After Hancock had returned to the dig, Gillard sat on the protruding root of a willow and stared out at the river. It should have been a place of beauty, and probably was once. But it was rather spoiled by the drone of traffic from the overpass half a mile to his right, and the huge amount of rubbish washed up into the bushes on the steep bank on the far side. That waste, greying tatters of plastic bags, and numerous bottles, cans and face masks, undoubtedly washed through during the recent floods, would stay there for God knew how long until some organisation, probably staffed by volunteers, cleaned it. The water looked reasonably clear, but according to the spam which he’d now started getting from Sheila Ransome on his work email, there was a higher than average amount of agricultural run-off as well as untreated human waste in the water. No one was taking responsibility for it.

He pulled out his iPad to see if any of the tests had come back, when there was a flash of blue along the river. He looked up to see a tiny kingfisher, little more than the length of his finger, dart down to the water, grab something and fly off. He spent a couple of minutes peering into the overhanging bushes on the opposite bank, until he finally spotted the giveaway silhouette on a low branch. A beak almost as long as the bird itself. Another quick sparkling movement, and off it flew, moving down the river. It lifted his mood immensely.

Finally turning to his emails, Gillard saw a sheaf of lab test results had come in. The body that had been found on the riverbank just a few tens of yards away was confirmed as modern. Carbon dating on the bones showed that they were post-1950, while the adipocere seemed to show that the corpse had been buried for several months at least. That pretty much confirmed what Gillard had suspected, and was consistent with the amalgam filling found in the upper jaw, and associative elements of textiles which had been found on or with the body. Analysis of the limited dentition showed evidence of an adult male, old enough to have had wisdom teeth. Full skeletal analysis would take longer, but confirmed an individual in good bodily health at the time of death and who would have stood roughly five foot nine. The University of Glasgow, which co-ordinated the testing, still had more analysis to do, some of which might take months. Separately, he was waiting for a familial analysis of the DNA from the comb. The sample already analysed didn’t match anyone on the national database, but there was a good chance that a partial match to somebody else on the system would turn up.