A police photographer circled the skip, let off a few flashes and retreated to make room for the scene of crime officers. One man was dusting the bin for prints. When he’d finished with one side of the bin, another hauled himself into it and began clambering around. He pointed out the protruding limb to Monty, as if he could have missed it. The leg emerged from the rubble like a spindly tree from a barren hillside, twisted, small and naked.

Her head was also exposed. Someone had already wiped away much of the dust and debris from the small waxy face. He mentally compared the features with the file photo of ten year old Bianca Webster: hamster cheeks, badly dyed hair. Just a runaway he’d hoped, until he’d been told about the missing computer. It was still early, they might find her yet, he had thought at the time. Jesus, his own optimism surprised him sometimes.

The mortuary chief, Henry Grebe, arrived in his white van. Funny, Monty thought, child abductors had a propensity for white vans too. The rings on Grebe’s fingers flashed under the lights as he rubbed his hands, addressing his band of body snatchers who rattled the gurney along the rough ground beside him. His voice carried to Monty across no man’s land. ‘Come on lads, chop, chop. If we get rid of this one good and fast we might still catch the end of the test.’

Monty caught the eye of the pathologist, Melissa Hurst. She beckoned him over. ‘I thought you were supposed to be doing something about that odious man.’ She’d pulled the hood of her overalls off and powdered cement covered her short wavy hair, making it appear greyer than it was.

‘That’s just what I was about to say to you,’ Monty said.

‘He’s been at the mortuary twenty years, it’s easier said than done.’

‘Can we take it now?’ the object of their dislike called out.

Monty clenched his fists. ‘No,’ he snapped. ‘Doctor Hurst and I aren’t finished. Go back to the van and wait till you’re called.’ To the doctor he said, ‘C’mon, I’m sure you’ve got something to show me, let’s stretch this out.’

The doctor spoke from the side of her mouth. ‘A grebe is a bird that under certain circumstances will eat its own young—did you know that?’

For a moment Monty forgot his misery and smiled. ‘You going David Attenborough on me?’

Someone had fashioned some loose bricks into a crude set of steps for the doctor to stand on, but Monty was tall enough to view the body without aids. He forced himself to follow Doctor Hurst’s gloved fingers as she manipulated the jaw like the star of one of those American forensic shows. ‘She’s not been dead long, no signs of rigor yet. And look at the eyes,’ she pointed.

Monty recognised in them the glaze of the newly dead.

‘At a rough guess, I’d say she’s been dead no more than a couple of hours. I’ll be able to tell you more when I examine her at the mortuary.’

‘Any idea of the cause?’ Monty asked.

‘Nothing confirmed, but it looks like the preliminary cause could be asphyxiation.’ She extracted a paintbrush from her overall pocket, flicked away more dust and shone the beam of a penlight up the child’s nose. ‘Look at her nose, can you see the congestion?’

Monty put on his glasses, held his breath and peered as closely as his position allowed, not seeing a thing, not wanting to see a thing; he’d take the doctor’s word for it.

‘The poor kid had a bad cold, lethal when combined with a duct-tape gag.’ Doctor Hurst circled a finger above the child’s mouth. ‘There are sticky marks around her mouth from the glue, see how the brick dust has adhered to it? And look at the petechial haemorrhage in the whites of the eyes—a sure sign of asphyxiation. At this stage I’d hazard a guess that murder might not have been intentional.’

Small comfort, as if that would make it easier for the wretched mother, Monty thought. ‘That’ll do for now, get the ball rolling,’ he said, holding his hand out to her and helping her down from the wobbly brick steps, something he would never have dared do for Stevie. Then again, Stevie wasn’t sixty years old and five feet tall. He beckoned to the men from the mortuary van and told them they could collect the body.

Standing well back from the taped area, he lit a cigarette. He turned his back on the body snatchers and took a deep drag as if it might mask the odour of every crime scene he’d ever attended. And this wasn’t even bad; he’d detected nothing but the smell of brick dust from the skip. Imagination can be a powerful thing.

‘I thought you’d given up,’ the doctor said.

‘I have.’

‘I’ll spare you the lecture then. Did you get my fax? I’m afraid I didn’t send it till late.’

‘Don’t tell me the blood tests on the floater have finally come back?’

‘No, not the blood, better than blood, it’s the tissue tests.’

‘Yes, you suspected some kind of kidney problem?’

‘Our John Doe was suffering from a kidney disease called IgA nephropathy. One of its symptoms is blood in the urine, something very few people would choose to ignore.’

Monty felt his spirits lift. It was breaks like this that kept him on the job. ‘Which means a sweep of doctors’ surgeries and clinics might well lead us to the identification of our mystery man—you beauty!’ Monty clapped her on the shoulder, forcing her to step back to keep her balance.

‘Steady on there, King Kong.’

He walked her back to her car and then joined Barry who was standing with Wayne Pickering at the edge of the underground car park of the half finished shopping centre.

DS Wayne Pickering introduced him to Geoffrey Browne, a stick-thin old man wearing a security officer’s uniform.

‘You found the body, yeah?’ Monty asked him.

‘Not only found it, he saw it dumped,’ Wayne said.

‘Really?’ Monty raised his eyebrows. ‘Tell me what you saw...’

‘I’ve already gone through it all with these fellas,’ the security man said with a nasal whine.

‘And you’re more than likely going to have to go over it again another dozen times I’m afraid, sir,’ Monty said.

The old man sighed deeply. Monty met Wayne’s look of concern with one of his own, wondering just how much they could rely on him.

‘I was boilin’ up some tea over there, see?’ Browne pointed a crooked finger to a card table and folding chair set up alongside one of the car park’s concrete pillars. A kettle sat on the table with an industrial length extension cord trailing into the shadows.

Monty scuffed his way over the concrete slab to the makeshift tearoom and gazed between the pillars to the clear view of the floodlit skip. It was hard to ascertain quite what the old man might have seen earlier in the grainy darkness and the dazzle of car headlights.

‘Go on then, what did you see?’ he asked when he returned.

‘I heard it first, the squeal of brakes, then I saw a four-wheel drive crash through the fence and fishtail across the building site.’

He peered in the direction the man was pointing. One section of the cyclone fence had been knocked down and the supporting poles bent out of shape. A police officer was taping up the gap. Traffic on the highway beyond the fence-line had slowed to a crawl as motorists sought to take in the drama. Bloody ghouls, he thought.

‘Then a bloke come out, opened up the back door and grabbed hold of this heavy thing,’ the old man said. ‘At first I thought he was just some mug dumping rubbish illegally. He threw the thing onto the skip and climbed onto it, scrabbling around for a bit like he was trying to bury something. I radioed it in from here while I watched him.’

‘He drove through the mesh fence, and you just stood and watched?’ Monty said.

‘What the hell else was I supposed to do at my age and with my back? Besides there was another fella sitting in the front seat, I wouldn’t have stood a chance if they got aggro. The fella on the skip must have seen me, I reckon, cos he jumped down real quick and scarpered back to his truck and took off.’