‘That no heather will grow on a Jacobite grave?’ Rhona said. ‘It has some basis in scientific fact, but it’s also a good story for the tourists.’

‘If we start doing a survey of the surrounding moor, we can count on our own influx of tourists,’ McNab said. ‘I take it you intend to bring this up at the next strategy meeting?’

‘It was the plan, yes.’

‘I’ll see you there then.’

Rhona reapplied her mask and headed back inside.

A standard post-mortem took around four hours and involved if not a small army, then definitely a subdivision, including forensic biologists, SOCOs, a photographer, a crime scene manager and a note-taker. On the other side of the screen you would normally find the senior investigating officer and the procurator fiscal, for a time at least, although not all fiscals liked to attend.

When in the midst of the procedure, the numbers were hardly noticeable as everyone went quietly and efficiently about their various jobs. McNab didn’t like the parts that involved opening up the body. Rhona, used to dealing with the scent of death, preferred to stay throughout. As the one who had been the first witness to the deceased and having seen the context in which she had been laid to her rest, everything Rhona had catalogued at the locus might now be explained.

As it was, Dr Walker’s careful and thorough examination couldn’t definitively determine how the child had died, although he suspected she had been smothered. The puncture marks round her genitals, he thought, had occurred after death. Something Rhona also believed to be the case.

The tests being done on the grave soil might yet confirm that blood had already stopped flowing when she’d been laid in there. If so, the grave was the deposition site but not the place the child had died.

The signature of a killer emerges out of an offender’s fantasies, which develop long before killing their first victim, and often involve mutilation or dismemberment of the victim’s body. There was little doubt in anyone’s mind that abducting a child who was subsequently killed was a sexual fantasy being played out. The puncturing of the child’s sexual organs might serve to confirm this.

As they were finishing up the autopsy, Richie asked if he might speak with Rhona before she left the mortuary.

‘If you can spare time for a coffee?’ had been his exact words.

Showered and changed, her hair still wet but at least smelling better, Rhona joined him in his office, where he too looked freshly showered.

‘There’s not much room in here, but I make good coffee,’ he announced as she walked into what was little more than a cubby hole.

‘It definitely smells good,’ Rhona said, relieved now to be back in the land of the living.

He poured her a large mug from the cafetière. ‘Milk?’

‘Black, please,’ Rhona said.

Once they’d both had time to savour the coffee, Richie said, ‘I was interested in what you were saying about the clothes buried with the child, and what that might mean?’ When Rhona didn’t immediately respond, he added, ‘I couldn’t help but notice McNab’s reaction to that information.’