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‘Why don’t you come with me, madam,’ she said, and she steered Amy into the recesses of the police station. Amy’s heart was banging so hard and fast that she thought it might escape from her chest.

The policewoman told Amy her name was DC Amristy and sat her down in a small room that Amy assumed was an interrogation room.

‘Why don’t you tell me all about it?’ DC Amristy said kindly.

Amy began to tell her, the whole story, and when she got to the end, Amristy stood up. ‘Let me just go and talk to our MISPER, see what she says.’

‘OK.’

As soon as the policewoman had left the room, Amy’s phone chirruped. She opened it to find a Facebook status update on her screen.

Becky Coltman has added a new photo.

‘Glorious day.’

‘Hmm?’ DI Declan Adams looked up from the screen of his PC and rubbed his eyes. Bob Clewley stood in the doorway of Declan’s office, a sweating Starbucks Frappuccino in his hand. He sucked some down and crossed to the window.

‘You can’t see from here, what with the view being of a multi-storey car park, but it’s beautiful outside. I’m going to take the kids down to the beach after my shift.’

‘That’s nice.’

‘Yeah, thought we might go down to Hastings, visit the nudist beach at Fairlight. I love to feel the evening sun on my knob.’

‘Right.’

‘You’re not actually listening to me, are you?’ Bob smiled.

Declan sighed. ‘I’m waiting for the forensic anthropologist to call.’

Bob turned away from the window and crossed to Declan’s desk, standing annoyingly close. It irritated him that Bob was able to concentrate on anything else when they were working on a case. Although, as Bob would point out, it was barely even a case yet. ‘Melinda Moore, this time, is it?’

‘Yes.’ Neither of them had dealt directly with Moore before, but she had been involved in a case they were familiar with, when a body had been found buried beneath the pier.

After Declan had emerged from the cesspit, he had hung around while the Home Office pathologist came to take the body. The nearest morgue was in Tunbridge Wells but that was in Kent, and they were Sussex Police. That meant the remains were taken to Eastbourne morgue, just a couple of miles from the Major Incident Suite.

Watching while the remains were removed from the hole in the ground, Declan had examined the scene more closely, trying to absorb the atmosphere of the place. There was nothing for miles but farmland, just like the lifeless place where he’d grown up. But this was an affluent area, the countryside all around dotted with million-pound properties, and he wondered why this farm had been left deserted for so long.

The project manager, Fiona Phillips, had told him that the grass above the cesspit was lush and overgrown, unmown for years, the whole place returned to nature. The construction team had had to cut the grass in order to gain access to the cesspit entrance.

‘It was sealed?’ Declan asked.

Fiona had nodded. ‘That was the first thing I wondered too. Did she fall or was she pushed? But the lid was on, firmly in place.’

‘Why did you say
she
?’

Fiona looked towards the hole. ‘They’re always women, aren’t they?’

Now, Bob crossed back to the window. Declan knew that he cared, that he took his work seriously, but he also knew the job didn’t consume Bob as it did him. Bob didn’t spend his nights with the faces of the victims of crime flickering inside his head, with murder victims talking to him, with dead children crying in his dreams. Declan appreciated that Bob was the normal one, the healthy one, and it wasn’t just because he’d seen more than the younger man. It was in his nature. The therapist he’d seen after he’d left the Met had told Declan he suffered from exaggerated empathy. He felt too much of other people’s pain. It was both a blessing and curse for a policeman.

With the body they’d found in the cesspit – and Declan felt sure that Fiona was right, that it was a woman – it was pure imagination. But last night, as he tried to sleep in a bedroom that was as hot and airless as … well, as a cesspit, Declan had been visited by a ghost. Not literally – he didn’t believe in that hokum – but in his mind. The dead girl had talked to him, pleaded with him to seek justice on his behalf.

But when Declan’s dream-self said, ‘Who
are
you?’ the girl faded from view.

‘So what do we know about the farmhouse?’ Bob asked now.

Declan stabbed at a couple of keys on the keyboard and brought up his notes: ‘Robertson Farm. The farmhouse was built in around 1830 … Not much of this is very useful. Between the Second World War and the 1980s, a lot of the land around the farm was sold off to surrounding farms. Seems like Robertson Farm wasn’t very successful. By 1990, there was just one guy living there, a farmer called Derek Jenkins. Right before he died he sold the farm to a property- development company called JWF, which wanted to build a hotel on the site.’

‘In the middle of nowhere?’ Bob said.

‘Maybe a spa. Or one of those places where rich Londoners take their kids to commune with nature. Anyway, the project got bogged down in the usual planning- permission hell until it was eventually put on hold, and JWF went bust at the end of 1998, leaving all of its projects in limbo, including Robertson Farm.’

‘It was left to rot.’

‘Exactly. For over twenty years, including the time when they were planning to turn it into a hotel … so we know that the earliest our woman could have entered the cesspit would be 1990. But I called a local drainage company that specializes in septic tanks and the like, and they said that all of the urine would have evaporated and the excrement would have solidified within a few years of disuse. The skeleton wasn’t submerged at all so she must have gone in there at least three to four years after 1990. But hopefully, Melinda will be able to tell us more.’

‘The early nineties,’ Bob sighed wistfully. ‘Good times.’

‘Yeah. I didn’t even know you existed.’ Declan went on: ‘JWF’s staff would know about the farm and, presumably, the cesspit. We should check out their staff from back then. See if anything sticks out. But right now, the priority is finding out who she is.’

‘Cessna.’

‘What?’

He looked suitably sheepish. ‘That’s what everyone’s calling her.’

Declan rolled his eyes. ‘Have a bit of respect, Clewley.’

‘It could be an awful lot worse. Mike Jarvis suggested calling her Latrina.’

The phone rang and Declan snatched it up. ‘DI Adams. Ah, hi, Melinda. I’ve been looking forward to your call. Yes, yes … of course, I’ll come over right away.’

When he put down the phone his heart was beating faster and he had that tingle in his belly, the one that kept him in this job, the fix he lived for.

He looked up at Bob. ‘Sounds like Melinda has got some interesting info for us. Want to come? Or are you going to go and bronze your bollocks on Fairlight Beach?’

The woman’s remains were laid out on a bench, the bones looking even sadder in the bright fluorescent light of the lab. In the cesspit, they had appeared muddy brown, but he could see now that the discolouration was more subtle. The bones looked as though they’d been dragged through dirt, the colour of a lifelong cigar-smoker’s teeth.

Bob had come along, too, Declan was pleased to note, extending his shift despite the lack of overtime and – doubtlessly – absorbing the complaints of his wife like a man well-used to disappointing those he loved. Bob’s flippant manner had changed now they were in the presence of the bones – he was no longer calling her Cessna. Or perhaps it wasn’t the remains that were making him serious and quiet. Maybe it was Melinda Moore.

Melinda, who was in her mid-thirties, had very long red hair that she wore loose, was so pale she was almost translucent and had blue eyes with heavily hooded lids, like a Pre-Raphaelite muse. She spoke with a soft, melodic voice tinged with irony. And she was tactile, too, laying a warm hand on people as she spoke to them. Declan was sure that if she invited Bob into that storage cupboard over there for fifteen minutes of fun, he would forget the family he adored in an instant. Declan would have been strongly tempted, too.

‘She was beautifully preserved,’ Melinda said, addressing Declan as they both looked down at the skeleton laid out like a woman sunbathing in her back garden, her limbs rearranged now.

‘She?’

‘Oh, yes, definitely a woman. I didn’t need DNA to tell me that. The shape of the pelvis alone tells me this person was female.’ She lightly touched Declan’s shoulder and he observed how Bob swallowed, watching Melinda reverently.

‘She’s five foot eight and weighed around nine stone … nine stone two. But from her DNA, I can tell a few other things. She was in her early twenties – I would guess twenty-three – and was Caucasian. She had blue eyes and blonde hair. What else? Yes – there must have been a good amount of moisture down there. The body requires moisture in order to decompose. Some of that moisture would come from the body itself – the flesh – but in a dry atmosphere, you would expect to see some mummification. The cesspit was empty?’

‘Yes,’ Declan said. ‘Completely dry. What else can you tell?’

‘Well … she was naked. But you knew that. Her left hip and left arm are damaged – I would guess from the drop into the pit, where they struck the ground.’

‘So she was dropped into the pit.’

‘Or fell,’ said Bob.

Melinda touched his arm, making him jolt, and said, ‘I really don’t think she fell in. And not just because the cesspit cover was closed behind her.’

Declan waited for her to continue.

‘There were puncture wounds in the thorax area – the ribcage.’

‘She was stabbed?’ Bob was horrified. He had clearly been assuming it had been some kind of unfortunate accident.

Melinda nodded. ‘With great force. It looks like they stabbed her in the heart, with the knife driving down, like this.’ She mimed somebody thrusting downwards with a knife.

They were all silent for a moment.

‘I’ve submitted the DNA to the national database, to see if there’s a match. If we’re very lucky, she was once arrested for shoplifting or something. But it will take a couple of days to get the results.’

‘Anything else you can tell us right now?’ Declan asked.

‘Yes, actually. She was suffering from mild scoliosis.’

‘What’s that?’ Bob asked, his cheeks turning a pale shade of pink as Melinda’s lips curled in his direction.

‘Curvature of the spine,’ she replied. Using both hands, she picked up the dead woman’s spine and turned it over, tracing a curved line along it with her forefinger. ‘As you can see, it’s very mild, but it forms a shallow C shape. When she was a young teenager she might have worn a back brace to help correct it. It probably wouldn’t have been noticeable once she was an adult though.’

Declan felt little bubbles of excitement in his belly. This, surely, would help them identify this person they now knew was a murder victim.

‘How common is it?’ he asked.

Melinda tilted her head from side to side. ‘It’s not my area of expertise …’

‘It affects three to four children out of every thousand,’ Bob said.

Declan and Melinda looked at him with surprise. Bob held up his phone. ‘I just Googled it, didn’t I?’

‘OK,’ Declan said. ‘And the NHS will have records of girls who have undergone treatment. We know her rough age, too, and we can assume she comes from around here – so it shouldn’t be too hard to identify her, even if nothing comes back from the DNA database.’ He smiled. ‘Thanks for being so helpful, Melinda.’

‘Yeah, cheers, Melinda,’ added Bob.

Melinda cast a look down at the bones on the bench. ‘I hope you find out who she is. And who did this to her. I’ll let you know if we’ve got a DNA match as soon as I hear.’

As they were leaving, Melinda called after them. ‘Oh, one more thing I almost forgot to mention.’

Declan turned back.

‘The position she was found in, with one hand positioned on her chest …’ Melinda put her hand on her heart.

‘Yes?’

‘It’s unlikely she landed in that position. I would say she was clutching her wound.’

Declan felt the cold of the cesspit crawl through his veins. ‘So she wasn’t dead when she hit the ground, despite having been stabbed.’

Melinda nodded. ‘Yes. She died down there. In the pit.’

I was getting bored of waiting. I knew it was sensible to wait while I set everything up but my desire to be with The One was threatening to overwhelm me. I could take her immediately, but there was something thrilling about waiting just a few more days, getting to know her from a distance, finding out all about her. It was good for me to practise patience, to make it all the sweeter when I got what I craved. But I needed a little snack, something to tide me over, while I waited for my main course. I hadn’t had the pleasure of dispatching the Slut personally, and I felt as though I had missed out.

I logged on to Craiglist and browsed through the W4M – women for men – casual-encounters ads, surely one of the best things about being alive in the early twenty-first century. All those desperate women making it so easy for people like me, women who wanted to make their boyfriends mad, who craved a big dick, who didn’t want a boyfriend, just someone to make their pussy wet. Reading their words on the screen made me hard.

I read through some of the ads until I found one that looked promising. She wanted to give and get head and she only lived a few miles away. The ad had only been posted fifteen minutes before so the chances were she hadn’t been snatched up yet. Using a fake profile, set up with a brand new Gmail account, I sent her a photo, as she asked. The photo was of a guy from a modelling site. I also sent a picture of a fat eight-inch cock from a porn site. She replied almost straight away with her own photo. She was pretty. Not stunning, but good enough. After I’d found out where she lived, using Google Street View to get a good idea of what it was like in her neighbourhood, we arranged to meet at hers.