“No, not necessarily. Although he’s well preserved, he will have lost of lot of fluid weight over the years. He looks a pretty healthy specimen to me.”

“What age?”

“Late teens, early twenties, I’d say.”

“No, I mean, how long had he been in the peat?”

Professor Mulgrew raised one eyebrow and tipped his head scathingly in Gunn’s direction. “Patience, please. I’m not a bloody carbon-dating machine, Detective Sergeant.”

He returned to the body and turned it over on to its front, leaning in close as he brushed away fragments of brown and yellow-green moss.

“Were there any clothes found with the body?”

“No, nothing.” Gunn moved nearer to see if he could discern what it was that had attracted Mulgrew’s attention. “We dug over the whole area. No clothes, no artefacts of any kind.”

“Hmmm. In that case I would say he’d probably been wrapped in a blanket of some sort before being buried. And he must have lain in it for quite a few hours.”

Gunn’s eyebrows shot up in astonishment. “How can you tell that?”

“In the hours after death, Mr. Gunn, the blood settles in the lower portion of the body causing a purplish red discoloration of the skin. We call it post-mortem lividity. If you look carefully at his back, buttocks and thighs you will see that the skin is darker, but there is a paler, blanched pattern in the lividity.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that he lay for at least eight to ten hours on his back after death, wrapped in some kind of rough blanket whose weave left its pattern in the darker coloration. We can clean him off and photograph it and, if you like, have an artist make a sketch to reproduce the pattern.”

Using a pair of tweezers, he recovered several fibres still clinging to the skin.

“Could be wool,” he said. “Shouldn’t be hard to confirm that.”

Gunn nodded, but decided not to ask what point there would be in identifying the pattern and fabric of a blanket woven hundreds or even thousands of years before. The pathologist returned to an examination of the head.

“The eyes are too far gone to determine the colour of the irides, and this dark red-brown hair is no indication at all of what colour it might have been originally. It’s been dyed by the peat, the same as the skin.” He poked about in the nostrils. “But this is interesting.” He examined his latexed fingertips. “A fair amount of fine-grained silver sand in his nose. Which would appear to be the same as the sand apparent in the abrasions on his knees and the tops of his feet.” He moved up to the forehead, then, and gently cleaned away some dirt from the left temple and the hair above it. “Bloody hell!”

“What?”

“He’s got a curved scar on the left front-temporal scalp. About ten centimetres in length.”

“A wound?”