‘But I really want to find out about the barman who stayed in Dove Cottage. The one mentioned by Rowena.’

‘So we need to get Vicky Willow in. She and Guy Naylor would have employed him.’

Gillard nodded. ‘Here’s another curious thing, Rainy. Rowena Willow showed me around St Crispin’s church, and told me a prophecy. It was along the lines of “an innocent prince killing a foreign crown”. Something like that.’

Rainy laughed. ‘Aye, sir, we know the victim is foreign. But if a member of European royalty had gone missing we wouldnae miss that news. The wee kingly fella would not have been grubbing up veg or working behind a bar in a shitehole like the Anvil either.’

‘Fair point, Rainy. I’m still curious about it, all the same.’

The moment they’d finished at the mortuary, Gillard rang the Anvil Arms. Vicky answered, amid a lot of background noise, the clattering of glasses and a shouting child. Once the detective had persuaded her to step away somewhere quieter, he asked the name of the East European barman who had worked there a few years ago.

‘Which one?’ she responded, before re-emerging into the noise. ‘Callum, for Christ’s sake, put them away. I’ve told you! No, now.’

Gillard waited out the thirty seconds until he heard the click of a door, and then they were back in silence. ‘We must have had half a dozen. I don’t think I even remember all their names. It was all cash in hand. Some of them only stayed a week or two, filling in between farm jobs.’

‘All right,’ Gillard said. ‘Pull together what documentation you have. I’ll send an officer down to collect it, and perhaps get another statement from you.’

‘Can if you like,’ she said. ‘There won’t be much. They never worked enough hours even for national insurance contributions. We liked to keep it simple. I’ll ask Guy to take a look once we close this afternoon.’

By late afternoon on Monday, Rainy Macintosh had returned from Rissington Common and walked into the office waving a thickish couple of folders.

‘Some success then?’ Gillard said.

‘Nae breakthrough, that’s for sure,’ she replied. Gillard waved her into a conference room where they had the space to lay out the documents. But the thickest of the two folders turned out to be photographs, many of them dog-eared and faded, some sorted into slim piles with elastic bands. Overall there were hundreds of pictures of joyful and often drunken youngsters at Christmas, Halloween, various other pub parties over the years. ‘There wasnae a single scrap of documentation you could rely on. But they had a wall in the bar with a collage of this lot, plus sheaves more in drawers. We spent most of the time looking through those, trying to identify casual staff from years ago.’

‘So they co-operated?’