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‘I’m serious, Poe. The respective boards of the lab and the RVI read the papers like everyone else. Not including this one, you’ve embroiled yourself in some extremely high-profile cases over the last couple of years. The exposure we got working on them helped bring in funding.’

‘Happy to help then,’ Poe said. ‘What you got so far, Estelle?’

‘Death came quickly to this man,’ she said. She put her safety goggles back on and walked back to the corpse. ‘Although not that much quicker than if nature had been allowed to play its hand.’

‘Explain,’ Poe said.

‘If your killer hadn’t got to him, I’d have said Howard Teasdale had no more than a year to live. He wasn’t being treated for it so I assume it was undiagnosed, but he had stage-four lymphoma. It had spread beyond his lymph nodes and into his liver, his lungs and his bone marrow.’

‘You think he might have been selected because he was terminally ill?’ Poe said.

‘I don’t have anywhere near enough data to comment on that,’ Doyle said. She peered at him over the top of her safety goggles. ‘And neither do you, Poe.’

He made a mental note to tell Nightingale anyway.

‘I’ve almost finished my examination. I’ll send the full report later … Are you OK, Matilda?’

Bradshaw’s brow was beaded with sweat. Her breathing was shallow and rapid. She couldn’t take her eyes off the corpse. She nodded.

‘It helps to think of this as a scientific process, nothing more,’ Doyle said. ‘I’m here to gather evidence and interpret it. You’ve done the same thing countless times only with a different cache of data. Poe tells me you’re the best he’s ever come across.’

Bradshaw gulped and breathed out carefully, winning the fight against the gag reflex. Doyle saying Teasdale was just evidence awaiting discovery would allow her to compartmentalise a PM she probably hadn’t really wanted to attend.

‘Thank you, Professor Estelle Doyle.’

‘Cause of death?’ Poe said.

‘Asphyxiation. This is supported by a thin ligature mark and associated bruising around the neck. The strap muscles are also haemorrhaged.’

‘Manner of death was garrotting, I take it?’

‘Almost certainly.’ She lifted Teasdale’s head and turned it left, showing them the back of his neck. ‘Note the small bruise on the left side of the cervical vertebrae.’

She turned the head right and showed them a similar mark on the other side.

‘Where he used his thumbs as leverage when he tightened it?’

‘The evidence supports that. And if you wait a moment I’ll show you something else.’

She engineered the hoist into position and moved the twenty-five-stone cadaver onto its side. A faint bruise, roundish in shape and about the size of a coaster, stood out on Teasdale’s mottled flesh.

For a moment Poe didn’t know what he was seeing.

Doyle helped him out. ‘He was a big man, Poe. Out of shape and dying but he had big muscles in his neck and shoulders.’

‘The killer used his knee for extra leverage,’ he said, the answer obvious when he put himself in the killer’s mind. ‘He put his knee against his back so he could pull harder.’

‘Again, the evidence supports that,’ Doyle said.

‘How long to die?’

‘Not long at all. Ten seconds before he was unconscious, probably dead in under a minute. And there’s something else you need to see.’

Doyle picked up a remote control. A screen on the wall of the observation room flickered into life. She moved a slide under the lens of a powerful-looking microscope. At the same time, an image appeared on the screen. Doyle turned a knob on the side of the microscope and the image came into focus.

‘You want to tell Poe what that is, Matilda?’

Bradshaw leaned towards the image. She pushed her glasses up her nose and squinted slightly, her lips pursed in concentration.