Geraint’s eyebrows rose at this. ‘Strangulation! You’re reading a hell of a lot into finding a bit of something half the size of a cocktail sausage!’

Louise rose to her feet and started to repack her haversack.

‘Whatever it is, we’ll have to tell someone about it straight away,’ she said with typical decisiveness. ‘I suppose it had better be the local police, not that they’ll be all that interested in a two-thousand-year-old murder!’

The bog was bounded on the seaward side by the dead-straight railway and road that ran a stone’s throw from the two miles of beach. At the southern end was the small town of Borth, a popular holiday resort. A one-street ribbon settlement, it suddenly rose at the end of the beach on to the hill of Upper Borth, from where the road carried on southwards to Aberystwyth. The two researchers had trudged across the marshland to reach the road and now walked downwards to the line of shops and boarding houses.

‘I wonder where the police station is?’ said Louise. ‘I presume they’ve got coppers in a place like this.’

Geraint stopped a man coming towards them to ask directions, but he was obviously a late holidaymaker, as he replied in a strong Cockney accent that he hadn’t the faintest idea.

‘Better luck next time,’ waspishly muttered Louise.

A little further on, they saw a young woman brushing the path in front of a three-storied house. A very pretty brunette, Letitia Matthews was a nurse, home on leave from her training in Cardiff. Trusting that she was a native and not another Londoner, Geraint spoke to her in Welsh and received a brilliant smile and exact directions in the same language. Smitten, as he often was by attractive girls, he would have lingered, but Louise prodded him in the back and, reluctantly, he began lugging his bundle of pipes further into the town.