There is just the torso. Limbless. Headless. As yet, with no name. The butchered remains of a young Afro-Caribbean boy thought to have been between five and six years old, his body dismembered then discarded, to be washed-up among the flotsam of the River Thames.
Spotted by a member of the public crossing Tower Bridge last Friday afternoon, what remained of the body was landed by river police. Initial estimates suggested it could have been there for anything up to 10 days.
In our suddenly saddened, darkened world few will think there is need of a reminder. There is evil out there. Unimaginable terror.
The post-mortem finding, couched in officialese, came nowhere close to describing the full horror: death caused by violent trauma to the neck area. But the detective leading the hunt for the killer came closer. "Savage" was his word for an attack beyond anything in his previous experience. Too seldom do we spare a thought for their suffering and trauma as police officers who routinely discharge the duties expected of them by society.
"The child died a very violent death," said Detective Superintendent Adrian Maybanks, as he promised Londoners he and his colleagues would not rest until they found the person responsible. He then gave a glimmer of the awful loneliness of the child's death, appealing for anyone to come forward who might know his identity - anyone with knowledge of a black male child missing and not seen for some time.
Missing from where? And for how long? In the tragic case of little Sarah Payne an entire nation lived through the terror and suffering of her parents and family. Who were this child's parents? Who is suffering for the love and loss of him?
As divers continued to search the Thames members of the public were urged to be on the lookout for the missing head and limbs without which this child's identity might never be known. Dutch detectives, meanwhile, travelled to London this week to join their British counterparts in examining a possible link between the boy's murder and a similar case in Holland last month. There a young girl's dismembered body was found in a lake, her head found separately by a fisherman in the Hook of Holland.
Like the victim in the Thames, she has yet to be identified. Who grieves for her? Police were also making inquiries in Germany arising from the only present clue to the little boy's identity, a pair of orange shorts found on the torso with washing instructions printed in German.
With the motive still "unclear", Mr Maybanks could only speculate as to why the boy had been dismembered in such a savage way. There were no overt signs of a sexual attack but detectives were not ruling out the possibility that he had been the victim of a paedophile gang or a religious cult.
As the police investigation continued yesterday the official inquiry was continuing in London into the failures of the child protection system which allowed the murderers of eight-year-old Anna Climbie to perpetrate their crimes.
Anna was forced to sleep in a freezing bath, lying in her own excrement and dressed only in a bin bag, while she was fed scraps of left-overs "like a dog". She had left her poor parents on the Ivory Coast with the promise of a better life with her aunt, first in France, then in Tottenham in North London. But the little child with the big smile was to suffer "truly unimaginable" abuse before her death just one year later.
Anna was bound for so long that she walked with a stoop. Beaten with a variety of weapons, she was found malnourished and with 128 bruises covering her body from head to toe when she died in February last year. "Murdered by her carers ... failed repeatedly by the system" was the candid admission of the Health Secretary, Alan Milburn - a charge echoed by her parents on Wednesday at the start of the inquiry he ordered following the conviction of Anna's aunt and her boyfriend last January.
We can all weep for Anna, for the unidentified girl in the lake, the unknown boy in the river. And as we contemplate that unprecedented terror attack on our civilisation we might reflect, too, on how far that civilisation has still to come.