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Black Swan in Harkside’s your best bet. Will you be wanting Adam Kelly’s address?”
    â€œHave you eaten?”
    â€œNo, but—”
    â€œYou can come with me, then, fill me in over a meal. I can have a chat with young Adam in the morning, when he’s had time to collect himself. PC Cameron can hold the fort here.”
    DS Cabbot glanced down at the skeletal hand.
    â€œCome on,” Banks said. “There’s nothing more we cando here. This poor bugger’s probably been dead longer than we’ve been alive.”

    Vivian Elmsley felt bone-weary when she finally got home from the signing. She put her briefcase down in the hall and walked through to the living-room. Most people would have been surprised at the modern chrome-and-glass decor in the home of a person as old as Vivian, but she far preferred it to all the dreadfully twee antiques, knick-knacks and restored woodwork that cluttered up most old people’s houses—at least the ones she had seen. The only painting that adorned her plain white walls hung over the narrow glass mantelpiece, a framed print of a Georgia O’Keeffe flower, overwhelming in its yellowness and intimidating in its symmetry.
    First, Vivian opened the windows to let in some air, then she poured a stiff gin and tonic and made her way to her favourite armchair. Supported by chrome tubes, upholstered in black leather, it leaned back at just the right angle to make reading, drinking or watching television sinfully comfortable.
    Vivian glanced at the clock, all its polished brass and silver inner workings exposed by the glass dome. Almost nine. She would watch the news first. After that, she would have her bath and read Flaubert.
    She reached for the remote control. After the best part of a lifetime’s writing in longhand, with only an old walnut-cabinet wireless to provide entertainment, she had given in to technology five years ago. In one glorious shopping spree the day after she received a large advance from her new American publisher, she went out and bought herselfa television, a video, a stereo system and the computer she now used to write her books.
    She put her feet up and clicked on the remote control. The news was the usual rubbish. Politics, for the most part, a little murder, famine in Africa, a botched assassination attempt in the Middle East. She didn’t know why she bothered watching it. Then, towards the end, came one of those little human-interest bites they use to fill up the time.
    This one made Vivian sit up and take notice.
    The camera panned a cluster of familiar ruins as the voice-over explained that the drought had brought this lost Dales village of Hobb’s End to light for the first time since it had been officially flooded in 1953 . She already knew that—this was the same film footage they had used when the story first made it to television about a month ago—but suddenly the angle changed, and she could see a group of people standing by the bridge, one of them a uniformed policeman.
    â€œToday,” the voice-over went on, “a young boy exploring the scene discovered something he hadn’t bargained for.”
    The narrator’s tone was light, fluffy, the way so many of the cosy mysteries Vivian detested made light of the real world of murder. It was a mystery worthy of Miss Marple, he went on, a skeleton discovered, not in a cupboard, folks, but under the muddy floor of an old outbuilding. How could it have got there? Was foul play suspected?
    Vivian clutched the cool chrome tubes at the sides of her armchair as she watched, gin and tonic forgotten on the glass table beside her.
    The camera focused on the outbuilding, and Vivian saw the man and woman standing on the threshold. Thenarrator went on about the police arriving at the scene and refusing to comment at this early stage, then he brought the piece to a close by saying they’d be keeping an eye on the situation.
    The programme was well