James felt the blood stiffen in his veins as he stepped forward. He saw that two short sections of floorboards had been removed and a small galvanised steel box had been taken out. It sat a few feet away with the lid open. Inside was the skeleton of a tiny baby. The skull and bones rested on a dark blanket and the sight of them caused a ball of sadness to expand in James’s chest.

Abbott shook her head ruefully and said, ‘This is another sight that will be with me for the rest of my life.’

She turned away then and gnawed at her lower lip.

‘How long would you say this has been here?’ James asked.

‘The forensic anthropologist will be here soon and he’ll be able to give you an accurate assessment, but my guess is at least a couple of decades,’ Coppell replied. ‘It fits the timeline of when Megan Roth went missing.’

‘But can you be sure that we’re looking at a female?’ James said.

Coppell shook his head. ‘This child lived for only a few weeks and sexual dimorphism is slight in pre-adolescent children as the bones are not sufficiently developed for gender differences to emerge. So, determining the sex will be difficult in this case, although we’ll probably get something from a DNA extraction.’

‘But I think it’s fairly safe to assume that this was baby Megan,’ James said. ‘Are there any indications as to how she might have died?’

‘There’s nothing obvious from what I can see. The skull’s intact and none of the bones are broken.’

‘And was the skeleton wrapped in the blanket?’

Coppell nodded. ‘I think she was laid to rest with great care and that again would suggest that it was her parents who put her here.’

While they’d been speaking Abbott had moved across the cellar to where the squat display unit was now positioned. The memorial stone with the inscription You will never be forgotten was still resting on top of it.

‘It raises the question as to whether the Batemans knew that the baby was buried under the floorboards when they placed the unit and the memorial stone on top of it.’

‘But I don’t see how they could have,’ James said. ‘They weren’t here when Mary’s parents were killed. According to Giles Keegan they were at Robert’s mother’s house in Sunderland. It was Giles who broke the news to them by phone.’

‘There’s another issue that needs to be considered,’ Coppell said. ‘The bodies of Simon and Amanda Roth were found here in the cellar. Therefore, the forensic team would have searched it thoroughly, and I’m sure they would have noticed that two of the floorboards had been tampered with and could be lifted out. They would have done what we did, which was to check to see what was underneath.’