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and pepper hair; wonders why there is so much more salt than pepper. He puts on a faded tie, looks down at it, murmurs, ‘My “Big Day” tie.’
    Don holds open de Vries’ office door. Vaughn stops as he passes through.
    ‘The Scene of Crime leader’s name?’
    ‘Steve Ulton.’
    De Vries nods and walks away.
    De Vries bursts through the plastic curtains, strides towards him.
    ‘Morning, Steve.’
    Ulton looks a bit taken aback, hesitates until Don joins them. Then he delivers the results, the two boys laid out on wheeled stretchers either side of him. De Vries props himself up against a workbench, the almost silent lab emphasizing the sound of throbbing in his right temple.
    Unbidden, Ulton starts reading from his report.
    ‘Starting off. The scene itself is devoid of useful physical evidence. There are tyre-tracks from over twenty different vehicles. With the weather as it’s been, most of the track is just blowing away, so there’s no way we’ll get anything there. We searched every inch of the skip and its contents, and there’s nothing there either. Finally, to confirm: there were no cameras or other surveillance at MacNeil’s farm-stall. They sometimes employ a car-guard, but not so late in the season.’
    ‘Nothing on anything then?’ de Vries murmurs.
    Ulton doesn’t know whether he was meant to hear the aside, but he goes on: ‘Some stuff, but mainly negatives. No fingerprint evidence on either side of the polythene wrapping. We have found two small hairs, probably eyebrows, on the inside of the polythene. It is possible that these come from Dr Kleinman or either of the two technicians processing these bodies and their wrapping. They could belong to the boys themselves. However, we will await DNA tests. Otherwise, there are no obvious DNA tags from which we can seek a match. We can assume that whoever wrapped them was wearing gloves, possibly protective clothing. From the state of the blood found inside the polythene, we estimate that between eight and twelve hours passed between the shooting of the victims and the wrapping of the bodies.’
    He swallows, takes a couple of breaths. ‘The polythene wrapping is odd. It’s old and was around from the 1950s through to the late 1970s, possibly, here, the 1980s, when new chemical formulas were developed which made the products lighter, thinner and stronger, also cheaper and with less pollution. In its time, it would probably have been used by warehousemen, distributors, transport companies, for binding units together securely for transit.’
    ‘Heavy-duty shrinkwrap?’
    ‘The precursor to it, yes.’
    ‘So someone had access to, or had saved, some packing material that hasn’t been around since the 1980s?’ de Vries queries.
    ‘Apparently, yes. To my knowledge, this product hasn’t been made anywhere for thirty, forty years. It’s obsolete.’
    De Vries nods; it is clear information, but it means nothing. ‘I’m sorry, go on.’
    Ulton turns a page. ‘We haven’t been able to retrieve anything from the boys’ bodies, but there was particulate in their hair. Grass seeds, and a predominance of leaf and seed matter from
Triticum aestivum
– wheat. They probably fell in a field, or close to a wheatfield. There are corresponding findings: the stomach contents of both boys showed that they had ingested water containing a high level of Atrazine. That’s an agricultural pesticide, used mainly on arable crops such as wheat and corn. That might suggest that the boys had drunk water obtained from a borehole, somewhere in the countryside, where arable farming takes place.’ He turns another page. ‘This ties in with Dr Kleinman’s observations of residual damage to the heart and liver of both boys – a likely long-term symptom, after many years of ingesting water contaminated in this way.’
    ‘Seven years?’
    ‘Perhaps. I don’t know.’
    ‘Okay.’ De Vries turns to Don. ‘Let’s assume that these boys were held in the countryside, and