leather pouch full of coins. The fourth thing gave me such a fright I found myself back at the water's edge again, gasping for breath, the air cold in my pounding chest.

I repositioned the body in as haphazard a manner as I could and covered his face with the bag of children's clothes and walked back along the gleaming woodland track through the darkening trees, shivering now, my steps quickening, keen to see a trail of smoke from a chimney, to hear a human voice, to warm myself at the fires of the living. When I reached my car, the blood bay spotted me and came pounding up to the nearest point of the fence, champing at the wire, long tail swinging like a pendulum, seemingly as anxious as I was for animal contact. I went down and pulled grass and weeds and offered them from my hand; the horse feasted eagerly, steam rising from her coat like breath in the cold air; I inhaled her deep, musky smell, let her old teeth gnaw my outstretched palm, relished every snort and whinny. When I withdrew from the gate, and she realized there was nothing more to come, she wheeled around and took off back to her spot at the bottom of the field, the clump of her hooves on the hard winter grass like mountain thunder, thrilling to the ear.

Still shaken, I drove fast out of the forest of pines and down to the road and back onto the N11 and stopped off at the first pub I came to. It was a sprawling, anonymous car park of a place, the kind of pub you need a map to find the toilet. A rough-looking Sunday-afternoon crowd of all ages was resentfully half watching an English Premiership game that could have been of little real interest to them, Wigan and Reading, perhaps, or Bolton and Portsmouth, the adults all drunk and surly, the kids bored and restless; the remnants of seasonal turkey-and-ham lunches littered the tables amid the full and empty glasses. It wasn't a very nice place, but I was very glad to be there, among the living.

I ordered a double Jameson and a pint of Guinness and a turkey-and-ham sandwich and found a quiet corner with a view of the car park and no view of a TV screen, and while I drank the whiskey with a little water, I took out a notebook and wrote down everything I had seen. Then I rang Dave Donnelly and told him some of it, including the need to get someone onto Vinnie Butler urgently. I told him it looked like the body had been killed elsewhere, then cleaned up and moved to the scene. I didn't tell him I had moved the body and I didn't tell him I had searched it, although I knew he'd assume I had. I didn't tell him about the tattoo either-he'd find out about that when the crime scene unit examined the body. The tattoo was on the man's left forearm: two symbols recently, and amateurishly, carved; they'd barely scabbed over. One resembled a crucifix, the other looked like the ancient Greek letter omega: †?

Dave went through the motions of reefing me out of it for not staying with the body until the scene had been secured, but his heart didn't seem in it: I guess from his point of view, having me connected with the murder would be an inconvenience. I needed to be free to dig for the scraps he'd need in working the case; in return, he'd feed me what he could, and look the other way when I stepped outside the law, provided I didn't do it in too visible a way. In case I didn't understand the latter point, Dave signed off on it.

"Just don't get that O'Connor woman involved, all right Ed? Thought you had more sense than to trust a fucking journalist."

"Sure about that, Dave? Far as I can remember, the way she wrote you up on the Howard case was one of the main reasons you got your big promotion to the Bureau."

"Your memory's playing tricks with you then, Ed. Knock off the gargle and cop onto yourself, would you?"

You couldn't slam a mobile phone down, but Dave ended the call so abruptly that it felt like that's what he'd done.

The other thing I didn't tell Dave about was the shredded betting slip I'd found stuck inside the corpse's trouser pocket, as if it had been through the wash. I prised it out and bagged it and pieced it together now. It had a mobile number written on it, faded but legible. I rang the number, and a hoarse male voice answered.

"What can I do you for, friend?"

There was a hubbub of voices in the background, and the rasp of a P.A. saying, "Winner all right. Winner all right."

"Was that the last race?" I said.

"That's the last done now, friend," the man said. "All off-course accounts to be settled in the morning."

"Did Fish on Friday place?"

"Did she what?"

He barked out a loud, derisive laugh.

"Best guess is she's still out there, friend. Maybe she'll be home for Christmas. Would you like to bet on it?"

I ended the call. Fish on Friday was one of George Halligan's horses, running at Gowran Park. The dead man had the mobile number of a bookie at the same race meeting in his trouser pocket. And when I'd held his face, back in the forest, his jaw had hung open, and his mouth gaped red down his throat, and I saw the last thing I decided not to tell Detective Inspector Donnelly. His tongue had been cut out.