He settled. For a moment he drummed his fingers on the table surface, then he reached again for his thermos and poured himself a half-measure into the plastic cup. He drank. He took from his briefcase a bag of sharpened pencils and biro pens in three colours. The moment had passed, it was as if the photographs had ambushed him. He began to search the sheets of paper for date stamps and he laid them out over the width of the table and then began to number them in red from the first date. Wouldn't take him long to knock the file into shape. If the map came he would most certainly be finished by tomorrow lunch time. That would be excellent. It would give him time to be out of London before the afternoon rush for home, and on the road comfortably for the Powys mountains, and the railway line from which the red kites, Milvus milvus, could be seen.

The date stamp on the first sheet of paper was 3 April 1993. For a moment, idly, he tried to remember what he would have been doing that day twenty-three months before, and failed. The paper was letter-headed "Physicians for Human Rights'… It was easy for him to picture it.

There was a milage and a lane and foul mud, and a grave. '

One.

The area for the digging was outlined by a rude rectangle of white tape. The rectangle was approximately ten metres by four metres, as measured out by the Professor's full strides. It had been easy to recognize the rectangle where they had dug because only weeds had grown in that disturbed corner of the field. Around the edge of the rectangle, heaped on the grass beyond the white tape, was the new boundary marker of piled muddy earth. Four policemen had done the digging at the Professor's direction. The long-handled spades with the wide blades were now tossed onto the low mud wall. The four policemen and the Professor knelt in the pit they had made. When they had started, their overalls had been pure white, they were now smeared in the grey-black mud of the field.