‘I’ve got to speak to Delahaye and the archaeologist to get their input. But it seems DCS Anderson was wrong. She predicted that we’d be eliminating Ozzy Blanchard from our enquiries. But now a lot of it begins to make sense: a man leaves home in a hurry, grabbing some vital possessions, disappears off towards the very area where he was working on a project, sufficiently terrified to drive at high speed into oncoming traffic, crashes the car, escapes on foot and disappears close to the village of Rissington Common.’

‘And now the poor wee laddie’s turned up dead a few hundred yards away,’ Rainy said.

‘Maybe the people that were chasing him finally caught up with him,’ Claire said.

Gillard nodded. ‘Stella Anderson told me that Blanchard made one call on his work phone to an unregistered mobile a few minutes after escaping from the crash. That seems to me a very important call.’

‘Aye, if your first call after surviving a road accident isn’t to your wife, that tells us he had some major worries,’ Rainy said.

Dr Delahaye was busy most of the afternoon in London, but his secretary set up a video-conference call with Gillard and Rainy Macintosh in Guildford, and Clive Hancock from the church in Rissington Common. They spent the first few minutes figuring out the mutes, background reflections and sound quality and the next making sure everyone had seen the emails that Gillard had circulated.

‘That’s a very encouraging result,’ Delahaye said, having looked through the evidence. ‘However, I really would prefer to see a match with the few surviving hairs on the victim’s own head. That would make the connection much more robust.’

‘Unfortunately, the lab couldnae recover any DNA from those,’ Rainy said.

‘Well, we have made a find of our own,’ Hancock interjected. ‘A section of the left-hand lower jaw, it seems, with five teeth, just a few feet away from where the upper torso and head were found.’

‘Are you sure it’s modern?’ Gillard asked.

‘Yes. There are two fillings in the molars, one lead amalgam at the rear and one near the front in white composite.’

‘Well we should certainly be able to date those to within a decade,’ Delahaye said.

‘There’s something else even more exciting,’ Hancock said excitedly. ‘About the murder weapon—’

Startled, Gillard asked him to explain. ‘With the help of Guildford University I’ve been able to decipher the lettering on the section of blade within our murder victim’s neck.’

Hancock then shared an image on the screen.

☩ BIOR ELM E ÞOR

‘Those are the letters we were able to decipher,’ Hancock said. ‘It’s Anglo-Saxon, and typical of a mid-ninth-century artefact. Filling in the missing letters, we think we have this.’

☩ BIORTHELM ME ÞORTE

Gillard could understand why for an archaeologist this was terribly exciting. But he needed to find out what relevance it had for the crime. ‘What does that mean, Clive?’