Angela had left the ‘Met Lab’ earlier that year to go into partnership with Richard Pryor when they founded this private forensic consultancy. Moira, who lived alone in the next house down the valley, had impulsively taken on the job of part-time housekeeper and rapidly slid into being their typist as well, reviving her spirits from the loneliness that followed the death of her husband in an industrial accident.
‘I’m sure they won’t turf you out into the street tonight, Priscilla!’ said Sian. ‘Perhaps you can stay with us for good?’
Moira managed to suppress a frown as she went through to her office next door. Apart from the fact that there was not enough work for two biologists, the prospect of both Angela and Priscilla living in Garth House under the same roof as Richard was not one that appealed to her. She would have been reassured to hear the conversation that continued after she left the laboratory, for Priscilla, as she continued to pipette sera into her banks of little tubes, replied to the suggestion that she stayed on in the Wye Valley.
‘It’s great here, Sian, you’ve all been so kind to me. But I don’t want to stay in forensic science permanently. I’d like to get back to my first love, anthropology. That’s why I’ve been dithering around lately, waiting for a vacancy to turn up somewhere.’
The technician loved a good gossip and this was a chance to delve some more. ‘I’m not quite clear what you did before this,’ she asked.
Priscilla filled her last tube, then swung around on her swivel chair, her long auburn hair swirling above the collar of her white coat.
‘I did a degree in physical anthropology in London, then my doctorate on blood types in different ethnic groups. After that, I went to the Natural History Museum in Kensington for a while, then moved to the police laboratory in New Scotland Yard, doing this sort of work.’ She waved a manicured hand at the tubes and bottles on her bench top.
Sian listened avidly to this recital of achievement. ‘And then to Australia and back!’ she said enviously. ‘You’ve never been married?’
Priscilla shook her head. ‘Never seemed to have time – or stayed long enough in one place. Plenty of chaps, though!’ she added with a smile.
‘My life has been deadly dull compared with yours,’ sighed Sian regretfully. ‘I left school soon after the war to work in a hospital lab in Newport and stayed there until I had the chance to come here. I love this forensic work so much that I’m doing an external degree in biochemistry now.’
‘What about chaps, though?’ called Priscilla over her shoulder, as she swung back to get on with her work.
‘Nothing serious yet, though there’s a fellow on my day-release course that I get on with very well.’
Their tête-à-tête was interrupted by the door into the hall opening to admit Richard Glanville Pryor, the founder of the Garth House venture. Tall and wiry, he wore a rather crumpled suit of fawn linen, with button-down pockets and a half-belt at the back. It was one of those he had brought back from Singapore, which the ladies claimed made him look like a big-game hunter. Under a bush of brown hair, his lean face, which usually creased so easily into a grin, was looking serious for once.
‘Just had a phone call from the police. Curious business! Sounds as if it might be right up your street, Priscilla.’
Moira came back in through the office door, clutching some unnecessary papers as an excuse to hear what was going on.
‘Why me, Richard?’ asked the glamorous serologist.
The doctor squatted on the corner of the big table that filled the large bay window. ‘There’s some suggestion that it might be a bog body, though I doubt it very much.’
Priscilla’s hazel eyes lit up at the mention of these curiosities.
‘A bog body! It would be a first in Wales, then. I’ve read a great deal about them. I even met Professor Glob once, at a congress.’
At Sian’s insistence, she had to explain briefly about these ancient corpses, found mainly in Northern Europe, assumed to be sacrificial victims who were dumped in marshes, where their tissues were preserved for centuries by the tannins of the peat and the acid bog water. Professor Glob was the doyen on the subject, a Danish archaeologist who had studied a number found in his homeland.
‘As I said, it sounds highly unlikely to me,’ continued Richard. ‘But the cops in Aberystwyth want an opinion. The forensic lab in Cardiff suggested me, as I’m now on their Home Office list.’
He told them the story, such as it was. ‘So far, the only evidence is a bit of tissue accidentally recovered by a botanist. The police sent it to Cardiff, mainly to check whether it came from a dead sheep. But it seems that a precipitation test showed that it was human.’
‘So what’s going to happen next?’ asked Moira, as intrigued as the rest of them with such an unusual story.
‘I agreed that we’d do what we could for them, but we wanted to look at the sample ourselves first. The police are bringing it up from Cardiff in the morning. If it’s definitely human, then I suspect they’ll ask us to look at the body, if they can find it.’
‘What do you want me to do?’ asked Priscilla. ‘Angela will be back at work tomorrow, so she may want to deal with it, especially as now I may soon be moving on.’
Richard laid a hand on her shoulder, raising another covert frown on Moira’s face.
‘She’ll want a day or two to settle in, I expect. Then we’ll decide how to play it. If our own tests on the sample show it to be a sheep or something, that’s the end of it, but the Home Office lads in Cardiff are unlikely to have got it wrong.’
The matter was left in abeyance and was soon overshadowed by the sound of Angela’s little Renault coming up the steep slope of the drive from the main road below. They all trooped down the corridor past the kitchen to the back door, to greet her as she stopped in the yard behind and then reversed into the open garages beneath the coach house.
She stepped out, as elegant as her friend Priscilla, both of whom were classy dressers. A few years older than Priscilla, Doctor Bray was tall, slim and had a mane of light brown hair in place of the striking auburn of her friend. Handsome rather than pretty, she had the features of what the somewhat socialistic Sian thought of as a typical English ‘hunting, shooting and fishing’ aristocrat. This didn’t stop the technician impulsively running forward to give her boss a welcoming hug.
‘Great to have you back, doctor! We’ve all missed you.’
Priscilla gave her a more restrained peck on the check, being careful of their make-up, and Moira went to squeeze her hand in both of hers and enquire after her mother.
Richard let the women do their thing, before going over and putting a welcoming arm around her shoulders.
‘Time for a cup of tea before you get back to work, Angela!’ he joked and steered her towards the back door. There was one more greeting to be offered en route, this time from the edge of the four acres that lay behind the house. Their handyman, gardener and occasional chauffeur was Jimmy Jenkins, a middle-aged scruff whom Richard had inherited along with the large house after the death of his aged aunt.
‘Good to see you back, Doc,’ he called, half a Woodbine bobbing on his lip as he spoke. ‘Hope your mam is better! I’ll bring your luggage in from the car.’
Angela smiled as she gave him a wave. She was glad to be back amongst her good friends, even though she loved the comforts of her family home, a large stud farm in Berkshire where her father was a successful breeder of racehorses. Their first stop was the big kitchen at the back of the house, where Moira bustled about making tea so that they could hear Angela’s news and bring her up to date with events at Garth House.
Eventually, the three doctors adjourned to Angela’s study-cum-sitting room, on the other side of the front hall from the laboratory. It had a matching bay window looking out over the valley, with the little-used front door between.
Priscilla came directly to the point. ‘Now that you’re back, I feel redundant,’ she said. ‘I’d better start making plans to move out.’
Priscilla looked from one to the other. ‘I’d love to – but I really think I should get back to London and keep looking for a job in archaeology. That’s where most opportunities are likely to arise.’
She had been lodging in a bed and breakfast in the village half a mile away and, though it was quite comfortable, she missed the bustle of the metropolis, unlike Richard and Angela, who had settled happily into these beautiful rural surroundings.
Since they first moved in the previous May, they had lived together in the big house, no doubt giving ammunition for the village tongue-waggers in Tintern Parva, just down the valley. However, the arrangement had remained professional and platonic, though there had been a couple of occasions when the conventions had been a little strained.
Angela and Richard were equal partners in the venture, as when they had set up their partnership earlier that year, Richard contributed both his golden handshake from Singapore University, where he had been Professor of Forensic Medicine, as well as the house he had been left by his aunt. On her part, Angela had put the proceeds of the sale of her London flat into the pot and with the added help of a modest mortgage, they had raised the capital needed to make some alterations to the rooms and equip the laboratory.
‘Then stay until the end of this month, at least,’ suggested Angela and, without more persuasion, her friend agreed to remain for a couple more weeks.
When their business discussions were done, Richard told Angela of current cases and especially the odd request he had had from Cardiganshire about the alleged ‘bog body’. Like Priscilla, his partner knew quite a lot about the finds reported in Denmark and elsewhere, which were obviously of considerable interest to all forensic biologists.
‘Let’s see tomorrow whether it’s a sheep or King Arthur!’ said Angela, happy to be back in harness herself.
The tests next day confirmed that it was not a sheep and, at a stretch, it could be King Arthur, for at least it was human.
At about ten o’clock next morning, a Triumph motorcycle roared up to the house and a helmeted police officer handed over a small package in return for a signature on his exhibit docket. Richard was due to go down to Chepstow to carry out a couple of routine post-mortems for the coroner at the public mortuary there, but he could not resist waiting to have a look at the specimen. The others crowded around, even Moira, who left her typewriter to have a look at such a curious sample.
Richard took the small glass bottle from the plywood box that protected it and found a sheet of paper wrapped around it. It was a note on Home Office letter-heading from Philip Rees, one of the forensic scientists at the Cardiff laboratory, whom they had met in a case a month or so earlier.
‘It just says that they did a precipitin test and it was unequivocally human tissue,’ he announced. ‘He also says there’s a small piece of cord as well, but they did nothing with that, as they were only asked to carry out a species identification.’
He peered into the bottle, then handed it to Angela, who diplomatically gave it to Priscilla to deal with. With the others watching, she carefully slid the contents out into a shallow glass dish. A greyish cylinder sat there, with a leathery cap. A short length of thin cord lay alongside it.
‘Not very exciting, is it?’ said Sian. ‘Looks like a lump of dirty candle grease.’
Richard picked up the dish and held it to his nose. ‘Adipocere, as I suspected from the story.’
He then had to explain to Sian and Moira. ‘When body fat is left for a long time in moist surroundings, it’s often converted into a kind of soap, which can persist for centuries. But bog bodies are usually around two thousand years since death and I just don’t know if adipocere would last that long.’
‘What about the scrap of string?’ asked Priscilla.
Richard shrugged. ‘I’ll leave that to you clever ladies. If we confirm it is human – and I’ve no reason to doubt Cardiff – then there’ll have to be an exhumation. Maybe then the reason for the string will become clear.’
‘What about that dark bit on top of the fatty stuff?’ asked Priscilla.
‘Could be skin, I suppose. Can you snip a bit off one edge and give it to Sian to process for histology? We can have a look under the microscope then, see what the structure is like.’
He looked at his watch and hurriedly left for his post-mortem session. Angela, not wanting to appear as if she was supervising her friend, left to do her unpacking upstairs and Moira drifted back to the office before starting on lunch, as her duties included making a light meal for the doctors at midday and something more substantial in the evening. Cleaning, washing and bed-making were now the province of the appropriately-named Mrs Daley, from the village.
Sian began processing the skin fragment by dropping it into formalin, then had some spare time. She wandered over to Priscilla and watched her deft fingers manipulating small pipettes and a rack of narrow tubes. Sian marvelled at how she could keep her long red-varnished nails so perfect when handling glassware and chemicals.
‘What exactly is this test?’ she asked. ‘I’ve heard of it, but I’m not quite sure how it works.’
‘It’s been around for ages,’ answered the biologist, always happy to instruct. She pointed to a rack of labelled vials, taken from the refrigerator. ‘These are made from the blood of rabbits immunized with sera from different animals, including humans. A small quantity is injected, which doesn’t hurt the rabbit, but stimulates the production of antibodies specific for the proteins of that particular beast.’
Sian nodded, she knew about antigen-antibody reactions from her time in the hospital laboratory.
‘How do you get a result, then?’
‘Basically, an extract is made from the test sample and layered on top of each specific serum in a tube. If an antigen for a particular species is present, then a white line appears at the junction between the two fluids, due to protein being precipitated.’
She added small amounts of the fluids into a series of tubes as she talked. ‘In this case, I’ll have to get rid of all this fat first and get a clear solution. Let it incubate for a few hours and see what happens. Naturally, we have to set up controls and blanks to make sure the result is genuine.’
It was the afternoon before all this was done and Priscilla was able to confirm that the substance was definitely human in origin by the time they assembled for tea in the ‘staff room’, between the kitchen and the staircase that went up from the centre of the hall.
‘I’d better confirm to the cops in Aberystwyth that they’ve probably got an unexplained body on their patch,’ said Richard. ‘They’ll have to inform the coroner first of all.’
‘Could it be an accident or a natural death?’ asked Moira, pouring Brooke Bond into the cups from a large brown pot.
‘Could be, I suppose. But when, that’s the question? It was about three feet down and it takes a long time for that thickness of peat to accumulate if the deceased just fell on to the surface.’
‘Someone would have seen him then,’ objected the ever-practical Sian. ‘Someone must have dug a hole to put him in.’
Priscilla looked doubtful. She had plenty of experience of holes in the ground from her work as an archaeologist.
‘You can’t be certain about that. Bogs change all the time and there may have been a pool there at the time he was dumped, which would have put him in deeper.’
‘We’re saying “he”,’ said Angela. ‘It could be a woman.’
‘True enough, replied Richard, taking one of Moira’s Welsh cakes. ‘But what about this bit of string, Priscilla?’
She had been cast as the expert on an
cient bodies, with her qualifications as an anthropologist.
‘Some of the other bog people were found either with their throats cut or with a ligature, presumably having been strangled,’ she replied. ‘But I think Richard’s right, we won’t know until it’s dug up!
THREE
After he had the phone call from Garth House, Meirion Thomas knew he was in for a busy time. He was a detective inspector in Aberystwyth, the only one that the rural county police force possessed. It effectively made him the head of the CID, commanding a couple of sergeants and a few detective constables.
Though covering a large area, it was sparsely populated, except in the summer, when holidaymakers flocked to the beautiful coast and mountains. Meirion’s usual diet of criminal investigations consisted of housebreaking, theft of outboard motors and sheep stealing. To have a buried corpse was indeed a novelty.
As Richard Pryor had anticipated, Meirion’s first task was to notify the coroner, a local solicitor in the town. This gentleman was a little hesitant about taking official notice of the matter, as he felt that so far, the evidence of a corpse buried near Borth was a little flimsy. He recalled reading about a fellow coroner in London, who some years ago had declined to hold an inquest on a decayed foot found inside a shoe. It had been washed up on the banks of the Thames, but that coroner had decided that he had no proof that the owner of the foot was necessarily dead!
Cautiously, his Aberystwyth counterpart asked the detective to keep him informed of any developments and Meirion went off to arrange for the two young botanists from the university to revisit the scene next day.
Early in the afternoon, he picked them up from Penglais, the hill overlooking the town where many of the college buildings stood, and took Louise Palmer and her student away in a black Wolseley driven by his sergeant, Gwyn Parry. A small van followed them, containing a couple of uniformed constables and some scene equipment. They drove north up the main A487 road through Bow Street, then turned left on to a minor road that looped down towards Borth. After Louise’s description of where in the bog they had made their discovery, the DI parked just beyond the hamlet of Llancynfelyn and they walked across sloping fields down to the level plain of the bog. Geraint Williams soon found the spot where his ragged piece of gorse was still sticking up from the bore hole.
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