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unturned’ seemed to detach themselves from the general clamour to drift into the room and break the spell.
    John Palmer got to his feet. ‘Crazy, crazy, crazy,’ he complained as he started to pace up and down and make gestures of hopelessness with his hands. Lucy maintained a steady sad gaze into the middle distance as if the last few minutes had been too much for her and her brain was refusing to acknowledge what was going on around her. The policewoman who had been detailed to look after her since Anne-Marie’s disappearance had come back into the room at Davies’s request but her attitude had changed; she remained standing and at a discreet distance.
    Outside the sound of a heavy engine starting up made Palmer stop pacing and go over to look out of the window. A yellow JCB digger stood at the entrance to the short drive leading up to their house; its driver was talking to two policemen. Palmer turned questioningly to Davies. ‘What the hell?’
    ‘The garden too,’ said Davies without emotion.
    Palmer’s eyes were tortured pools of disbelief as the digger lurched forward, its huge wheels cracking several of the concrete slabs where he hadn’t used enough bedding sand when he’d laid them during the previous summer. It made its way round the side of the house, lowering its shovel as it went and filling the air with blue exhaust fumes.
     
    Time passed slowly as John and Lucy Palmer huddled together on the couch in their own private hell while strangers ransacked their house and destroyed their garden. Words had ceased to be of any use; they sat in disbelieving silence even as junior officers started to come into the room and make their reports to Davies.
    ‘Nothing upstairs, sir.’
    ‘Loft clear, sir.’
    ‘Nothing in the cellar, sir.’
    The continual series of negatives gradually got through to John Palmer. After the third he found the confidence to look at Davies with ill-disguised contempt and said, ‘Now will you get your damned circus out of our house and leave us alone?’
    ‘All in good time, sir,’ replied Davies automatically and without emotion.
    A few minutes later a police constable, wearing dark blue overalls and Wellington boots entered the room with scant regard for the carpets he was trailing mud over. ‘Can I have a word sir?’
    Davies left the room and was gone for fully ten minutes. When he returned he stood directly in front of the Palmers and announced, ‘It’s over: we’ve found her.’
    ‘Don’t be ridiculous! How can you have? You’re lying,’ said John Palmer springing to his feet.
    Lucy Palmer suddenly screamed and made a headlong dash to the door, bursting out of the room past the startled constable who made a late grab for her but missed.
    ‘Stop her!’ cried Davies but she ran round the back of the house to where canvas screens were now being erected around an excavated section of the garden about twenty metres back from the house. Two police officers stepped forward to restrain her but not before she got a good look at what lay in the shallow pit. There was a moment when all of them seemed to freeze like a tableau before Lucy let out a scream that tore at the nerves of all present. She collapsed unconscious on to the wet grass at the feet of the officers.
    Davies and John Palmer reached the scene and it was Palmer’s turn to see what lay there. He was left to stare down at the tiny little legless corpse lying in the mud between the Wellington boots of the officer who had dropped down into the hole to reach it. He shook his head slowly as if unwilling to believe what he was seeing. His eyes didn’t blink and he seemed oblivious to everything around him, even his wife’s unconscious condition, leaving her welfare entirely to the policewoman who was kneeling beside her, loosening her clothing and trying to bring her round.
    Palmer didn’t appear to hear the murmured angry comments of the police search team as he moved closer to the edge of the hole and squatted