Charlotte has long thought that her own parents know more about what happened back then than they’ve ever let on. She’s convinced it’s one of the many secrets they keep from her.

She often hears them whispering when they don’t think she can hear them. A few times she heard the names Simon and Amanda mentioned, along with Megan.

As always, she regrets coming down here and can’t get out quick enough.

‘Let’s go back upstairs,’ she says. ‘I think we’ve got time for another session before my parents get back.’

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

James could not take his eyes off the skeletal remains in the steel box.

He was confident that DNA analysis would soon identify them as belonging to three-week-old Megan Roth. But he was not at all sure how or when her body had been buried beneath the floorboards.

The fact that it hadn’t been discovered during a search by police twenty-four years ago had led the chief forensic officer to suggest that it might have been placed there afterwards. But it was always possible that the forensic team hadn’t done a thorough job back then. Perhaps it wasn’t obvious that the floorboards had been tampered with or the spot was covered by a piece of heavy furniture that didn’t get moved.

It raised a whole series of new questions that hummed like high-voltage electricity through James’s head.

‘I have to keep reminding myself that we’re trying to find out what happened here on Christmas Eve,’ he said to Abbott. ‘Not what took place here over twenty years ago.’

‘But it does support the theory that they might somehow be connected,’ she responded.

James nodded. ‘And that’s one of the aspects of this case that makes it so challenging. I won’t be at all surprised if another credible suspect suddenly turns up out of the blue.’

They were still discussing it when Dominic Martin, the forensic anthropologist, arrived. He was a bulky man with a fleshy, nondescript face and a nasal edge to his voice.

After a brief look at the bones in the steel box, he said, ‘I agree with Tony that they belonged to a very small baby and have been here for twenty years or more. The remains are well preserved but I very much doubt that I’ll be able to determine the sex from them. However, we should be able to extract some DNA samples. These can then be compared with the profiles we have on the database of the couple you suspect were her parents.’

James used his phone to take a couple of photos of the skeleton, then asked Coppell if his team had found much else during their search of the farm.