At Sian’s insistence, she had to explain briefly about these ancient corpses, found mainly in Northern Europe, assumed to be sacrificial victims who were dumped in marshes, where their tissues were preserved for centuries by the tannins of the peat and the acid bog water. Professor Glob was the doyen on the subject, a Danish archaeologist who had studied a number found in his homeland.

‘As I said, it sounds highly unlikely to me,’ continued Richard. ‘But the cops in Aberystwyth want an opinion. The forensic lab in Cardiff suggested me, as I’m now on their Home Office list.’

He told them the story, such as it was. ‘So far, the only evidence is a bit of tissue accidentally recovered by a botanist. The police sent it to Cardiff, mainly to check whether it came from a dead sheep. But it seems that a precipitation test showed that it was human.’

‘So what’s going to happen next?’ asked Moira, as intrigued as the rest of them with such an unusual story.

‘I agreed that we’d do what we could for them, but we wanted to look at the sample ourselves first. The police are bringing it up from Cardiff in the morning. If it’s definitely human, then I suspect they’ll ask us to look at the body, if they can find it.’

‘What do you want me to do?’ asked Priscilla. ‘Angela will be back at work tomorrow, so she may want to deal with it, especially as now I may soon be moving on.’

Richard laid a hand on her shoulder, raising another covert frown on Moira’s face.

‘She’ll want a day or two to settle in, I expect. Then we’ll decide how to play it. If our own tests on the sample show it to be a sheep or something, that’s the end of it, but the Home Office lads in Cardiff are unlikely to have got it wrong.’

The matter was left in abeyance and was soon overshadowed by the sound of Angela’s little Renault coming up the steep slope of the drive from the main road below. They all trooped down the corridor past the kitchen to the back door, to greet her as she stopped in the yard behind and then reversed into the open garages beneath the coach house.