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the same angle as the left-hand one. She moved to the right. ‘I can see his legs suspended from the pole and his feet poking up to the ceiling.’ She stepped back. ‘Three mirrors on a dressing table and a multitude of ways of seeing one man’s death.’
    Hendricks explored the space in front of the window.
    ‘What are you looking for?’ asked Clay.
    He pointed at the dressing table in the alcove. ‘It should be here!’ He pointed at the window. ‘To take full advantage of the light coming in from the window. I think the killer’s moved the dressing table.’ He looked down at the threadbare carpet. ‘But it’s so worn, I can’t see any indentations from its feet.’
    ‘To reflect his human sculpture,’ said Clay. The words lit a fast-burning fuse in her head. Death as a work of art .
    As Clay walked to the dressing table, she asked, ‘What’s the word, the name? When a painting’s in three linked panels?’
    She recalled such an item in the chapel of St Claire’s, the place she’d called home from when she was a baby until the age of six. It was golden and decorated with angels. ‘Triptych.’ She answered her own question with a word buried deep in childhood memory.
    There were four sections in the wooden body of the dressing table. Two long rectangular drawers in the centre and two hinged doors on either side.
    She opened the doors and drawers and they were all empty.
    ‘Bill?’ She looked at Leonard Lawson. ‘Why did he keep his wife’s dressing table and none of her personal belongings?’
    ‘Let’s talk to his daughter about her mother when she comes round.’
    His words prompted Clay to replay events in reverse.
    Louise Lawson was in the back of an ambulance with Gina Riley. She had had an epileptic fit on the street as she escaped from the scene of her father’s murder. If she suffered from photosensitive epilepsy, it figured that she had been in her father’s room at some point and must have seen his body.
    ‘I wonder what state she’s going to be in when she does come round,’ she said, sadness flooding through her.
    In the central mirror, Clay’s attention was seized by a discolouration on the wall opposite Leonard Lawson’s bed. She turned and saw it was a clean rectangle, the grime on the wallpaper around it defining the shape.
    ‘Terry! Bring a tape measure!’ she called. She pointed at the space. ‘The killer’s taken a trophy, a picture.’ Terry Mason’s footsteps seemed to echo as he came to the room. ‘It’s the first thing the old man saw when he woke up in the morning and the last thing he saw at night.’ Mason appeared. ‘Terry, can you measure the dimensions. Missing picture. But of what?’

6
2.59 am
    Clay looked at Leonard Lawson’s body, inverted and dehumanised in death, and focused on what it told her about the perpetrator. So much attention to detail. So little blood. Someone who’d clean the toilet with a toothbrush, maybe, beneath a framed cross-stitch on the bathroom wall: ‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness’.
    ‘The picture’s fifty centimetres wide and thirty-five centimetres deep,’ said Mason, heading to the door.
    Clay committed this fact to memory and resisted the urge to close Professor Lawson’s eyelids and give him back a crumb of dignity.
    Clicking on her torch, she shone the light into his face. Leonard Lawson’s mouth was partially open, revealing long incisors and canine teeth; all the back teeth were missing. His swollen tongue was trapped between his front teeth. She placed an index finger on his lower lip and pushed down, shining the light inside his mouth.
    You bit down on your tongue as he smacked you on the head , she thought, observing the small pool of blood and spit on the floor beneath his mouth.
    Somewhere in the house, the steady clicking of a camera resumed. To Clay’s ears it had the rhythm of a faulty clock, fast-forwarding through time.
    She saw something narrow and white in the professor’s mouth cavity and