‘So they aren’t the clothes the victim was wearing when she was abducted?’ McNab said.

‘They are smaller than we would have expected,’ Rhona tried to explain.

McNab was studying Rhona’s expression. ‘Can we go have a chat, Dr MacLeod?’

Rhona nodded. ‘If you’ll excuse us, Dr Walker, Dr Wang?’

‘What the hell, Rhona?’ McNab said as soon as they were in the changing room. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?’

‘I wanted the measurements to be confirmed by a pathologist.’

‘Well, now they have been.’ McNab, dumping his scrubs, ran his fingers through his hair. ‘Fuck. Mary’s big brother, Robbie, got in touch with me. He’s already convinced the body is his sister. As are most of the tabloids, even though we have consistently said we haven’t ID’d the victim.’

‘It might yet be Mary McIntyre,’ Rhona said.

‘If so, why bury her with someone else’s clothes?’

They’d both imagined the scenario. It was impossible not to. Mary McIntyre being abducted in her white frock, stripped of her clothes either before or after her death, in all probability sexually assaulted, then brought to the moor to be buried. Nowhere in that likely story was there a role for another set of clothing.

‘I don’t know.’ Rhona hesitated. ‘But the most important thing now is to identify the remains. Retrieving DNA from the body won’t be easy.’

‘Why?’ McNab demanded.

Having finally been convinced by DNA sampling, McNab, like many others, believed it could always be delivered.

‘Bogs are acidic. They mess up the DNA pattern. Advice from a forensic anthropologist is that we go for somewhere that’s really protected, like the petrous part of the temporal bone in the skull.’

McNab looked perturbed by this. ‘But you can do it?’

‘Hopefully. If we do, then, provided you can take a buccal swab from Mary’s siblings, we’ll know the answer. There’s also something else that might help.’

‘What?’

Rhona explained about yesterday’s swim and the discovery of the bracelet. ‘These particular bracelets were fairly common in the sixties and seventies and hopefully there might be an inscription when we clean it up.’

‘Good work,’ McNab said cautiously. ‘So,’ he went on, reading Rhona’s expression, ‘if the confirmation outfit doesn’t turn out to be from our victim, then who does it belong to?’

‘Another victim?’ Rhona finally voiced the thoughts she’d had up on the moor.

By McNab’s expression, he’d been thinking the same thing.

‘The boss has ordered a trawl across the UK for missing kids within the time frame. If we consider even five years either side of 1975, there are plenty of possibilities.’

‘We also need to take a proper look at the surrounding area with a UAV and imaging camera,’ Rhona said. ‘If there are anomalies not consistent with the general ground terrain we need to take a further look at those. And in the case of a buried body, heather is replaced by grass.’

McNab looked thoughtful. ‘So that explains what Ellie said when we visited Culloden Moor on that trip north she took me.’