The builder looked wary. ‘Eight years, Sergeant. I learned English back home, when I was a kid at school in Poland. When I came here, I talked English all the time with the people I met. Some of my fellow countrymen, when they come now, they don’t think they have to bother to learn English. It’s too much trouble for them. They think things will be translated into Polish for them, because they are so many. But I was one of the first to come, before my country was a member of the European Union, even. I always wanted to live in England, so I learned English. It’s the only way to fit in, yes?’

‘Yes, of course.’

He looked at her, still uncertain. ‘My papers are in order.’

‘I’m not doubting it,’ said Fry. ‘But you could do one important thing for me. Would you give my colleague, Detective Constable Murfin, a list of the men who have been working on your team here at the farm?’

Raymond Sutton stood to one side of the window and watched the police officers get into their car at the end of the drive. Quietly, he muttered a sentence to himself.

‘And they answered and said unto him, Where, Lord?’

As the car passed out of sight, he let the curtain drop. He turned back to face the room, looked around him for a moment, and finished the quotation.

‘And he said unto them,

Wheresoever the body is, there will the eagles be gathered.’

‘I’m sorry, Raymond? Did you say something?’

Sutton stared at Elaine, confused by her presence. He hadn’t noticed her come into the room. He’d been thinking that he was somewhere else, far away, in another life almost.

‘The Gospel of St Luke,’ he said. ‘Chapter seventeen, verse thirty-seven.’

‘I see, Raymond. Are you ready for your tea yet?’

‘King James version. Obviously.’

‘I’ll fetch it in, shall I?’

‘You can do what you like. It makes no difference now.’

Chapter Five

Chapter Five

A team from Sheffield University had been unloading equipment – shovels and trowels, wire-mesh screens for sifting bone fragments from the soil, evidence bags, tape measures and orange markers. One of the students was already using a video camera to record the position of the remains from every angle before the team approached it.

Fry knew that digging a dead body out of a grave was never as easy as burying a fresh one. When an unprotected corpse was placed in the ground, it formed an intimate union with the earth. Flesh rotted, fabric disintegrated, the skull, spine and pelvis became embedded in the soil. A casual digger would soon despair of freeing the entire body, even after it had spent a year or so in the ground. If anyone removed a body to bury it elsewhere, they were bound to leave a few bits behind.