Vos hunkers down next to the body. ‘If he did fall out of a plane, how fast would he have been travelling when he hit the ground?’

‘Terminal velocity of a falling body is between 120 and 125 mph,’ Watson says. ‘Look on the bright side – he could have landed in a built-up area. But these footballers love their privacy.’

‘Every cloud, eh, Gordon?’ says Vos.

Maybe it is prolonged exposure to nature’s relentless cycle of life and death, but the gardener who found the body does not seem terribly traumatized by his discovery. In fact he seems more concerned by the unsightly hole in his pristine lawn, and by the army of police and forensic officers trampling all over his flowerbeds.

‘Do you live locally, Mr Souter?’

The old man swivels his eyes beneath the brim of his tweed cap and fixes them on DC Phil Huggins. His lips remain clamped around a needle-thin roll-up and he says nothing, but the implication is clear – do I look like the sort of person who could afford to live locally?

The gardener’s blue Ford panel van is parked in front of the house. Huggins has already checked it for obvious bloodstains or anything else that might indicate it was involved, and forensics will want to do the same, even though the idea that the old man transported the body here, dug an impact crater, then called the police, is patently ridiculous. But at this stage it’s all about going through the motions and nobody, least of all Huggins, wants to be the one who overlooks the vital piece of evidence just because it’s patently ridiculous.

In any case the reason they are all gathered here today is because it would appear a Middle Eastern guy fell out of the sky and landed in Enrico Cabaljo’s garden. Enrico Cabaljo, who cost Newcastle United £10 million and scored no goals in twenty-five appearances, whose every clumsy, pigeon-toed touch ended up being jeered by the 52,000 fans – including DC Phil Huggins – who had paid upwards of £500 for a season ticket to pay his £120,000-per-week wages. Patently ridiculous? Don’t get me fucking started, Huggins thinks.

The gardener is staring at him through his cigarette smoke.

‘I’ve got to get on,’ he says.

Huggins thanks him and puts his notebook in his pocket. He walks down to the gate and out onto the main road. He pulls out his mobile and speed-dials DC John Fallow, who is somewhere in the village coordinating the house-to-house inquiries with the local uniforms. Fallow informs him that if he turns left and walks for two hundred yards he will come to a village shop run by a sweet and enterprising old lady who is dishing out bacon rolls and mugs of tea. Huggins informs Fallow he will meet him there in five minutes.

Huggins is six feet five inches tall, and his long, loping stride takes him beyond the cordon tape to the shop in less than two. When Fallow arrives, Huggins is already sitting on a wall outside the shop munching cheerfully on a sandwich and talking football with a uniformed sergeant from Morpeth station and a reporter from the local newspaper who has got wind of some action on his patch. Fallow, who has already had a sandwich this morning, goes inside for another mug of tea. The old lady’s face lights up, but then he has that effect on all old ladies, who are immediately reminded of their own cherubic grandsons when they see him. At the age of thirty, Fallow curses his persistently boyish features – the smooth, glowing cheeks; the dimpled satsuma chin; the puppy fat that tenaciously obscures the lines of his lower jaw. He envies Huggins’s gothically pronounced cheekbones and Vos’s rugged, lived-in face. He draws the line at Mayson Calvert – who the fuck would want to look like Mayson Calvert? – yet even so he cannot help but think that even Mayson has the potential to look vaguely interesting if he did something with his hair, or got a more fashionable pair of glasses, or wore a suit that didn’t look like it had been handed down to him by his old history professor.

The reporters have gone when he comes out of the store. For a while he and Huggins talk shop with the uniformed sergeant, then the sergeant is summoned back to the front line. Fallow watches him trudging back up the hill towards the cordon tape, his shoulders visibly stiffening as he slips back into official mode.

‘So what do you think?’

‘I’ll tell you what I think,’ says Huggins, brushing some stray crumbs from his tie. ‘Illegal immigrant.’

‘What?’

‘It makes perfect sense. Illegal immigrants jump into the undercarriage of a plane just about to take off from some godforsaken Third World country and hang on for grim death in the hope of making it to the Promised Land. Trouble is, most of them are either crushed to death by the wheels or else freeze to death because of the altitude.’

‘I’ve heard about that,’ Fallow nods. ‘When the plane comes in to land, it lowers its wheels and – bang – the body drops out.’

‘Happens at Heathrow all the time,’ says Huggins. ‘There was one last month: guy walking his dog in the park in West London, right on the flight path about ten miles out – next thing he knows this fucking stowaway from Africa lands on the path in front of him. Fell out of the undercarriage of a 747.’

‘Have you mentioned your theory to the boss?’

‘No,’ says Huggins, ‘the boss is in a foul mood.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he’s been told he’s getting a replacement for Vic Entwistle, that’s why.’

Fallow looks at him. ‘But there’s no way Entwistle was ever coming back.’

‘You know that, and I know that,’ says Huggins. ‘But don’t you think if the boss could have found a way to get Entwistle’s hospital bed moved to the Bug House, he would have done?’

A tractor is approaching along one of the single-track lanes leading from the main road through the village. The driver is a young man wearing blue overalls and a woollen hat pulled down over his ears. He stops outside the shop and turns off the engine.

‘You coppers?’ he shouts.

‘Can we help you, sir?’ Fallow says.

‘Aye. I found this. Thought you might be looking for it.’

The driver reaches down to the footwell and retrieves a plastic feed sack with something in it.

‘Phil, you’d better come and look at this,’ Fallow says, peering in the sack.

‘What is it?’ Huggins says. ‘Some magic beans?’

‘Nah,’ Fallow says. ‘It’s someone’s leg.’

Mhaire Anderson arrives shortly after 10 a.m. and, once she’s decked out in a paper suit, is immediately taken to see the body. She emerges ten minutes later, purse-lipped, and is escorted back to her car, which is then driven back through the village and along the lane, a circuitous route which terminates at a metal five-bar gate. Beyond the gate is a muddy track leading to a rusting iron cattle bridge over the railway line.

Vos is waiting at the gate. Gordon Watson and his team are on the bridge itself, while a dozen uniformed officers are down on the embankment and the track.

‘Morning, guv’nor,’ Vos says.

‘I hope you’ve stopped the trains,’ Anderson says.

‘Replacement bus service only between Newcastle and Morpeth.’

‘Good. So what have we got?’

They go through the gate and begin walking up towards the apex of the bridge.

‘The farmer found the leg in the field on the other side of the bridge,’ Vos says. ‘I say leg, but it’s actually just the thigh. Huggins and Fallow checked out the bridge itself and found the shin and the foot attached to a rope tied to one of the struts.’

‘Christ.’

‘The driver of the 8.30 p.m. East Coast Main Line train to Edinburgh reported hitting something last night,’ says Seagram. ‘He thought it might have been a deer.’

‘A deer?’ Anderson says. ‘Since when do deer hang down from railway bridges?’

‘He was going at 80 mph,’ Vos says. ‘It was dark and it was pissing down.’

‘He’s got eyes, hasn’t he?’