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'It was an old piece, a back number, when it was used to wrap the wound in the head,' insisted Hanley.

McCarthy shrugged.

'You could be right,' he agreed. 'With this kind of mummy, one can't be accurate as to the exact year of death. But reasonably so.'

Hanley relaxed.

'That's what I meant,' he said with relief. 'Larkin must have grabbed the newspaper lining a drawer, or a cupboard, that had been there for years untouched. That's why the date on the paper goes back to March 13th, 1943.'

'So does the corpse,' said McCarthy. 'I put death at between 1941 and 1945. Probably within a few weeks of the date of that piece of newspaper.'

Hanley glared at him, long and hard. 'Mrs Violet Mary Larkin died during August 1963,' he said.

McCarthy stared at him and held the stare while he relit his pipe. 'I think,' he said gently, 'we're talking at cross-purposes.'

'I'm talking about the body in the morgue,' said Hanley.

'So am I,' said McCarthy.

'Larkin and his wife arrived from London in 1954,' said Hanley slowly. 'They bought Number 38, Mayo Road, following the death of the previous owner/occupant. Mrs Larkin was announced as having run away and left her husband in August 1963. Yesterday, we found her body bricked up behind a false wall while the house was being demolished.'

'You didn't tell me how long the Larkins had been at that house,' McCarthy pointed out reasonably. 'You asked me to do a pathological examination of a virtually mummified body. Which I have done.'

'But it was mummified,' insisted Hanley. 'Surely in those conditions there could be a wide range in the possible year of death?'

'Not twenty years,' said McCarthy equably. 'There is no way that body was alive after 1945. The tests on the internal organs are beyond much doubt. The stockings can be analysed, of course. And the newsprint. But as you say, both could have been twenty years old at the time of use. But the hair, the nails, the organs — they couldn't.'

Hanley felt as though he was living, while awake, his only nightmare. He was bulldozing his way towards the goal line, using his strength to cut a path through the English defenders during that last Triple Crown final match in 1951. He was almost there, and the ball began slipping from his hands. Try as he might, he could not hold on to it…

He recovered himself.

'Age apart, what else?' he asked. 'The woman was short, about five feet three inches?'

McCarthy shook his head. 'Sorry, bones don't alter in length, even after thirty-five years behind a brick wall. She was five feet ten to eleven inches tall, bony and angular.'

'Black hair, curly?' asked Hanley.

'Dead straight and ginger in colour. It's still attached to the head.'

'She was about thirty-five at the age of death?'

'No,' said McCarthy, 'she was well over fifty and she had had children, two I'd say, and there had been remedial surgery done, following the second.'

'Do you mean to say,' asked Hanley, 'that from 1954, they — until Violet Larkin walked out, and Larkin alone for the past fifteen years — have been sitting in their living room six feet from a walled-up corpse?'

'Must have done,' said McCarthy. 'A body in a state of mummification, which itself would occur within a short time in such a warm environment, would emit no odour. By 1954, assuming she was killed, as I think, in 1943, the body would long since have achieved exactly the same state as that in which we found her yesterday. Incidentally, where was your man Larkin in 1943?'

'In a prisoner-of-war camp in Silesia,' said Hanley.

'Then,' said the professor, rising, 'he did not kill that woman and brick her up beside the fireplace. So who did?'

Hanley picked up the internal phone and called the detectives' room. The young sergeant came on the line.

'Who,' asked Hanley with deliberation, 'was the man who owned and occupied the house in Mayo Road prior to 1954 and died in that year?'

'I don't know, sir,' said the young man.

'How long had he been in it?'

'I didn't take notes about that, sir. But I recall the previous occupant had been there for thirty years. He was a widower.'

'He certainly was,' growled Hanley. 'What was his name?'

There was a pause. 'I never thought to ask, sir.'

The old man was released two hours later, through the back door in case anyone from the press was hanging around the front lobby. This time, there was no police car, no escort. He had the address of a council hostel in his pocket. Without saying a word, he shuffled down the pavement and into the mean streets of the Diamond.

At Mayo Road, the missing section of chain-link fence where the house had once been was in place, closing off the entire car park. Within the area, on the spot where the house and garden had stood, was a sheet of level concrete in the last stages of drying. In the gathering dusk, the foreman was stomping over the concrete with two of his workers.

Every now and then he hacked at the surface with the steel-capped heel of one of his boots.