Gillard drove back to his office to a backlog of other work. DCS Dobbs had sent him a huge folder of training courses that he was supposed to have taken, but had never had the time. In his nit-picking way, the detective chief superintendent had underlined each of them where the word ‘mandatory’ appeared. There were certainly several forensic courses he would like to have taken if he had the time, but the mandatory ones included racially sensitive stop-and-search techniques, and preparing rape cases for the CPS. He hadn’t conducted a stop and search since he was in uniform, while rape evidence was these days handled by a specialist unit. Each course was a day or more long, and Dobbs needed a response today on when he could book himself in.

Gillard tossed them aside for later. As he did so, DC Carrie Macintosh walked stiffly over to the desk. A bright and quick-witted Glaswegian, formerly a junior doctor, she was known universally as Rainy.

‘Is our wee body a murder victim then, sir?’

Gillard smiled. ‘Probably.’ He described the latest forensic findings. ‘If the victim turns out to have been there for half a century or more, then we can turn it all over to the archaeologists. If he hasn’t, he might well have been murdered. But even if you had a rusty Anglo-Saxon dagger over your mantlepiece, there would be better and more effective weapons to use. There are other accidental possibilities that Delahaye listed, but they do seem quite unlikely.’

‘Och, best check if any antique weapons have been nicked recently.’ She looked down at her notebook. ‘I did the registration trace you asked for on the Nissan Qashqai. The owner is RAS Services Ltd of an address in Croydon. I looked the firm up at Companies House and it simply says business services, but a little more digging turned up that it’s a private detective agency. The owners are Raymond and Anne Slater. They share an address in Croydon, just round the corner from where the firm is based. Do you want me to dig for more?’

‘Yes please.’ The name Slater was definitely familiar, from many years ago. ‘What else are you working on at the moment?’

‘A break-in at a pharmacy. The usual type. Addicts for sure.’

‘All right, I may need you full-time on this case if it develops into anything. We’re expecting some forensic results in the next couple of days, so don’t get too deep into anything else.’

‘It will be good to have something with a wee bit of spice to it,’ she said, as she headed back to her desk. Gillard couldn’t help noticing that she was limping.

‘Have you hurt your leg?’ he asked. Rainy wasn’t tall and had admitted to struggling with her weight on and off for years. He suspected she may have been on one of her occasional fitness kicks.