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With that he went. I was completely flummoxed. Were these more products of conception? All the others had arrived in the same type of box but, I thought, perhaps they had run out of that sort and were using anything they could lay their hands on. It was incredibly heavy and, when I shook it gently, there was a sloshing noise. Obviously there was something big inside; for a moment I panicked and wondered if someone had made a mistake and put a baby in there.

‘Clive?’

Clive came out of his office. When he saw what I was holding, he said, ‘That goes in the bottom fridge on the left.’

‘What is it?’

He smiled. ‘From the size of it, I’d say it’s a leg.’

I nearly dropped it. ‘A leg?’

He nodded. ‘They put the arms in smaller ones.’

Feeling slightly queasy, I did as I was told. I had known that the bottom fridge on the left was used for the products of conception, but hadn’t realized that we put other things in there. When I had done as I was told, I returned to the office. As Graham was taking the day off to slaughter some wildlife, we were alone. I said, ‘So we get limbs, then?’

‘From theatres. And hands and feet.’ He paused, and added with a twinkle in his eye, ‘But no heads, at least not from theatres.’

Clive told me that most of the bits and bobs that they cut out in theatres go upstairs to the laboratory for the pathologists to look at and write a report on. Some of them, however, don’t need a pathologist’s opinion; the smaller ones – such as fingers that have been crushed and have to be cut off because they can’t be saved – go straight into clinical waste in the theatre, but the arms and legs (removed because of poor blood supply or injury) are too big and have to come to us for storage until they are collected for incineration.

‘Mind you, that’s not the end of it,’ he said. ‘Someone’s always digging up things.’ I must have looked blank, because he went on, ‘Bones and suchlike. The police bring them in here and ask Ed or someone to tell them if they’re human.’ This sounded thrilling, but then he spoiled it by adding, ‘They never are.’

‘Where do they come from, then?’

‘Most of them are from sheep and cows and other animals. Thankfully, people like Fred West only come along once in a lifetime.’

‘Still, I suppose they have to make sure.’

He nodded. ‘And we do occasionally get some weird ones. Once we had what looked like a severed hand in a lady’s glove brought in. Someone found it when they were cleaning out their gutters.’

‘God! How did that get there?’

He laughed. ‘Poor old Ed had a bit of time with that one. For a while he was convinced it was real, but then when he probed about a bit more, he found it was just chicken bones and mincemeat stuffed into the glove.’

‘Bloody hell.’

‘Someone’s idea of a joke, I suppose.’

‘Pretty sick joke,’ I said.

‘Pretty sick people about, Michelle.’

We were in the office drinking coffee. When he had finished his, he put his mug down and said, ‘A while ago, we had a real foot brought in here.’

‘Just a foot?’ I asked incredulously.

A nod. ‘In a trainer, it was. Rotted and all. They discovered it on the riverbank, near an old chapel.’

‘Whose was it?’

With a shrug, he said, ‘Dunno. I don’t think they ever found out.’

My head was filled with some of the things I had read about in my extensive library of true crime. ‘But there was a big investigation?’

‘That was the funny thing,’ he said. ‘They brought it into the mortuary one Saturday night, then left it here for a couple of days. No fuss, no nationwide alert. Someone came in on the Monday and took it away. No fuss, no bother.’

‘Really?’

‘Nothing. We were expecting something along the lines of an all-points bulletin regarding blokes with only one foot, or a massive manhunt for a loony with a machete and a foot fetish, but it all stayed silent. It was some weeks later that we found out what the police reckon had happened.’

‘Which was?’

‘It belonged to a tramp who fell in the Severn up Worcester way, they reckon. The body got caught up in some reeds, decomposed