‘Witnesses?’ Mac asked.

‘Over east, 500 feet or so, are some estates,’ Gondal said. ‘But there’s trees blocking any noise the killers might have made. Even the chainsaw. There’s nothing around here. It still amazes me that you can find remote places like this in London. Great for containing the crime scene, terrible for witnesses.’

Mac nodded. It was the damn reason the killers chose this place for the hit.

Gondal said: ‘I sent a guy out to fingerprint the phone the initial call to the police was made from. And a guy hunting for CCTV. Out here, no one cruising past would have seen or heard anything, so the caller might actually have been present during the carnage. It was all the way over in Greenwich, weirdly. That seems off to me. Someone feeling a sudden bout of guilt, maybe.’

Good idea. But these killers were professional. Nobody would find CCTV footage of any use, and the fingerprint man would return with the bad news that the phone box had been wiped clean. Mac asked if anyone had been inside the house yet.

‘Just the FOA and the paramedics, but they were careful. We were about to head in. The pathologist isn’t here y— oh, here we go.’

Two thick beams of light splashed over them as the uniforms barring the entrance to the area had admitted another vehicle. A middle-aged man got out, nice and slow for his £40 per hour. He waved, then went to the back of his vehicle to suit up.

The detectives shook hands with the pathologist. Mac explained for about the fifth time how he’d lacerated his ear: car door. The pathologist was on call tonight, like Mac’s team, and moaned about having to bring his dog, which they saw in the back of his car. Mac couldn’t resist a stroke of its fur – it accepted happily. The pathologist clapped his hands together when he was told that the bodies inside were probably not in whole form, like a guy getting ready for a challenge.

The borough detectives offered to hang around – akin to saying the murder squad needed them – but Mac gave them a firm no, thanks, we’ve got it covered, go find a stolen cat or something. The locals made their exit, somewhat reluctantly, like partygoers turned away from a nightclub door. Everyone else went indoors, except Mac, who chose to remain outside for the time being to think to his iPod music. It was how he did things sometimes.

---

Everyone spread out once inside. The bodies were the pathologist’s domain, so nobody touched them. They stepped around blood and body bits as if they were pieces of furniture, taking photos and bagging and dusting things because you never knew what insignificant piece of nothingness might provide the breakthrough.

The MIT detectives on the next shift arrived shortly afterwards. One was a slimeball DC called Downey, one day from the end of his police career. Two HAT guys left to pursue enquiry avenues, but Gondal chose to stay. They filed past their boss and went inside. Mac continued to look around outside, thinking, to a backdrop of loud rock music.

When finally he entered, he was called to a body in a white suit. Or, more correctly, body parts in a white suit. Or what technically should be described as a red suit.

‘I think it’s him, sir,’ Gondal said. He searched his superior’s face for an emotion. Mac was staring down at the head, which was a good five feet from the nearest part of the rest of the body. It was impossible to recognise the face, of course, because the face had gone. Literally. And not because of the chainsaw: it had been peeled away carefully. A bloody knife, surely the surgical instrument, had already been bagged. It would go for DNA testing, and the scientists would shake with anticipation.

A typical home in this mess would have required a long face, a shake of the head, an angry or saddened tone, and the detectives stuck to the script. Every cop in London would be glad Ronald Grafton was out of the picture, but an abattoir was no place for rejoicing. Plus, cops didn’t want their jobs taken away by street justice. And there were two other victims, who might turn out to be law-abiding citizens. So, there were counteracting emotions at play, which explained a host of neutral expressions.

‘It might have been a trophy,’ Gondal said, referring to the face. They hadn’t found it.

Mac doubted they ever would.

There was a shout from the lounge. Gondal and Mac headed that way. They knew the tone of that shout. It meant one of their team had found an important clue. The hand of lawful justice might still get a role in this case.

In the living room, a detective stood by the dead woman on the sofa, holding aloft a necklace in a pair of tweezers.

‘Our bad guy is Davey-boy,’ the detective said with a grin, as if the case had already been solved.

Mac and Gondal closed in carefully, stepping on boards placed so that shoes wouldn’t crush evidence, while the slimeball DC Downey took out his phone and sent a text about this new development to someone who had no business knowing. All three stared at the swinging pendant, and understood the detective’s cry of glee. It was the sort of clue that detectives dreamed of: a military identification tag.