‘Who’s coming with me tomorrow?’ was his first question, as he entered the laboratory. Angela pre-empted any discussion by nominating Priscilla.
‘She’s the obvious person for this one, with her anthropology and museum experience,’ she declared. ‘Anyway, someone has to look after the shop and I’m still settling in after being away for weeks.’
Richard suspected that she was being diplomatic in not wanting her friend to feel as if she was being sidelined, now that she herself was back in harness, but it did seem sensible to take someone who had the most appropriate knowledge.
‘An early start, then,’ he said briskly. ‘If it proves to be more than a dead sheep, we may have to stay the night, so throw your toothbrush into a case. It’s at least three hours’ drive from here to Aber, so wagons roll soon after seven o’clock.’
Next day, the autumn dawn had grown into a red sky over the eastern rim of the valley as the black Humber Hawk set off northwards. Richard Pryor had bought it second-hand when he came home from Singapore almost a year before and, like his vines, it was his pride and joy. The car purred its way towards Monmouth and he settled back for the long ride, feeling contented at doing a job he relished, in spite of its often morbid and sometimes distasteful nature. He was glad to be back in his native Wales after fourteen years in the Far East — and glad also to be sitting alongside such an attractive and vivacious woman as Priscilla Chambers. Today she was dressed in gear suitable for digging corpses from a swamp, but still managed to look elegant. She wore a military-looking raincoat over a green roll-neck sweater and grey trousers. If necessary, her ‘sensible’ shoes could be replaced by a pair of wellingtons carried in the car boot.
Although Priscilla had been working at Garth House for the past three weeks, he had not learned much about her personal affairs, though he did not doubt that Sian and Moira had already extracted every detail of her life story. However, on the long journey across the centre of Wales, there was plenty of time to talk and Richard soon learned that Priscilla was born in Gibraltar of a military family, her father being a retired major in the Intelligence Corps. He was now teaching mathematics in an Oxford school, where her mother ran a small secretarial agency.
Priscilla had spent most of the war years in a boarding school in Gloucestershire, then in 1944 went to university on a scholarship. Some mental arithmetic told him that she must be just over thirty years of age, a decade younger than himself.
For her part, the drive gave Priscilla the chance to fill in the gaps in her knowledge of Richard. From laboratory gossip, she knew some of the facts, but by the time they reached Cardiganshire, she knew that he was the son of a retired family doctor in Merthyr Tydfil, where he had been brought up. Grammar school was followed by medical college in Cardiff before the war, then a couple of years’ pathology training before being called up. He spent the war as an RAMC officer in military hospitals in Egypt and Ceylon before being finally posted to Singapore, when it was reclaimed from the Japanese. Taking local release with the rank of major there in 1946, he stayed on as a civilian pathologist in the General Hospital, doing coroner’s and police work. This came with a part-time teaching post in the university and he ended his nine-year’s service with a professorship in forensic medicine. A very generous redundancy payment had coincided with his aunt’s bequest of Garth House and he had returned at the beginning of the year to set up his private forensic consultant practice with Angela. They had hatched his idea after meeting at a forensic congress the previous year. Angela was disillusioned with her job at the Metropolitan Police Laboratory, where there was little prospect of further promotion, so she threw in her lot with Richard and moved to the Wye Valley. That was six months ago and after a hesitant start, they were now becoming well established, gathering work from coroners, solicitors and the police, as well as Richard’s part-time contract as a lecturer at the medical school in Bristol.
The roads were quiet and the journey passed pleasantly, Priscilla being enthralled by the lovely countryside and then the lonely hills beyond Rhyader. Like Angela, she was a Thames Valley girl and the Cambrian mountains were a surprise to her.
They rolled into Aberystwyth before eleven o’clock and found the police station on the elegant promenade, housed in a large granite building which used to be the Queen’s Hotel. The detective inspector met them and took them to his tiny office in the Victorian building, where they were obliged to have a cup of police tea, almost strong enough to hold a spoon upright.
‘My sergeant and few uniformed officers have gone up there already,’ he explained. ‘We’ve also asked a lady from the archaeology department of the college to attend, as she seemed very keen to be there.’
As they went down to the cars in the back yard, Priscilla thought that local archaeologists would be over the moon if an Iron Age bog body was found on their patch, but Richard still maintained that whatever it was, the presence of adipocere was probably too recent for that. They followed the police car in the Humber and, half an hour later, pulled up behind two vans and a pre-war Hillman Minx parked on the road between Llancynfelyn and Ynys Las, the nearest point to where a group of distant figures were congregated on the bog.
Taking Meirion Thomas’s advice, the two from Tintern took their rubber boots from the back of the car and pulled them on, then followed him across the fields. Richard carried his square black ‘murder bag’ with his instruments, while Priscilla had a bag with a camera and specimen jars.
Gwyn Parry, the detective sergeant, introduced himself and Doctor Eva Boross, the archaeologist. She was a cheerful, rotund woman of about sixty, with wild grey hair and fingers stained brown from a lifetime of heavy smoking. Wearing a plaid lumberjacket and a pair of riding breeches, she was quite unlike Richard’s mental image of a Hungarian, but her accent was still strong after twenty years in Britain. With their similar professional backgrounds, Priscilla took to her immediately.
‘We started digging already,’ announced Eva. ‘The core sample was obtained from three feet down, so with care, nothing will be lost until we get near that depth.’
The posts and ropes had been moved further out and Doctor Boross had marked out a ten-foot square with pegs and white tape, centred on the borehole. Inside this, a couple of brawny policemen had dug out a deep hole four feet across. A portable pump, borrowed from the Fire Service, was chugging away nearby, discharging coffee-brown water from the hole into a pond fifty yards away. The diggers were putting the black peat into wheelbarrows, which another two constables were wheeling away to be placed carefully on a large tarpaulin laid well outside the working area.
‘That’s in case we need to go back to it and look through it in detail,’ Eva Boross explained. ‘Though trying to sieve this wet, fibrous stuff would be a nightmare!’
She retired to a safe distance to light a cigarette and meticulously dropped her ash back into the packet, though Richard thought this was a little overcautious. Even if the remains below were not all that ancient, he doubted whether a little fag ash on the surface would hinder any investigation.
‘How far down have they got?’ asked Richard, moving nearer the edge of the hole to take a look.
‘Most of the way, but keeping the bottom in sight is the problem, with the water oozing in all the time,’ said Gwyn Parry.
Shovelling more carefully now, the constables went down another six inches, then came up for a breather. Plastered up to their knees in black peat, they had a rest, then took over the wheelbarrows, while the other pair went down the hole.
For almost another hour, Priscilla and Richard waited patiently as relays of constables slid into the excavation, eventually using bricklayer’s trowels rather than spades. The lady from the university used a long measuring stick at intervals, to check the distance from the surface to the bottom of the pit.
‘Must be very near now,’ she muttered. ‘Those botany people were quite clear about the depth of their borehole.’
She had hardly spoken before one digger, almo
st doubled up in the hole, gave a muffled shout.
‘I can feel something here! It’s hard, like a stone.’ His pal decided to clamber up to the surface, to give the other man more room. Everyone came nearer, craning their heads to see down the pit, but the policeman’s large body and the muddy water defeated them.
‘Be careful the pump doesn’t suck anything out except water,’ cautioned Richard, imagining vital trace evidence vanishing down the pipe.
‘Easier said than done, sir! But I’ll dig a sump well away to one side and put the nozzle in that.’
A few moments later, he reported that the suction was gaining on the seeping water table and that when he momentarily swept the water away with his hand, he could see a blackened mound alongside a hard whitish thing.
Doctor Boross looked at Richard.
‘I think one of us should take over the digging now, doctor. Perhaps you should have a look first, to see what you can make of it?’
Thankfully, the constable climbed out of the excavation and Richard took his place. He wore a pair of old army jungle-green trousers inside his wellingtons and an even older leather jacket that he had had since his student days.
Immediately he was up to his ankles in water, but the powerful pump was more than holding its own, so that the level was slowly dropping back to the deep hole that the constable had dug in one corner. He could see a bulge in the bottom mud and pulled on a pair of thick rubber gloves that he had in his jacket pocket.
Feeling the lump, his fingers slid over a rounded mass and then, beneath the remaining water, encountered a hard structure, as unyielding as iron. Returning to the mound, he pressed into it and felt a slight indentation form under his fingers. More exploring under the surface gave him some idea of what was lurking beneath.
‘It’s a body alright,’ he reported. ‘I can feel bone — and from the shape, it’s certainly no sheep!’
There was a buzz of excitement from the watchers gathered around the excavation. ‘Is it human, d’you think?’ asked Eva Boross.
‘Can’t tell yet. We need to get more water out and a lot more peat.’
Richard asked for a trowel and when one was handed down, he began carefully digging around the sides of the bulge, as the pump continued to gurgle the opaque water from the sump. After a few minutes, he managed to free both sides of the protrusion, before again feeling around whatever was being exposed.
‘I’m sure this is a buttock!’ he proclaimed. ‘I can feel a small hole on top that I can get my finger into. It must be where their drill punched into it.’
‘So what shape is the hard stuff?’ demanded Priscilla, leaning over the edge of the cavity. Like the Hungarian lady, she was itching to get down there and use her archaeological talents.
Richard slid his hand lower, now getting the impression that the axis of the body was diagonally across the excavation. ‘I can feel a thick shaft of bone — and, yes, that must be a femoral head!’
This was the large knob on the top of thigh bone, where it fits into the hip joint. He straightened up, his back aching. Waving the trowel at the detective inspector, he sounded almost exultant as he confirmed that now the police had something definite to report to the coroner.
‘It’s certainly a human corpse — though God knows how long it’s been here!’
He clambered back out of the excavation, his old trousers plastered with black mud, for a discussion on how they should proceed.
‘I suppose now it must be treated as a crime scene, doctor,’ suggested Meirion Thomas. ‘Just in case it’s not a historical find.’
‘And if it is ancient, it needs an equally meticulous procedure,’ countered Doctor Boross firmly. ‘Perhaps Doctor Chambers and I should take over from here; we know how it needs to be done.’
They compromised on a combined operation and while both a police officer and Priscilla took some photographs of the first appearance of the cadaver, the remorseless action of the pump took yet more water from the hole, so that the mound that Richard thought was someone’s backside came more clearly into view.
It was now well past lunchtime and the DI called a halt, while a constable went back to the vans and returned with a large box of sandwiches, small pork pies and four Thermos flasks of tea.
‘We’re certainly not going to finish this tonight,’ said Richard Pryor. ‘We can’t just drag this out of the ground piecemeal. It will have to be removed as intact as we can manage.’
Priscilla and her new-found friend Eva agreed. ‘It will have to be moved on to some form of support. Perhaps a door or some planks would do,’ suggested the older archaeologist.
‘That means the hole will have to be enlarged to make more room,’ said Priscilla. ‘If it’s human, we need well over six feet clearance.’
Sergeant Parry gave some instructions to a constable who was driving one of the vans and he hurried off, with instructions to return to Aberystwyth and come back with a couple more men and some equipment suitable for moving the body.
Then, eating and drinking finished, they went back to the excavation, where the pump had now almost dried out the area around the remains.
‘We’ll have a go at it for a bit,’ declared Eva Boross and with Priscilla on the other side, they began carefully trowelling away peat into buckets, gradually exposing the corpse. Richard watched intently from above and saw the outline of a body slowly appear. It was obviously lying on its front, the buttocks and back exposed first.
When the slimy peat was wiped away with a hand, the wrinkled skin appeared almost black, though splits here and there allowed greyish adipocere to show through.
There was a circular hole in one buttock, where the botanist’s coring tube had penetrated, before hitting the underlying bone of the pelvis.
‘The legs are in a bad state, Richard!’ Priscilla called up, after another hour’s work. She was concentrating on the lower end of the body, while Doctor Boross was freeing the shoulders. ‘They are fraying off below thigh level, just bones and some tendon.’
‘Best leave them alone for now,’ he advised, peering down at what she was doing. ‘We’ll have to leave them in a block of peat and slide the whole thing on to whatever they bring as a support.’
A couple of feet away, Eva Boross was also having problems. ‘The skin is very friable, like wet paper,’ she reported. ‘The arms must be tucked under the body. And so far, I haven’t located the head, though I’ve cleared the peat almost to the neck.’
The photographer was taking pictures every few minutes to record the progress of the exposure of the tattered corpse. The light was now fading as the afternoon wore on, so at intervals the scene was illuminated by the artificial lightning of a flashgun.
When the two women came up for a rest, two policemen enlarged the edges of the hole to make more room for removing the remains. The van came back with the top of a trestle table and some planks, together with a couple more muscular PCs.
When Doctor Boross went back down the hole after a quick smoke, she soon discovered two disturbing facts.
‘Doctor Pryor, there’s some thin rope here, coming round from the front, it seems. Very frayed, and seems fixed underneath.’
Richard looked down at a ragged end that she held up.
‘There was a tiny strand of what could have come from that, caught up in the botanist’s sample,’ he said.
‘Some of the foreign bog bodies were strangled with a cord ligature,’ she said hopefully. ‘I’ll try to expose the neck area. I’m almost up to it.’
A few moments later, she made another more grisly discovery.
‘There’s no head here! I’ve probed up beyond the neck and there’s nothing there except soft peat.’
Priscilla squelched up from her end and after feeling around, confirmed Eva’s finding. ‘Nothing there, Richard! Unless it’s buried some distance away, it’s certainly not attached to the body. I can feel the ends of the lower neck vertebrae with my fingers.’
With light rapidly fading under a le
aden sky, it was obvious that they could do little more that day except secure the site, so after a discussion, they turned the pump off and laid planks across the hole, with the trestle holding down a large tarpaulin.
‘I’ll leave an officer on watch all night,’ said Meirion Thomas. ‘He can sit in a van up on the road and keep an eye out, just in case anyone comes nosing around.’
The sergeant and his constable from Borth had been around all day, keeping a few curious spectators away from the operation. Now the local PC was deputed for the night watch while the other uniformed men went back to Aberystwyth.
‘We’ll have to stay somewhere overnight, Inspector,’ said Richard. ‘It’s impossible to go back to Monmouthshire and then return by morning.’
‘I’d love to put you up myself,’ said Eva Boross. ‘But I’ve only got a two-roomed flat near the university.’
‘Don’t worry, we can find you somewhere here in Borth,’ said the detective inspector. ‘A lot of bed and breakfasts will be shut in the off season, but I’m sure Sergeant Edwards here knows someone who can put you up. I’ll have to go back to Aber now to report to the chief and notify the coroner.’
The sergeant, who knew every soul in the little seaside town, had no difficulty in finding them lodgings and after dumping their muddy boots into the back of the Humber, he drove back with them to a line of tall boarding houses facing the sea across the main road. Edwards went into one, part of a three-storey terrace, and conferred with the lady who answered the door.
Within minutes, they were receiving a warm welcome from Mrs Gwenllian Evans, a genial lady of ample proportions, who showed them to a pair of rooms on the first floor, which had a superb view of the twilit sea just across the road.
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