‘We’re being allowed to approach for a few minutes’ consultation with the anthropologist,’ said DI Hitchens. ‘But then we have to keep clear. Dr Jamieson says he wants to protect himself from assumptions.’

‘Whose assumptions?’

‘Ours, I think.’

The forensic anthropologist’s task was the recovery of human remains, and the determination of age, sex, stature, ancestry, time since death, and any physical trauma that might indicate manner of death. Beyond that, he was not part of the investigation.

Fry laughed. ‘Are we allowed to speak to him at all?’

‘You could probably wish him a Merry Christmas.’

When he heard the laughter, the anthropologist looked up from the excavation with a suspicious scowl. He had a pale, bald head, almost the same colour as the paper scene suit he was wearing. Water gleamed on his scalp. From rain or sweat, it was impossible to tell.

‘How is it going, Doctor?’ called Hitchens.

‘Mixed fortunes, I’m afraid. A dry soil would have preserved the body better. But this is, well …’ He scooped a handful of mud that seeped through his fingers.

‘Too wet?’

‘Correct. Much too wet.’

‘But there’s some good news, I take it?’

‘Well, you know, there are plenty of opportunities on an isolated farm for disposing of a body. If your aim is to reduce the remains to something unidentifiable, then burial is actually one of the slowest and least successful ways to achieve that.’

‘It’s much quicker just to leave it exposed somewhere, if you can get away with it,’ suggested Cooper.

‘Yes. How do you know that?’

‘Every livestock farmer knows that a dead sheep left out in the open during the summer will be reduced to a skeleton within a month.’

‘Exactly. Burying a corpse just slows the process of decomposition. A deeply buried body can take eight times as long to decompose as one exposed on the surface. In this case, burial and the use of plastic sheeting are the two factors which might enable the victim to be identified.’

Protective clothing was being distributed to the forensics team – coveralls, hair caps, gloves and shoe protectors. Trace evidence was transferred so easily that it could be carried away from a crime scene just as easily as it was carried there.

Next to the grave an area had been provided for the scientists to work in, preventing any more disturbance of the grave itself than was necessary. Soil would be removed by lifting it in layers of about ten inches at a time, then it would be passed through sieves of various mesh sizes to extract evidence. They would be trying to locate fragments of bone, personal items, anything that had been dropped or didn’t belong in the area. Some of the anthropology students had begun cursing when they saw the condition of the soil they were supposed to sieve.