All that I wanted to do was to see if there was any frogspawn in our pond. It was raining a little, but that didn’t bother me.

So when I stepped into the garden and saw the massive hole in the middle of the lawn, this came as quite a shock. The huge builders’ tools strewn across the grass told me that this was not the work of some passing fox or gang of squirrels. Whoever did this was hunting for something.

I couldn’t admit it to TPR, but I knew exactly what the diggers hoped to find. I prayed that the corpse that I had buried there three decades earlier still laid undiscovered. Was there any chance that it could have completely decomposed by now?