‘But what about the young Willow lassie, Rowena? She has access to Cleaver’s house, as his cleaner and the landlady’s daughter, and a keen interest in archaeology. Unlike any casual visitor she would have been able to clean up and change the bloodstained carpet without risk. So she has means and opportunity, but what about motive?’

Gillard struggled to picture Rowena as a murderer, but conceded that Rainy had raised an interesting idea. ‘Those are good points, and I’ll be following them up. But to get motive, the one thing missing from your hunch, we need to know who the victim is. We have to redouble our efforts on an ID. Once we get that, it may all click into place.’

Within an hour DC Rainy Macintosh had pulled together the ten most likely missing males in a broad age range between fifteen and forty with the right height to match the mystery corpse. When they had gone missing was a less significant variable, but varied between forty years ago and just two years. Well within the range of the type of dental fillings they had found, and within the guidelines for adipocere formation. Gillard sat at a terminal opposite hers as they examined the same documents.

‘Stephen Hibbert is one of my favourites,’ she said. ‘Aged twenty-six, hitchhiking between London and South Wales in 1997, last seen at a motorway services station, with his thumb out.’

‘What about this one?’ Gillard asked. ‘Mohammed Firoze, thirty, went missing from his home in Windlesham in 2008. His car last picked up on ANPR in Southampton. We have good and recent dental records we could check.’

‘I think we can rule out Frank Machin, who disappeared in his car with his wife and bairn in 2001,’ Rainy said. ‘Even though they all lived in Haslemere. I would have expected those bodies to have been found together.’

The names listed included two Eastern European seasonal workers, one from Lithuania and one from Romania who’d disappeared ten years apart after working on farms in Hampshire. ‘What about these?’ Gillard asked.

‘There was a sighting of the more recent one, Tomas Valdovas, aged twenty-two, on CCTV getting on a National Express coach from Reading to Victoria,’ Rainy said. ‘He might well have gone home, although his family claim not to have seen him. But the older guy, Tadeus Romanescu, was last seen in September 2008. He was thirty-four.’

Gillard finished perusing the list and looked up. ‘That’s a good start, Rainy. See what dental records we have for any of them. I also need to know which of them we might be able to acquire a familial DNA sample for. That should cut down the list quite quickly.’ He looked up at her. ‘Now we think he’s alive, I’d really like to find out where the hell Ozzy Blanchard is.’