The Cutting Place (Maeve Kerrigan #9) - Jane Casey Page 0,3

a clue in the name, love.’

‘I’m not saying I couldn’t have worked it out,’ I protested. ‘I’ve never thought about it before.’

He grunted. Clearly I was worth even less of his time now, which was a shame because I needed his expert knowledge.

I tucked a stray curl of hair behind my ear, widening my eyes to play up the helpless look. ‘As you can tell, I don’t know much about this. The river flows in both directions, so does that mean we can’t tell where the body parts might have gone in? Could they have been moved up here by the action of the tide?’

He wrinkled his forehead, considering it. ‘The tide moves things up but then it moves them back again on the way out, if you see what I mean. That makes it hard to pinpoint where items enter the water. They sometimes wash around the same area for a while.’

‘Could they have been dumped off a boat?’ Derwent asked.

‘Yeah. But why draw attention to yourself by hopping in a boat to dump body parts when you could slip them into the river from the shore? No one would have noticed if it was small parts, which is what we’ve found. People don’t realise but the river is a busy place. You wouldn’t want to be out there midstream and not know what you’re doing.’

He was right. I’d never realised how busy the Thames was with constant boat traffic: commuter boats, tours, barges loaded with building materials, small speedboats and larger vessels crewed by competent-looking people in high-vis overalls.

‘If the body parts turned up in this area, does this mean they were all thrown in the river here?’

‘I wouldn’t want to try to guess, love. But we only found four pieces. Better hope there’s more to come.’ He nodded briskly and strode away.

‘Thanks for the help,’ I called after him.

‘I don’t know much about this,’ Derwent cooed in my ear. ‘Please explain it to me, Mr Police Diver.’

‘And did he explain it to me?’

‘Sort of.’

‘So it worked.’ I put my notebook away. ‘But don’t get used to it.’

2

‘Hello, you two.’ The pathologist Dr Early barely looked up as we walked in; at the best of times she was a fast-moving blur in scrubs, humming with nervous energy, and she didn’t waste precious seconds on elaborate greetings. ‘I was wondering who was going to be lucky enough to get this one.’

‘Nothing like a nice easy case to start the week,’ I said.

‘And this is nothing like an easy case.’ Dr Early gathered an armful of files and headed for the door.

‘I was going to say that.’ Derwent was actually sulking as we followed the pathologist through the security doors that led to the morgue.

One of her assistants was photographing a collection of objects that lay on a metal table under the glare of a bright light. He was heavily built but he moved with precision and focus as he skirted the table.

‘Here we are.’ Dr Early slipped a pair of gloves on and pulled her mask up over her mouth and nose. ‘You need protective kit too. Then it’s jigsaw puzzle time.’

‘I’m not a doctor, but it looks as if you’re missing a few pieces,’ Derwent said before he tied his mask on.

‘And I’m not a detective but it looks as if it’s your job to find them.’ Dr Early raised her eyebrows at him meaningfully and I smirked to myself under the cover of my own mask: victory to the pathologist.

None of us had forgotten where we were or what lay on the table beside us, but banter was one of the only ways to feel normal when your job involved looking closely at fragments of a human being. Not that I would have known what I was looking at, if I hadn’t been told. No piece was bigger than a shoebox. The skin was yellowed, bleached by the river, and the flesh underneath it was pale and ragged, bloodless. White bone gleamed under the bright lights that shone on the table.

‘So. What we’ve got are four pieces of what seems to be an adult female. She was probably IC1, probably light-haired and probably younger rather than older, but I’m not putting most of that in my initial report because it’s an educated guess at the moment – it’s purely for your benefit.’

‘Why do you say it was a woman?’ I asked.

‘I’m going on the size of the hand and the joints that we’ve recovered – they would