‘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.
‘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 fiancé 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.
When Meirion Thomas had finished and the DCC had added a few more words, the London man laid his hand on the thin file that he had been given, which contained a summary of the investigation.
‘So what have you managed to do so far?’ he asked, trying to keep any condescension from his voice.
‘All the usual preliminary stuff, without getting a whiff of a result,’ replied the local CID man. ‘House to house in Borth and the nearby villages, though without a photograph or any sort of physical description of the chap or even his clothing, it was a waste of time.’
‘The only thing we have is that Batman tattoo,’ added Gwyn Price. ‘But it didn’t ring a bell with anyone – though of course, being up near the shoulder, it would never have been visible unless he was stripped or in bathing trunks.’
‘What about missing persons in the area?’ ventured Squires. David Jones jumped back into the discussion, anxious to assert his rank.
‘Trouble is, what area? And what time frame? We’ve got a few people reported missing in the county over the past ten years, but with a large summer tourist influx, the population is very fluid.’
Paul Vickers, a large, heavily handsome man of thirty-nine, with black hair and an expensive suit, pondered the answers.
‘So what have you got on his body and time of death?’ he demanded of Meirion.
‘The pathologist says it’s impossible to tell when he died to within a good many years, because of the preservative effect of the bog. But the tattoo must put some limit on it, when we can get some more information about this damned cartoon character.’
‘What about physical description?’
‘You’ll see tomorrow that he was little more than bones and some skin, as well as being minus his head, so the pathologist can only estimate that he was around five-feet eight in height, give or take a couple of inches, which is not a lot of use. No other distinguishing marks, he said.’
‘Who is this pathologist? Is he used to this sort of case?’ asked the sergeant, in a tone that suggested that civilization petered out west of Reading.
Meirion Thomas jumped to defend Richard Pryor.
‘He’s a Home Office pathologist and, in fact, was a professor of forensic pathology. Not only that, but he had another lady scientist with him, who used to work in your laboratory in London.’
Vickers sat up in his chair and looked intently at the detective inspector. ‘What was her name? Was it Doctor Bray?’
His voice was suddenly tense, but Meirion shook his head. ‘No, it was Chambers; she said she specialized in anthropology.’
Sergeant Squires nodded. ‘I saw her at a scene in Battersea once. A very attractive lady indeed!’
Vickers seemed to relax. ‘The pathologist must have been Richard Pryor, the one that came back from Singapore. I met him briefly in a shooting near Gloucester some months ago.’
The social chat over, there was little else to be done except arrange for the two London men to be picked up at their hotel in the morning and taken to the incident room at Borth. The local DI and sergeant dropped them off at the Bellevue Hotel, just along the seafront from the police headquarters, then went to the nearest pub for a pint before going wearily to their own homes.
‘That pair think we are still in the colonies,’ grumbled Gwyn Parry. ‘Condescending couple of bastards!’
Antipathy between county police and the Metropolitan Police was traditional. Some forces felt it was an admission of inferiority to have to ‘call in the Yard’, but Meirion Thomas took a more phlegmatic view of the situation.
‘It’s no good getting uptight about them, Gwyn. There’s no way we can carry on with this on our own. This fellow could have been brought to Borth from anywhere and dumped in that bog. We can’t go looking all over Great Britain for him!’
Next morning, while Vickers and his sergeant were travelling towards Borth in the back seat of a police car, Richard Pryor was sitting in his office in Garth House. He was holding up a large X-ray film to the window, so that Angela and Priscilla could see it against the daylight outside. They all looked intently at the dense white image of the thigh bone, which contrasted sharply with the black of the surrounding celluloid.
‘What d’you make of that, ladies?’ he asked chirpily. Angela could tell that he was pleased with what he had discovered, but she was not going to give in easily.
‘I suppose the radiologist in Hereford told you what it was, clever-sticks!’ she chided.
Richard pretended to be affronted. ‘He only confirmed what I already suspected! Ever heard of Albers-Schonberg?’
‘Sounds like an Austrian composer or a psychiatrist,’ suggested Priscilla, facetiously. Richard grinned and waggled the film in his hand.
‘No, he was a German radiologist, who described this disease in 1904. It’s better known as “Marble Bone Disease”, for obvious reasons.’
‘It’s not obvious to me,’ said Angela, stoutly. ‘Pris and I are proper doctors, not physicians!’
Richard became serious a
nd pointed to the dense white shaft of the bone.
‘We thought the femur was very heavy and with good reason. This is a quite rare genetic defect in which the bone becomes extraordinarily dense and thickened. Look, there’s hardly any marrow cavity down the middle of the bone. It’s all overgrown and as hard as a rock – in fact, the modern name for the disease is “osteopetrosis”, meaning rock-like bones.’
‘So what makes you so excited about this, apart from your academic interest?’ asked Priscilla. Richard dropped the film on to his desk.
‘Well, because it’s so rare. Maybe there’s a medical record somewhere of this chap, if he was ever seen in a hospital. Although the bone is so hard, it’s brittle, so they get a lot of fractures. And it seriously affects the skull as well, so if they ever find a spare head somewhere, we could match it to this fellow.’
The two scientists were quite impressed after all.
‘Quite a unique pair of identifying features, Richard,’ said Angela. ‘Albers-Schonberg disease and a Batman tattoo!’
‘Better than nothing, which is what we had when we dug him up,’ said Richard defensively. ‘Something useful to tell the cops, anyway.’
Angela hauled herself off the corner of his desk, ready to go back to her work in the laboratory.
‘You said something about possibly telling the age of the body from his bone X-rays . . . any joy there?
‘Not really, according to the radiologist,’ he replied.
‘The presence of this great thickening obscures the details of the internal structure, especially as the marrow cavity is partly obliterated. Normally, the internal architecture of weight-bearing bones is modified as people get older. But he said there was no positive evidence of advanced age, for what that’s worth.’
As the two women went out, he reached for the phone and dialled Aberystwyth, to leave a message for Meirion Thomas to contact him.
The investigators in Borth had just left the hut, to go over to the site of the excavation to show it to the London men. There was nothing really to see, apart from a hole in the ground surrounded by posts and tape, but Meirion Thomas felt that Vickers and his assistant should get a feel for the whole case. Howard Squires was very taken by the panoramic view, which included the huge bog, the sea and the surrounding hills, but his senior officer seemed distracted. He was thinking of a woman, in fact his former fiancée, Angela Bray. Engaged to her for over a year, he had suddenly become infatuated with a younger woman and broken it off. He was well aware how hard Angela had taken it and knew that it was a factor in her decision to leave London and team up with this Welsh pathologist, Richard Pryor. Some months earlier, he had been called to Gloucester to identify a murdered South London criminal, shot in a gang dispute. The pathologist was Richard Pryor and with him had been Angela Bray, which led to an embarrassing confrontation in the mortuary. Now history was in danger of repeating itself and he would have to be careful to avoid meeting her again, as ‘hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’.
‘Guv, have you seen enough here?’ His sergeant’s voice brought him back to earth.
‘Er, yes, I think so.’ With an effort, he focused his attention again and looked around. ‘How would they have brought a body here? The same way as we came?’ he asked the locals.
‘Probably, it’s only a few hundred yards from the road,’ answered the DI. ‘We assume that there were more than one and presumably they had some sort of transport. He was only of average height, but I doubt one person would have struggled here with the corpse.’
‘Unless he was killed right here?’ objected Squires.
Meirion gave a doubtful shrug. ‘Possible, but it seems unlikely that they would cut off his head here and take it away.’
‘The whole damned case seems unlikely!’ muttered Vickers, as he took a last look around.
They went back to the police car and drove back to the headquarters in Aberystwyth, where an office had been put at the disposal of the Scotland Yard men. Vickers said that he would have to make a lot of telephone calls to get things moving, before going back to Borth after lunch.
In Meirion’s own office, a message relayed from the incident room asked him to ring Doctor Richard Pryor and when he got through, the doctor told him of the confirmation of the rare bone disease discovered in the corpse. It took a few minutes for Richard to explain about Albers-Schonberg disease, but the detective quickly grasped its significance.
‘So we’ve got to find a guy somewhere in Britain who had this disease – and find a skull somewhere which also suffered from it?’
‘That’s about it, Inspector! I’ll see if I can find if there is any kind of central medical register of patients who have been diagnosed with marble bone disease. I doubt it, as it’s so uncommon, but there may be some orthopaedic surgeons who have an interest in it.’ He thought for a moment, then went on. ‘It’s a pity that I didn’t find any old fractures in the skeleton. They are quite common in Albers-Schonberg, as the bones are brittle. They could have been matched with the X-rays of patients who had had multiple breaks, but we’re out of luck on that score.’
‘So we’ve got to find a head somewhere?’ repeated the detective.
‘That’s about it – as well as someone with a Batman tattoo!’ agreed Richard. ‘Any progress on discovering when that character became popular?’
‘The chaps from the Yard are looking into that. They’re more likely to have people in London who would know.’
‘Who have they sent down to you?’
When the DI gave the names, he heard a low whistle coming down the phone. ‘Paul Vickers, eh? That’s a coincidence, as I met him not long ago.’
He avoided mentioning that Doctor Bray knew him even better and soon they finished their conversation and rang off. Richard pondered for a moment, then went in search of his business partner. He found her in her room on the other side of the hall, at her desk writing up some paternity results for Moira to type.
‘Got a minute, Angela?’
She looked up and saw that he seemed to have lost some of his usual light-hearted manner.
‘Why so serious? Have you just had our latest bank statement?’
He dropped on to the chair opposite her. ‘Just a word of caution. The police in this bog case have had to call in the Yard to help – and the help they’ve been sent is Paul Vickers. It’s none of my business, but after that incident in Gloucester, I thought I’d better tell you, so that it doesn’t come as a surprise.’
She put down her pen and looked at him fondly.
‘Thanks, Richard. You are a nice chap, aren’t you? But it’s OK, really, I’m rapidly putting all that behind me, thanks to Garth House and all this Wye Valley tranquillity.’
Relieved, his cheerful grin returned. ‘Fine, but perhaps we’d better keep you away from Aberystwyth for the time being.’
Angela reached out a hand and laid it on his arm.
‘Thanks again! But perhaps it would better to keep Priscilla away from him, rather than me. Attractive women act like a magnet on Paul Vickers!’
His duty done, Richard went back to the laboratory to see if Sian had started to decalcify the scrap of bone from the skeleton, so that he could confirm his diagnosis under the microscope, but he had time to hope that the Yard man would have no reason to come down to Garth House.
SIX
A week later, the only development that was made in the ‘Mystery of Borth Bog’, as the Press now called it, was some clarification about the Batman tattoo. Paul Vickers had phoned several of his colleagues in Scotland Yard and asked them to canvas any contacts they had in the newspaper and magazine business in London.
Several days later, he had a call from a detective sergeant who had been sent to lurk in the pubs around Fleet Street, an area which he knew well from other somewhat dubious assignments. He found it a salubrious assignment, as after a few pints of beer and the odd gin and tonic, he learned from men who worked in various publications that Batman was the creation of a couple
of American cartoon writers in 1939, who had sold the idea to Detective Comics and it had taken off from there in the United States.
‘Very popular over there, sir, all through the war and now increasingly so. But virtually unknown here in Britain until recent years.’
Vickers had known that, according to the pathologist, it was unlikely that the body had been killed less than a decade ago, which took the murder back to at least the last year of the war.
‘So do you think anyone over here, that long ago, would been keen enough on Batman to have it as a tattoo?’ he asked, though he realized that the sergeant would have no better guess to make than himself.
‘Well, he could have seen comic books about him brought over by Yank servicemen, I suppose. He could even have been a GI himself, comes to that. God knows there were enough of them knocking about here before D-Day.’
There was nothing else useful that he could tell him and they rang off. Vickers was becoming increasingly frustrated by being stuck in the back of beyond, as he thought of Cardiganshire. He had given up going to the incident room in Borth, as it seemed entirely futile. His sergeant, Howard Squires, stayed there for the sake of appearances, but absolutely no progress was being made. They could not even blame the lack of it on the ‘local yokels’, as Squires called them, as everything that could have been done, had been done. Nothing had come of extensive interviews with the community in Borth and a trawl of the hotels and boarding houses over the wider area had been equally unrewarding. Revisiting all the missing persons enquiries over the past few years again drew a blank. It was difficult to see how it could be otherwise, given that the dates were vague to within a number of years and they had no physical description of the deceased man.
Paul had spoken to his senior officer in London and told him that he felt they were wasting both their time and the Home Office’s money, in keeping them down here.
‘I feel sure this body was dumped a long way from where he was killed, sir,’ he complained. ‘That could have been anywhere in Britain and the investigation could just as well be run from London, as there’s damn-all to be learned down here.’
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