There was no reply. Muttering to herself, she went to the boot, changed into her wellingtons and picked up a torch. She locked the car, ducked under the crime tape and went through the gate. The torchlight showed no signs of the person she had seen. She splashed across the muddy field, and climbed up the embankment to where the excavator sat, like some giant metal bird, halfway through scooping a meal from the water. She called out again, but got no reply. Slightly unnerved, she called in her position on the radio. The operator in the control room was a friend of hers, and advised caution.

‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to take any risks,’ Sarah said.

Then she caught him in her beam. A man crouching down at the very pit from which the body had been removed, just twenty yards away. ‘Oi!’ she called out. ‘This is the police. Stay exactly where you are.’

The man had his own torch, which he shone in her eyes. Briefly dazzled, she then saw he was running away along the riverbank. The object he was carrying was now clearly a metal detector. From her position on the embankment, six or seven feet higher, it seemed easier to run on the hardened earth than to make her way down the weed-strewn slope to the riverside path. She was running in parallel to him and gaining, although she was aware that the river curved away to the right while the embankment carried on straight.

Whatever it was she tripped over, she didn’t see, but it was enough to send her tumbling down the slope. By the time she got to her feet, and retrieved the torch, the man had made good his escape.

Thursday

Gillard was notified about the intruder by the Mount Browne control room as he was driving into work the next morning. He rang Yaz Quoroshi at CSI on the hands-free, and asked if they had finished at the crime scene.

‘I keep getting the same question from Hancock. Just a couple of hours now,’ Quoroshi said. ‘We’ve dug another ton of soil immediately around the body, looking for the missing fingers and teeth. Then we removed the topsoil to a depth of twenty centimetres in a five-metre radius from the discovery of the body, but didn’t find anything except bits of the plastic bag. Hancock’s archaeology volunteers have arrived ready to go through it. He’s badgering me to use ground-penetrating radar to search for a murder weapon.’

Gillard laughed. ‘He’s trying it on. We already have enough dental proof that this is a modern body,’ he said. ‘No doubt the archaeologist is getting very excited about the prospects of the police paying for a sophisticated dig, but if the county council won’t pay for it, it’s not going to happen.’

‘That’s almost word for word what Radar Dobbs told me.’