“You don’t think it was a suicide, do you, sir?”

Corstorphine held her gaze for a long second before shaking his head deliberately. “No, Frankie. It doesn’t feel right, not with all this paraphernalia under the tree.” He looked back at the quad bike, calculating the likely speed and force of impact. “I’d say someone set a snare for him.”

Frankie nodded, moving upwind of the body to remove herself from the smell which wasn’t even obliterated by the DI’s aftershave. She held aloft her evidence bag. “What about these gears?”

He frowned. The gears were a complete mystery and would make their job that much harder to do. Then there was the dead rabbit hanging next to Oscar’s corpse in a manner that suggested someone was having fun at their expense.

“Would you say Margo could have set all this up?” He looked up into the tree again, searching for inspiration, something that would tell him what had happened here. He tried to envisage Margo climbing into the branches, setting a snare for her man.

“She had the motive, sir. It’s public knowledge he knocked her about.” She sounded doubtful. Margo was a doormat. Whatever spirit she once may have possessed had been beaten out of her by Oscar. But the manic laugh, the spark that lit her face when she seemed to rejoice in his death?

“We can question her under caution when we get back.” He looked up from scrutinising the ground around the tree. A vehicle was making tortuous progress along the track. “Here’s the ambulance,” he said unnecessarily.

It took four of them to release Oscar’s body from the tree and cut the wire from above his head with some difficulty. “Try not to touch the wire, it may hold forensic evidence,” Corstorphine advised as the body was manhandled into a body bag. The ambulance crew zipped it up, noses wrinkling up against the smell, and laid it down on the gurney, securing the body into place with straps. The two detectives guided the ambulance as it executed a multi-point turn, stopping it as the wheels started to sink into the soft ground each side of the track, or threatened to drop into the burn at the end of each laboured turn.

When the ambulance was safely away, Corstorphine manoeuvred the Land Rover under the tree and climbed onto the roof to release the captive rabbit into another evidence bag. From there he could reach the lower branches with ease and he climbed gingerly into the upper reaches of the tree. The stronger of the wire snares was securely wrapped around a stout branch, where the force of Oscar’s snaring had caused the wire to dig deeply into the bark. It was the rabbit’s snare that caught his attention, though, looped around a large bone wheel that had jammed itself in between two smaller branches.

He called down to Frankie. “Pass up the camera.” As he grabbed the strap, he caught her questioning gaze. “The whole bloody tree will have to be a crime scene.” His mind was engaged with how to manage an oak tree and its surrounds as a forensic crime scene. They didn’t teach this at police college.