‘Have we any idea of his height, doctor?’ asked the detective inspector.
‘Looks about average from his bones, but Doctor Chambers here is the real expert. No doubt she’ll need to take some accurate measurements of the leg bones when we get back to base.’ Privately, he knew he could have done it equally well himself, but he wanted to give Priscilla as big a role as possible.
Superintendent David Jones looked quizzically at his two CID staff.
‘Any outstanding missing persons in the last few years?’ he demanded.
‘Problem is, sir, we don’t know how many years are involved,’ replied Meirion. ‘No one comes to mind from this part of the county, but I’ll have to go through the records.’
‘And you can’t even hazard a guess as to the time this fellow died, doctor?’ persisted the deputy chief.
Richard shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t want to mislead you by picking a figure out of the air. I’m sure he’s been in that bog more than a few years — but it could be ten or even twenty, perhaps much more.’
He turned to Eva Boross, who had the inevitable cigarette in her fingers. ‘Any possibility of the depth it was buried in the ground being helpful — or something to do with the vegetation at that depth?’
The Hungarian also shook her head despondently. ‘I doubt it, but it might be worth me asking the botany people at the university. The body could never have sunk that deep from the surface in a few years, so it must have either been put into a hole dug in the peat — or there may have been a pool there then. The bog changes all the time, according to rainfall and changes in underground water.’
They talked around the apparently insoluble problems for a little longer, then the meeting broke up.
‘I’ll have to go and tell the Chief Constable what’s happening,’ muttered David Jones. ‘I’ve no doubt he’ll contact Scotland Yard tomorrow. Meirion, you can let the coroner know what’s going on.’
With mutual thanks and promises to keep closely in touch, Richard and Priscilla made their escape, saying goodbye to the archaeologist, with whom Priscilla already seemed to have made firm friends. It was beginning to get dusk as they drove up into the hills on their way home across Mid-Wales, with some of the unknown body’s bones wrapped in newspaper in a margarine box in the boot.
‘I don’t know about you, but I’m starving,’ complained Richard. ‘Sandwiches and endless cups of police tea are fine in their way, but I could do with a square meal.’
They found a hotel in Builth Wells able to satisfy their pangs of hunger. It was an old-fashioned hostelry in the main street, a gloomy place with everything varnished a dark brown, but it had a dining room and quite an extensive menu. The food turned out to be surprisingly good, even though they seemed to be the only patrons that evening. Once again, Priscilla marvelled at the quality and choice on offer, considering that wartime food rationing had only ended the previous year. Over oxtail soup, roast beef and apple tart with fresh cream, they went over the events of the past thirty-six hours.
‘I’ve really enjoyed it, Richard, thanks so much for letting me come,’ enthused Priscilla. ‘I thought mysterious strangled and beheaded bodies were only found in London and the big cities, not in a little place out in the sticks like Borth! What on earth can it be all about?’
Richard grinned at her. ‘You English people, you think you have a monopoly on violent crime! There’s as much intrigue and vendettas in rural areas as in any city, we’re just better at concealing it.’
They went into the adjacent lounge for coffee and Richard ordered a couple of brandies to go with it.
‘So what happens next?’ asked the auburn-haired biologist. ‘There seems little more we can do to help identify this fellow.’
‘We urgently need the head, though God knows what state it would be in. At least we had a bit of bog tanning to preserve the trunk. We’d not have seen that tattoo but for that.’
‘There’s no doubt about him being strangled, I suppose?’
Richard warmed the brandy glass in his hand. ‘There was that double ligature tied in a knot and what was left of the larynx had a crack through the cricoid cartilage. Of course, he might have been shot through the head as well, but as we haven’t got it, we can’t tell!’
‘And the poor chap’s hands were tied together,’ said Priscilla, with a shudder. ‘A nasty, sadistic sort of case.’
‘More like some gangland killing,’ agreed Richard. ‘But there are not many gangsters in sleepy Cardiganshire.’
Eventually, they reluctantly dragged themselves away from the fire in the lounge and Richard went to find the landlord to settle the bill. Priscilla offered to pay her share, but Richard waved it aside.
‘Like last night at Mrs Evans’, we can legitimately charge it to the partnership as expenses. The police or the coroner will foot the bill eventually.’
Before they left, Richard used the coin telephone in the hotel corridor to ring Garth House. When he pressed Button A, he was strangely happy to hear Angela’s calm tones, reassuring him that all was well and that she was looking forward to seeing them arrive home.
‘It’s not a bog body, but it’s a murder, though heaven knows when it happened,’ he told her. ‘We’ll tell you all about it in about an hour and a half.’
The rest of the journey seemed to take longer than that, as he peered down the tunnel cut by the headlights through the dark countryside. After her good meal and a brandy, Priscilla soon dozed off and only woke when the Humber revved up the driveway to the house. Angela had tea and biscuits ready for them and they sat in her lounge for a while, giving her a detailed account of their activities in Cardiganshire.
‘So you’ve no idea who he was or when he was killed?’ she asked at the end.
Priscilla raised her hands in mock despair. ‘Not a clue, Angela! At least the only one is that he had this Batman tattoo. Have you any idea when that idiotic business began?’
The other woman shook her head. ‘I’ve just about heard of it. Isn’t it an American comic strip or something? Perhaps the dead man was a Yank?’
‘Well, that’s not our problem,’ said Richard, yawning mightily. ‘Let the police follow it up — probably your pals from Scotland Yard.’
He immediately felt that he might have said the wrong thing, for Angela was still bitter about the defection of her former fiance in favour of another woman — and he was a detective superintendent from that same famous institution. However, she made no sign that it had registered, though he knew that Angela was adept at concealing her feelings.
‘Time for bed, folks,’ suggested Priscilla and soon Richard drove her the short distance to Tintern Parva, where she had comfortable lodgings in a bed and breakfast establishment used mostly by summer walkers and holidaymakers.
Angela waited up until he returned, then they both made for the stairs. ‘Did you enjoy your night away with our glamour girl, Richard?’ she said without a trace of sarcasm. ‘I think Moira was afraid that you’d be led off the path of righteousness!’
He gave her one of his famous grins. ‘Yes, we had a romantic drink in the local pub and then a passionate meat and two veg in Mrs Evans’ den of sin!’
‘No, somehow I don’t see you as a lecherous seducer, Richard,’ she said, as she left him at the upper landing.
As he went towards his own room, he wondered if he detected a hint of disappointment in her voice.
FIVE
Next day, they got down to the job of examining the material they had brought back from Aberystwyth.
The bones were laid out on a large sheet of brown paper on the big table in the laboratory and everyone, including Moira, was keen to see what could be discovered. They all stood around expectantly, the morning sun lighting the exhibits through the wide bay window.
‘We’ve got a right femur, a tibia and half the pelvis,’ pointed out Richard, who had put on a white coat and a pair of rubber gloves. ‘And there are three vertebrae from the neck, as well as some soft tissues.�
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Priscilla, similarly attired, had their osteometry board ready on the side of the table. This was a varnished board a couple of feet long with a long ruler screwed along one edge and a fixed ledge sticking up at the bottom.
‘The police were keen to get his height, so shall I start with that?’ she said. At Richard’s nod, she put the long thigh bone, stained brown by the peat, on to the board, so that the knee end was against the ledge. Then she moved a sliding bar down from the top until it touched the upper knob of bone which would have fitted into the hip joint.
Adjusting the lie of the bone so that the maximum length was being measured, she read off the number of centimetres on the scale, which she wrote on a sheet of paper, then did the same for the tibia, the bone from the lower leg.
Turning to an open textbook and couple of loose dog-eared papers, she ran her finger down some columns of figures and scribbled some calculations on the sheet.
‘According to Trotter and Gleser, he should be between five-foot eight and five-ten. Using the old Pearson formula, he’s five-seven and five-nine.’
‘How do you make that out?’ demanded Sian, always thirsty for knowledge.
Priscilla laid a hand on the book and the reprints.
‘Anatomists have published several surveys of bone length from bodies where they already knew the height. Pearson did that at the end of the last century, but Krogman wrote a guide for the FBI in 1939 and only a few years ago, Trotter and Gleser did another big survey on war casualties, including many from Korea.’
‘So why do you get different answers?’ persisted their technician, a valid query which Richard answered.
‘These surveys were done on different populations, including different ethnic groups. And there’s always an error zone of at least an inch and a half.’
Angela, her arms folded, looked down at the bones on the table. ‘So the likelihood is that he was between five-feet eight and five-feet nine?’
‘That’s about the best we can do,’ replied Priscilla. ‘Certainly not very tall or very short. In fact, he was like most men in Britain, which doesn’t help the police much!’
‘Anything else you can tell us?’ asked Richard hopefully. ‘What about race, for instance?’
Their tame anthropologist picked up the thigh bone again and turned it over in her hands, sighting along the shaft.
‘Nothing significant without a skull, but the only racial variation in leg bones is in the length of the femur in Negroid ethnic groups. This one’s certainly not that.’
‘What about the colour of that skin?’ asked Sian, pointing to a glass pot in which a scrap of loose skin was immersed in fixing fluid. ‘It’s even darker than that little bit we got from the borehole.’
‘Years of being soaked in black peat can account for that,’ said Richard. ‘But you’ll have to process the bits for the microscope, just to check for melanin and exclude any racial marker.’
This was getting a little complicated for Moira who, with a sigh, went back to her office. She felt a little depressed that the other three women seemed so much at home with these technical matters and wished that she had better skills than just hitting typewriter keys.
However, Angela also felt she was contributing little to this latest case, as her expertise in serology seemed unlikely to assist in identifying ‘Mr Bog’, as Sian had started to call the victim.
‘I suppose I had better do a blood group on the remains, though I can’t see that an ABO and Rhesus are going to help much,’ she said.
Richard immediately picked up on the fact that his partner was feeling left out of this investigation and hastened to draw her in.
‘Of course you should; we must have as much information as we can, Angela. You never know, we might need to exclude someone the cops turn up, even if we can’t get a positive match.’
Priscilla was carefully replacing the thigh bone back on the table, after finishing with the measuring device. As she did so, she weighed it up and down in her hand before laying it back on the brown paper.
‘I know I’m more used to handling frail archaeological skeletons, but don’t you think these are unusually heavy?’ she commented, looking at Richard with a slight frown.
‘Yes, I noticed that in the mortuary yesterday,’ he agreed, taking the bone from her and hefting it a few times himself. He looked across at Sian. ‘Can you decalcify a piece, if I saw it out for you?’
Their technician nodded. ‘But it’ll take a week before I can cut sections,’ she warned. To get a thin slice of bone suitable for looking at under the microscope required that the chalky calcium part must be dissolved out in weak acid.
Richard tapped the long bone against the edge of the table and felt it as unyielding as a rod of iron.
‘I’d like to get this X-rayed, too,’ he said. ‘I’ll take it up to Hereford Hospital; they’ll do it for me. I’ve got a coroner’s case there on Thursday, one of these operating theatre deaths.’
‘What are you looking for, Richard?’ asked Angela.
‘I’ve got an idea brewing in the back of my mind — and an X-ray may also give some indication of the age of this chap. The internal structure alters with advancing age, though admittedly it’s most useful when they are over fifty or sixty.’
He set about sawing a narrow slice from the shaft of the bone with a stainless-steel implement from his autopsy kit. Though the slice was only a quarter of an inch wide and went less than halfway through the bone, it took him five minutes and left him with an aching arm.
‘My God, that’s like flint!’ he complained, as he handed over the sliver of bone to Sian to put in a pot of formalin.
‘What else can we do?’ asked Priscilla, waving a gloved hand at the debris on the table.
‘This is where Angela comes in,’ he replied, eager to involve her in the examination. ‘I had a quick look at the vertebrae in the mortuary, but the light was not at all good in the late afternoon. See what you make of them, Angela.’
Though primarily a forensic biologist, the handsome brunette had had many years’ general experience in the ‘Met Lab’, as everyone called it, and could turn her hand to most aspects of forensic science. She pulled on some gloves and carefully arranged the three spinal vertebrae so that they interlocked in the proper anatomical position.
‘That’s all there was left of the neck?’
He nodded. ‘Just the lower three of the seven vertebrae. The upper ones must have gone with the head, as there was no sign of them anywhere in the adjacent peat.’
Angela picked up the top one, and looked at the central part with the hole for the spinal cord and the long spine at the back, between the two shorter wings that stuck out each side.
‘It’s had a bit of a bashing! Must have been chopped from the back.’ She took a lens from the pocket of her white coat and studied the upper surface intently.
‘There are deep cut marks, one almost going right through the left transverse process. And another that’s split the back of the vertebral body.’
‘Yes, I saw those. But what do you think caused them? A knife or something heavier?’
Angela took her time in replying, as she peered again through her lens. ‘Heavier, definitely. The edges are crushed, rather than sliced. I would think something like a cleaver or one of those agricultural billhooks.’
‘Not an axe?’
‘It would have to be a very sharp one, if it was. I’d prefer something with a thinner blade.’
Sian was looking at the small bone with fascination, visions of Mary Queen of Scots with her head on the block filling her mind. ‘But you’re sure he had his head chopped off, then?’
Richard stepped in, afraid that the girl might have nightmares about this. ‘Almost certainly after he was dead, Sian. He was strangled, remember?’
‘Why would they do that, Doctor Pryor?’ she asked, wide-eyed.
‘Almost certainly to stop us identifying him — and they seem to have succeeded, so far!’ he replied wryly.
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‘You think it was a “we”, rather than a single killer?’ asked Priscilla.
‘Seems more likely, given he was tied up, throttled, beheaded and then buried out in a marsh,’ replied Richard. ‘Though it’s always risky to be dogmatic in this business.’
‘Nothing in the way of old injuries or scars, I suppose?’ asked Angela.
‘Unfortunately not. Almost the only surviving skin was on the back, so the abdominal area was missing, which might have had operation scars. All we have is that tattoo.’
‘Well, let’s hope the police have some luck with Batman!’ said Angela, pulling off her gloves.
Two days later and a hundred miles away, they were not having much luck with anything. The police house in Upper Borth was far too small for an incident room, so one had been set up in a disused hut about half a mile from the place where the body was exhumed. An army camp had been built during the war for some undisclosed purpose on the sand dunes at Ynys Las, near the top end of Borth’s great beach. Though it had been closed some years earlier, several of the long timber huts were still intact and with the power and phone reconnected, the police had installed the essentials they needed — trestle tables, chairs and the vital kettle and teapot.
As predicted, the chief constable had sought the help of the Metropolitan Police and late that afternoon, a detective superintendent and a sergeant arrived from New Scotland Yard, after an arduous train journey to Aberystwyth via Shrewsbury. Meirion Thomas picked them up at the station and took them to the Headquarters on the seafront to meet the chief and his deputy.
‘We’ve put you up in a hotel here in town for tonight, then comfortable digs in Borth from tomorrow,’ explained the local DI.
In the chief constable’s office, over coffee and biscuits, the London man, Paul Vickers and his assistant, DS Howard Squires, were given an account of the case, though so far, it was not very much. Paul Vickers listened impassively, leaving his questions until the end. He was not all that pleased at being sent down to a remote part of Wales at such short notice, especially as he had promised to take his fiance to the opera at Covent Garden on Wednesday and had already bought expensive tickets. But his name was next on the rota of senior detectives to be farmed out to the provinces and having an eye on promotion to chief superintendent, he could not afford to be difficult about it.
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