‘Some scraps of clothing that appear to match what the corpse down by the river was wearing, and some more tatters of black bin bag. They’ll have to be sent off for analysis, and it could take a few days.’

‘Has anyone been through the house?’

‘Yes. We’ve got a laptop, but nothing obviously incriminating so far.’

‘It could well be that this predates his occupancy, couldn’t it?’

She nodded. ‘Somebody buried the body here, then moved it, somewhat clumsily, to the place we found it. I expect the fingers were cut off by a spade or something like that, and not noticed if it was done at night.’

‘Timing is something we haven’t had any clue about since we started this inquiry. But if the expected arrival of the reverend as a tenant prompted the killer to dig up and rebury the body, we can begin to build some timescales. Our victim may have been down amongst the willows for a year or so.’

‘But we don’t know how long he was here before that,’ Kirsty said.

‘No, we don’t. And to my mind it makes it less likely that the body is Ozzy Blanchard. Some questions cannot be answered until we know who he is. I just wish those labs would hurry up with the results.’

‘Covid is slowing everything up, that’s what they tell me.’

By midday on Monday, Dr David Delahaye had rung Gillard to confirm that the fingers were indeed from the corpse found by the river, accounting for the two missing digits on the left hand. They fitted precisely, and exhibited the same waxy adipocere as the main corpse. The Home Office forensic pathologist had identified some of the scraps of material as coming from a sock. ‘So it would appear to me that the body was moved, probably hurriedly, from one site to the other.’

‘That’s the conclusion that we came to,’ Gillard responded. ‘To me the most plausible idea is that the body was buried in the garden of the rental property while it was vacant, but as soon as the new tenant moved in, they realised it would eventually be discovered.’

‘Hmm. It doesn’t sound like a considered strategy to begin with,’ the pathologist said. ‘Ideally you want to bury a body somewhere that it will never be disturbed.’

Gillard chuckled. ‘In my decades as an investigator, very few corpse disposals are carefully planned, even when the murder itself is premeditated. The fate of the body is almost always the critical forensic element of the crime, yet what I see most often is panic, hurried night-time disposal, and luckily for us, plenty of incriminating mistakes.’

‘Well by that yardstick, the killer here has done quite a decent job,’ Delahaye said. ‘He’s left us no clues as to who he is.’