Clearwater Partners had acquired the company that later became Aqua Holdings a dozen years ago, paying £3.5 billion. Within six months they had outsourced much of the maintenance operation, sold off thousands of acres of land for development, and with the proceeds paid themselves a £500 million dividend, via a Bermuda-based holding company on which no tax was due. Gillard found a Financial Times analysis piece which said that the two billionaires had brought their money-making strategy to the UK, but warned there were bound to be claims of asset stripping, and the danger of leaving potential liabilities for repairs uncovered by the now-depleted capital reserves and huge debt accumulated.

This all seemed to Gillard to dovetail neatly with the accusations made by Sheila Ransome, the woman who had spoken to him through the car window. It clearly was a battle of David against Goliath. Quite how the elusive Ozzy Blanchard fitted into all this wasn’t clear. However, no one of sound judgement drives at high speed into oncoming traffic on a busy dual carriageway unless drunk, drugged or very, very scared. If it was either of the first two, his body would almost certainly have been found at the scene. But it wasn’t. So a man capable of that dangerous manoeuvre was fit enough to exit the vehicle and then escape. He must have been terrified. Perhaps the finding of this body would prove whether that fear was justified.

Gillard was just finishing saving all the documents he’d found when the head of CSI rang him. Yaz Quoroshi was quite excited about a discovery they had made as they were shifting the corpse carefully into a body bag. ‘Craig, we’re making good progress towards an ID.’

‘That’s quick,’ Gillard said. ‘I’d feared that we would struggle to get much information without some time-consuming and expensive tests.’

‘Well, first off the victim is male. The archaeologist and I agreed about that. The skeletal remains are indicative, even though the hip girdle is fractured in numerous places, as is the jaw. We’ve got a few upper molars still in place, one of which has an amalgam filling. There is also a wedding ring, plain gold band, no inscription. But we made an even more exciting discovery, which should accelerate the inquiry considerably.’

‘Good.’

‘I was really pessimistic at first when I saw the kind of soil conditions the body was in, but we’ve now established that the upper half of the corpse was in a modern shirt, artificial fibres. The jeans were in better condition, and in the back pocket we’ve found a comb, trapped within which there are quite a few hairs with follicles still attached. They are in far better condition than the few hairs that we found on the scalp. It looks easily good enough for a DNA analysis.’

‘That’s brilliant news. Any further thoughts on how long he’s been there?’