Blood Work

as their own little walking, talking doll. They told him that the crow was actually a raven. When Jack threw a pebble and it took off squawking in the air, the girls had said that it was a bad omen. The raven was an omen of death. And Jack, as susceptible to superstition as an Irishman from Cork is wont to be, believed them. But when they returned home late that afternoon, with the sound of laughter and bustle coming from the house like it was almost Christmas, Jack, swinging between them, dangling from their longer arms like a curly-haired monkey, picked up on the atmosphere and smiled even more broadly for no reason at all. But as soon as they entered the chaos of the house it became clear why Jack was being treated to a trip out with his beautiful cousins. His mother had given birth to a daughter. A young sister for Jack. And although he didn't really understand what was going on he knew it was a special day.

Before the day was spent, however, eleven o'clock at night with the moon hanging low and enormous in the summer sky like a swollen exotic fruit, his silver-haired grandfather, eighty-three years old, had died. And Delaney would never see a crow or a rook again without shivering slightly, although in his heart, deep down, he knew the raven had not been meant for his grandfather. But there was a cycle to life, and death was part of that. Jack grasped that from a very early age.

How that connection worked, though, in the case of the murdered and mutilated woman that had been obscenely decorated with a scarf just like Kate Walker's, Delaney wasn't quite so sure. But he knew evil wasn't an abstract concept.

He was far from hungry. After what he had witnessed a short while ago he felt as if he might never eat again. But his energy levels were low and his brain told him he needed nourishment, so he was standing outside the burger van chain-smoking and trying to wash the memory of what he had witnessed from his mind. He held his cigarette to his lips and realised his hands were still shaking. He couldn't keep the images away and he knew what would be written in the pathologist's clinical report.

Her left arm was placed across the left breast. The body was terribly mutilated . . . the throat was severed deeply, the incision through the skin jagged, and reaching right round the neck. The body had lost a great quantity of blood. There was no evidence of a struggle having taken place. The scarf was draped around her savaged neck. There were two distinct, clean cuts on the left side of the spine. They were parallel with each other and separated by about half an inch. The muscular structures appeared as though an attempt had made to separate the bones of the neck.

The abdomen had been entirely laid open: the intestines, severed from their attachments, had been lifted out of the body and placed on the shoulder of the corpse; while from the pelvis, the uterus and its appendages with the upper portion of the vagina and the posterior two-thirds of the bladder, had been entirely removed.

'Inspector?'

Delaney, startled out of his reverie, looked up at the florid face of the short-order chef.

'You want onions with this?'

Roy held up the burger and Delaney shook his head, not sure he had the stomach for it right then.

'You all right, sir?' Sally asked.

Delaney didn't reply, pulling out his mobile phone and tapping in some numbers. After a while the call was answered. The familiar voice purring with self-content.

'Melanie Jones.'

'Melanie. It's Jack Delaney.'

'I was just about to call you,'

'Why?'

'Because he just called me again.'

'And . . .'

'He said to give you another message.'