The sergeant repeated the story he had spilled out in Hildebrand’s office, the words tumbling over each other in frantic haste. His voice was calmer now, as he ordered his thoughts and remembered details. “We’d broadened the search, like you’d said, and it was that young chap, Fenton, who saw the earth seemed different in the one place, sunken like, as if something had been buried and the soil had settled in around it. Well, he began to dig a bit, thinking it might be somebody’s old dog or the like, and instead he comes up with a muddy edge of cloth. Appeared to be part of a blanket at first, then we could see the corner, with a bit of lining. A coat, we thought. You could see the color, a dark blue. Then the white of bone. We stopped there and I came for you straightaway. Not wanting to disturb anything before you’d seen it like it was.”

“Yes, well done! You’re sure it’s a coat, not a blanket? You’d wrap a dog in an old blanket!”

“It’s not made the same as a blanket. And there’s no fur, sir. You’d find fur too, if it was an animal. That lasts.”

“Yes, yes!” Hildebrand answered testily. “No sense of size—child, fully grown adult?” He was not a man who enjoyed suspense, he wanted his answers now, questions later. Sometimes in policework there were no answers at all. He’d been afraid this Mowbray investigation was heading in such a direction. But if they’d found either the children or that damned Tarlton woman, all to the good. He felt his spirits suddenly rising. If it was the Tarlton woman, it’d get Rutledge off his back, by God, and leave the Mowbray business out of it altogether!

“No, sir, as I said, we didn’t want to disturb the ground more than needful.”

A silence fell, and Rutledge found himself thinking, This is too far for Mowbray to have come. He’d have had to pass through two villages—someone would have seen him—and bone meant the body had been in the ground for some time. In the trenches, you learned how long it took a man to rot. …

He was still tired from the session with Mowbray, feeling the intensity of emotion, the rawness of the man’s fears—his own reaction to them.

“I hope to God the body has nothing to do with Mowbray!” he told himself.

“Or with Charlbury …,” Hamish added softly, startling him.

By the time they’d reached the makeshift grave, a small crowd had collected, standing just out of sight of the remains. They were mostly from Leigh Minster, according to the sergeant. The news hadn’t traveled to Stoke Newton or Charlbury yet.