He peered into the bottle, then handed it to Angela, who diplomatically gave it to Priscilla to deal with. With the others watching, she carefully slid the contents out into a shallow glass dish. A greyish cylinder sat there, with a leathery cap. A short length of thin cord lay alongside it.

‘Not very exciting, is it?’ said Sian. ‘Looks like a lump of dirty candle grease.’

Richard picked up the dish and held it to his nose. ‘Adipocere, as I suspected from the story.’

He then had to explain to Sian and Moira. ‘When body fat is left for a long time in moist surroundings, it’s often converted into a kind of soap, which can persist for centuries. But bog bodies are usually around two thousand years since death and I just don’t know if adipocere would last that long.’

‘What about the scrap of string?’ asked Priscilla.

Richard shrugged. ‘I’ll leave that to you clever ladies. If we confirm it is human — and I’ve no reason to doubt Cardiff — then there’ll have to be an exhumation. Maybe then the reason for the string will become clear.’

‘What about that dark bit on top of the fatty stuff?’ asked Priscilla.

‘Could be skin, I suppose. Can you snip a bit off one edge and give it to Sian to process for histology? We can have a look under the microscope then, see what the structure is like.’

He looked at his watch and hurriedly left for his post-mortem session. Angela, not wanting to appear as if she was supervising her friend, left to do her unpacking upstairs and Moira drifted back to the office before starting on lunch, as her duties included making a light meal for the doctors at midday and something more substantial in the evening. Cleaning, washing and bed-making were now the province of the appropriately-named Mrs Daley, from the village.

Sian began processing the skin fragment by dropping it into formalin, then had some spare time. She wandered over to Priscilla and watched her deft fingers manipulating small pipettes and a rack of narrow tubes. Sian marvelled at how she could keep her long red-varnished nails so perfect when handling glassware and chemicals.