Private London

Chapter 37

DI Kirsty Webb desperately fancied a cigarette.

She hadn’t smoked in over ten years, but she reckoned she could kill for one now as she watched the forensic pathologist preparing to examine the corpse.

It was supposed to be Kirsty’s weekend off. Fat chance of that now with a girl gone missing, abducted right off the street, and another woman found eviscerated and dumped. Murdered, most likely.

Three weeks earlier Kirsty had been the lead DI called to the Putney rowing club on the Surrey side of the Thames.

Six-thirty in the morning on the first of May, Dr Jonathan Brown, a twenty-seven-year-old academic specialising in medieval hagiography, had been preparing to go on the water. He was a hotly tipped single-sculls hopeful for the 2012 Olympics and pretty much every minute of his spare time was spent training for the event.

As he was putting his scull onto the water that morning, however, Dr Brown saw something that caused him to step back, make the sign of the cross and mutter a prayer to Saint Andrew the Apostle, the patron saint of fishermen. What he was looking at was the mottled arm of a dead woman.

The woman was lying at the end of the ramp running down to the river, looking as though she was trying to pull herself out of the water. Dr Brown looked at the arm, horrified for a moment, unsure what to do. Then, as the tidal waters gently rocked into shore, the body was lifted and turned by the swell.

The medieval scholar saw that her body had been cut open. A gaping wound across her torso. He staggered back, gagging – and for the first time in over five years he didn’t do any training that morning.

Kirsty Webb had been trying to track the identity of the woman ever since.