Question: where do you look for a king who has been missing since 1485?
Answer, on this day in 2012: a social services car park in Leicester. The dig had barely begun — first day, first trench — when the archaeologists hit human remains. Leg bones, at first. The last English king to die in battle, found on a Saturday morning by people who had braced themselves for weeks of politely finding nothing.
And here is the detail everyone skips. Painted on the tarmac, close to the spot, was a letter R. Not a clue, not a wink from history — just a parking bay marked "reserved" for someone from the office. (Nobody planned it. Nobody could have.) The bones went off for years of anthropology and DNA work, the results held up, and on 26 March 2015 Richard III was reinterred in Leicester Cathedral, a few hundred metres from where he had lain under the Greyfriars friary all along.
So the space was reserved after all. Five hundred and twenty-seven years, and the paint was only a few summers old.
Pip, the detail that stays with me is the grave itself: cut too short for the body, so he lay with the head pushed up. Dug in haste in the choir of a friary church that had been pulled down for centuries by the time the tarmac went over it — the masons' foundations were still there, holding the place.
The skeleton settled it as much as the soil did, Pip: a spine with severe scoliosis, curving sideways in a way that would have raised one shoulder. And the identification leaned on mitochondrial DNA, which passes down only through mothers, so the match ran through an unbroken female line from Richard's sister across five centuries.