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The shell of the car, half wedged under the body of an HGV, was just about recognizable, although it was badly crushed and completely burned. There were three bodies inside, but they could just have been shop mannequins roasted by flame-throwers. The driver was slumped over the steering wheel, his hands – burned down to bone – clenching it. The front seat passenger was sitting bolt upright, as if asleep. The rear passenger was smaller but she was the worst. She was curled into a foetal ball, fists clenched, arms and leg flexed. You looked at her and you couldn’t help wondering if she had been alive when the fire took hold.

I couldn’t reach the end of the book and neither could Maddie. We handed it back to Clive who took it and shut it in the top drawer of his desk.

An hour later, Ed came down and perused the photographs and read the police reports that Neville had supplied. We had taken the body bags out of the fridge but not opened them and they now lay waiting, one on each PM table. Ed declined coffee and went to get changed. Maddie and I followed Clive into the dissection room, then waited for Ed to come in and put on the PPE. Only then did we open the body bags.

That smell again, only a lot, lot worse and now it was combined with the terrible sight of those three poor people. The driver – assumed to be Mr Franklin, but no definite identification had been done yet on any of the bodies – had had to have his hands broken off in order to remove him from the car and these were beside him. His feet had burned away completely, as had much of his torso and chest. The front seat passenger was as badly burned but the smaller, back seat passenger seemed to be the worst; her feet and hands were burned away and most of her back had gone, leaving only a spinal column and a few blackened rib stumps.

Ed and Clive examined the bodies for jewellery, finding a wedding ring on the front seat passenger and a matching one on the detached hand of the driver, although there was nothing on the rear passenger. There was no clothing on the bodies, and so no pockets to search. As Ed was making a few notes on the external appearance of the bodies, Maddie said to him, ‘There doesn’t seem much point, really, does there? I mean there’s not a lot left to look at.’

Ed looked up. ‘Oh, you’d be surprised. You’d be surprised.’

He then said to Clive, ‘I’ll do the evisceration.’

Clive said with a sly smile, ‘Sure you can cope?’ Not often a pathologist does his own evisceration. Ed said nothing, just picking up the PM40 knife while Maddie and I looked on. He went first to the driver’s body. The abdominal cavity was practically empty except for a charred lump of liver, but the ribcage was still intact; he opened this by a combination of some cutting but mostly just pulling apart. The heart and lungs, although partly cooked, were relatively unburned. He pulled them gently then put them together with the liver in a bowl. He then cut down on the ribs and tested each one, finding that nearly all of them were broken. There was also a fracture through the lumbar spine, but the pelvis was intact. ‘Will you take out the brain?’ he asked Clive.

‘You’ve seen the fracture?’ There was a jagged hole in the head.

Ed nodded. ‘I think the fire did that,’ he explained to Maddie and me. ‘Intense heat will fracture bones.’

While Clive was working with the bone saw on the skull, Ed dissected the organs with Maddie and me looking on. As he did this, he showed us what he was finding. ‘The aorta’s been transected. That’s good.’

Maddie frowned. ‘Is it?’

‘It’s a classic deceleration injury; one you don’t survive.’

‘You mean that’s what killed him?’

‘I hope so,’ he said quietly but fervently. ‘I bloody well hope so.’

When he opened the major airways and saw that they were clean, we could see that he was smiling underneath his mask. ‘No soot. That’s good because it’s another indication that he was dead before the fire took hold.’

Clive came over with the brain. It didn’t look like a freshly removed brain normally