Gillard got out of the car and went to the boot. He pulled on a Tyvek coverall and a pair of wellingtons, donned a pair of blue latex gloves and a face mask, and made his way down the embankment to join them. As he approached, three uniformed male officers turned to greet him. Of the rest, four were wearing water company hi-vis in lime green, and one who seemed to be in charge was a short, dapper man wearing a suit and a hard hat. The detective introduced himself.

‘Kelvin Arrowsmith, regional financial controller for Aqua Western,’ he responded, bumping elbows with Gillard.

‘They’ve just found human remains,’ blurted out one of the uniforms, a fresh-faced PC in his early twenties.

‘So I was told. Down here?’ Gillard asked, crouching down to look into the hole. He could see something grey and slimy in the cloudy water. The smell wasn’t too bad, considering. Like old cheese rather than rotting flesh.

‘Only part of it,’ said one of the contractors, a shortish but solid guy with a gingery crewcut, who introduced himself as Aidan Tickett. ‘Most of it is still in the bucket.’ He gestured towards the excavator with a thumb over his shoulder. ‘Some of it got crushed.’

Gillard and Aidan made their way over to the huge metal bucket of the excavator. Amongst huge clods of clay were more grey slimy lumps, and pieces of what could be bone. Torn fragments of black plastic were in there too, along with soggy residue which had the look of textiles. The cheesy stink was stronger here.

‘It’s a mess, isn’t it?’ the contractor said.

‘It’s often the way,’ Gillard said. ‘Who was operating the excavator, and who else was here when it was found?’

Aidan scratched his nose with a grubby finger. ‘Female apprentice, her first week on the JS220. She was upset so we sent her home. Trev Collier, the engineer from Aqua, witnessed it, I came down a bit later.’ Aidan pointed out Collier. He was one of the hard hats, a lean man in his fifties, with a deeply lined face that spoke of decades of outdoor work. Gillard took Collier aside and made notes as the engineer described how the JCB’s bucket had dug into part of the riverbank and lifted soil and roots further back to make a higher embankment. ‘That’s when I saw body parts,’ Collier said. ‘I’ve been in this business twenty years and we’ve found all sorts of historical stuff, but I’ve never seen a dead body before. The woman working the JCB was freaked out when I told her. She thought it was her fault for not spotting it, but I told her that it could have happened to anybody.’

The detective peered downriver where the watercourse widened into a broad meander that led into tangled woodland under the link road overpass. ‘So what is the project you’re working on?’