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before death.’
    â€˜You mean she’d been raped before she was strangled?’
    He shook his head. ‘I can’t say that, yet. You’ll understand that I have to disturb the body as little as possible here. When we have her on the slab, we’ll be better able to see whether penetration was violent, whether there was much, or indeed any, resistance to intercourse. All I can tell you at the moment is that there are traces of sexual fluids evident in the genital area.’ He stood up. ‘That sounds like the meat wagon arriving now. I’ve finished my site examination. The sooner she’s removed, the sooner we shall be able to give you the benefits of a full post-mortem report.’
    He sounded glad to be briskly professional again. And he was right about the vehicle arriving. With swift, practised hands, the slim body was slid into a plastic body bag and placed in its ‘shell’, a plain fibre-glass coffin. Thus concealed from the prying eyes which still lined up behind the plastic ribbons on the edge of the area, the corpse was borne away from the shed on the derelict site.
    Lucy Blake reported to Peach on her exchanges with the pathologist as they returned to Brunton Police Station in the Mondeo. At least they now knew that she had been dead for some time, possibly since before the weekend. But it was back at the station that DS Blake discovered what she thought was the most depressing fact of all about the dead girl.
    No one had yet reported anyone of her description as a missing person.

Four
    L ucy Blake was glad to spend that Monday evening with her mother. It took her away from the dour, narrow streets and cheap and grimy brick houses of the town and back to the more innocent country world of her childhood.
    Her mother’s cottage, in the village at the base of Longridge Fell, was within ten miles of the sordid shed in the industrial area of Brunton where she had knelt beside the decaying body of that still anonymous dead girl. Yet in the feeling it conveyed of a safe and wholesome security, this place might have been on the other side of the world.
    It was a stone cottage with a neat, cheerful garden at the front, at the end of a row which made up one of the three lanes in the small village. These had been humble dwellings for farm workers when they were built, but the small houses had been skilfully placed. When the winds howled in from the Fylde coast on its western side, these dwellings seemed to curl themselves up in the lee of the hill, letting the winds sweep over their sturdy slate roofs.
    Agnes Blake had been widowed for ten years. She was sixty-nine now, but still hale and independent enough to work part-time in a supermarket in the neighbouring Longridge. She looked forward to her daughter’s visits more than she would ever have admitted. Although the old place had central heating these days, Agnes had lit a fire two hours before Lucy’s arrival, so that flames now licked cheerfully up the chimney. And the face of the woman Agnes still saw as a girl glowed pink and healthy, as she nestled cosily into the chair in which her father had once sat and told stories to the wide-eyed child upon his knee.
    â€˜I never see you in your uniform now, our Lucy,’ said Agnes as they sat with their cups of tea after the meal. ‘Used to look very smart, you did, with the dark blue and that hat.’
    Lucy grinned: she didn’t remember her mother saying that at the time. ‘I don’t wear the uniform now, Mum. Except on formal parades. I told you, that’s part of being in CID.’
    â€˜And are all these murders and stabbings and rapes I read about part of CID too? You lead a dangerous life for a young girl, our Lucy.’
    â€˜Not as dangerous as you think, Mum. Most of it’s routine and boring, petty burglaries and the like, but you don’t read about that.’ She thought about the stark, accusing face of that dead girl earlier in the