Grounds for Appeal drp-3

by Bernard Knight

  ‘I’ve only got a couple of commercial gentlemen staying tonight,’ she explained. ‘So there’ll be plenty of hot water for a good bath — you look as if you could do with one, with all that old peat on you!’

  She was obviously bursting to know what was going on up on Cors Fachno, the news of which was all over Borth within an hour of the arrival of the police that morning. Taking pity on her, after Priscilla had taken her small case into her room, Richard gave Mrs Evans a short, discreet version, suggesting that it might be a historical burial and that an archaeologist from the university was there with them. He spoke to her in Welsh and was pleased to discover that after years of disuse, he was still reasonably fluent. Both his parents came from Lower Brynaman in Carmarthenshire and at home in Merthyr he had spoken his native language until he left for medical school.

  After he had hauled a decent pair of trousers, pyjamas and dressing gown from his case in the room, he followed the landlady’s instructions to one of the bathrooms down the corridor. Here he washed off the smears of Borth Bog and soaked away the slight aches from even his limited efforts of digging in a cramped hole in the ground.

  He heard the door of Priscilla’s room next door being closed after she returned from her own ablutions and, after a decent interval, went out and tapped on it.

  It opened a short way and he got a glimpse of a silk petticoat and bare feet.

  ‘Sorry, I thought you might be decent by now!’

  She grinned at him. ‘Don’t worry, we’re both doctors, of a sort!’ she joked.

  ‘I wondered if you fancied a walk along the prom and a drink at the nearest pub?’ he offered. ‘The landlady said that supper won’t be until half-past seven.’

  ‘Good idea! Give me ten minutes and I’ll be with you.’

  The walk along the prom turned out to be a trudge in the dark along the top of the two-mile embankment that kept the sea from inundating Borth. Richard entertained Priscilla with the ancient legend of Cantref Gwaelod, the sunken land directly out at sea, flooded when Seithenyn, the drunken custodian of the sluice gates, allowed the sea to inundate it. She listened intently and he realized that part of her undoubted attractiveness was the fact that she made everyone she met feel that they had her undivided attention.

  After a quarter of a mile, they turned around and walked back to the town. Richard had an unerring instinct for good pubs and soon found a cosy snug in the Victoria Inn. In front of an open fire, Priscilla had a gin and tonic and Richard a pint of Felinfoel ale from the famous brewery in Llanelli, the first he had enjoyed for fifteen years.

  She had changed into a different jumper and a flared green skirt, a camel-hair coat thrown over her shoulders. They sat in comfortable companionship, discussing first the events of the day and the prospects for tomorrow.

  Richard felt utterly relaxed in the company of this stunning woman, though little niggles of guilt assailed him from time to time. By the middle of his second pint, he was feeling vaguely disloyal to Angela for being so contented, whilst she was sitting alone in an empty house a hundred miles away. The two women were totally different, he thought. Angela was very good-looking and exceptionally well dressed, but was a rather quiet, reserved woman. When Richard had first met her at that conference, he had thought her something of an ice maiden, though better acquaintance proved that she had considerable warmth under her protective aloofness.

  In spite of living in such close proximity for months, their relationship had never strayed from the strictly platonic, though on a recent visit to London when they went up for a case, the glimmerings of romance had arisen, to be quickly suppressed for the sake of their professional relationship.

  Priscilla, so very attractive in a more overt way, was a talkative, gregarious extrovert, spontaneous in the expression of her feelings. In Singapore, he had had several affairs with expatriates since his divorce, but that had all ended more than a year ago and being with Priscilla now revived feelings that had lain dormant all that time.

  He thought ruefully that perhaps it was just as well that she was not a permanent fixture in Garth House — and that they were not living under the same roof, as he was with Angela. Reluctantly, he looked at his watch.

  ‘Another quarter of an hour and we’d better get back to Mrs Evans,’ he said. ‘Mustn’t miss her meat and two veg after all that digging we’ve done today.’

  Priscilla used the time to discover more about his marital history. Though she had had an outline from Sian, she openly fished for more details and learned that he had met his former wife Miriam in the military hospital in Ceylon where he had been a medical officer during the war.

  ‘She was a civilian radiographer and British girls were in short supply there,’ he explained. ‘We got married Army style, dress uniforms, arcade of swords, the whole works!’

  Priscilla’s big eyes gleamed at the thought of a tropical wedding with all the trimmings. ‘But it didn’t last?’ she asked.

  ‘It was fine for a few years. Then I was posted to Singapore and she came over when things settled down and I got a job in the teaching hospital. But we had no children and she got bored, I suppose. An expat society like that is not the best place for an attractive woman with too much time on her hands.’

  Priscilla took his meaning and smiled sadly. Getting up, she shrugged her coat back over her shoulders and held out a hand to pull him from his chair.

  ‘Come on, professor or major or whatever you are. Time for that meat and veg!’

  As they walked back along the main street in the dark, she slipped her arm easily through his, as the waves hissed and sighed on the shingle beach nearby.

  That night, as he lay on his bed, he was very conscious of the fact that Priscilla was lying only a couple of feet away on the other side of the wall.

  FOUR

  After a hearty Welsh breakfast at seven o’clock, they said goodbye to the amiable Mrs Evans, and in their working clothes once more, set off in the Humber, which had been parked all night in the road outside. When they reached the scene, all the players from the previous day were there, with the addition of the deputy chief constable, who in such a small police force as Cardiganshire, only held the rank of superintendent. David John Jones was a tall, dark man with the deep-set eyes of an Iberian Celt and though he was perfectly civil to them, Richard had the feeling that he was rather suspicious of outsiders from Monmouthshire on his patch. However, when the pathologist spoke to him in his native language, he loosened up and informed Richard that if this turned out to be a suspicious death, Scotland Yard may have to be called in, as their minuscule CID was not manned or equipped to run a murder investigation. This was a standing arrangement made by the Home Office to assist smaller constabularies.

  They moved across to the excavation, where some officers had removed the coverings. Underneath, the hole was still partly full of water, though as the body had already been in a waterlogged swamp for an unknown number of years, another night’s soaking should make no difference. The pump had been started and the level was dropping quickly. As they waited, Richard asked what facilities were available for him once they had got the body out of the marsh.

  ‘There’s a decent mortuary at Aberystwyth General Hospital,’ replied Meirion Thomas. ‘The whole place was rebuilt just before the outbreak of war. That’s where the coroner’s cases are sent.’

  ‘You’ve told the coroner, Meirion?’ demanded David Jones.

  ‘Yes, sir, last night. He said to keep him informed about what we find today.’

  Soon the pump had sucked the water down to the level of the sump and the remains were once again exposed. Richard courteously invited Eva Boross to be first in the hole, as she had the most experience of digging artefacts from the ground.

  ‘Looks much the same as we left it, but some of the peat underneath has washed away while under the water,’ she reported. ‘Best plan is to clear all around now, then undercut the peat until we can slide the whole thing on to that door.’

  It
took an hour to carefully isolate the long rectangle of peat supporting the body, Priscilla and Richard taking turns to relieve Eva of the back-breaking task. Then a couple of PCs manoeuvred the door alongside and gently, the block of peat and its macabre cargo were slid across on to its firm support.

  As the door was manhandled to the surface and laid on the large tarpaulin, the Deputy Chief stared at the body with a frown on his saturnine features. ‘It’s a very dark colour! D’you think he’s black?’

  ‘All those foreign bog bodies were like that,’ said the archaeologist. ‘It’s the tannin in the peat that does it.’

  The detective sergeant was whispering something to his inspector and Meirion turned around to look. Up on the road, there was now a small crowd of onlookers and he saw one with a camera.

  ‘We’ve got an audience already! I’ll bet the Cambrian News has got wind of it by now.’

  The DCC scowled. ‘Damned nuisance, they are! I’ll bet if you found a body in the middle of the Sahara, there’d be people popping up from behind rocks inside half an hour.’

  ‘I can’t examine him properly here, especially with those folks watching, even though they’re a good distance away,’ said Richard Pryor. ‘Better cover him up until we can move him.’

  The edges of the tarpaulin were lifted up and folded over the remains, then secured with cord. Two brawny constables then carried it away like stretcher-bearers to the larger of the two police vans parked up on the road.

  As soon as they had left, Richard stood with Priscilla and Eva Boross, looking down into the now-vacant hole in the peat.

  ‘Definitely no head, unless it’s still buried in the peat well away from the rest of the body,’ he said.

  The archaeologist agreed. ‘To be on the safe side, I feel we should ask the police to clear the peat away for a few feet all around where the body was, even if it means making the hole a lot bigger. You never know what you might find.’

  They collected their kit together and walked back to the cars, where, as David Jones had suspected, a young reporter from the local paper was with the dozen onlookers, ready with his camera and notebook. The detective inspector went over to him and had a few words, which seemed to satisfy him. Wellingtons came off again and Richard was glad that he had lined the floor of his car boot with old newspapers, which caught the worst of the mess.

  They followed the police van back to Aberystwyth where its cargo was taken to the mortuary behind the hospital in North Road. The porter who acted as part-time mortuary assistant looked askance at the peat-stained bundle that was carried in to his clean post-mortem room, though at least it didn’t smell, like some of the drowned bodies belatedly recovered from the sea or the river.

  Sergeant Parry, with that facility that policemen have for cadging from local institutions, took the three scientists off to the doctor’s dining room, where they were served with tea and sandwiches. Home-cured ham and fresh salmon were very welcome, especially at a time when the austerity of post-war rationing was only just disappearing.

  By the time they got back to the mortuary, the porter and two policemen had unwrapped the body, and now the door lay on a slab, already shedding black peat on to the surrounding floor.

  ‘Sorry about the mess,’ apologized Richard, but the porter, a fat man with a shining bald head, had become philosophical about the debris. ‘Don’t worry, doctor, I’ll hose it all down when you’re finished.’

  Richard took a long red-rubber apron from a hook on the wall and hung it from his neck by a chain, another chain hooking it around his waist. Priscilla gave him some rubber gloves from his case and stood by with their camera, to add their own record to those taken by the police photographer. Meirion Thomas, Gwyn Parry and Eva Boross formed the audience, plus a couple of policemen who stood with white enamel mugs at the back of the room, drinking tea made by the mortuary man.

  ‘Right, let’s get on with it,’ said Richard, advancing on the body. He had a bucket of water and a sponge and began by gently cleaning the back surface of the trunk. Wrinkled and almost black, the skin was leathery down to the lower part of the buttocks, where it frayed off to expose the bones of the thighs. The lower parts of the legs and feet were still embedded in peat and when he removed it, they virtually fell apart into a collection of loose bones, ligaments and tendons, all stained brownish yellow. At the other end, removal of more peat revealed the bare end of the spine at mid-neck level, with two loose vertebrae not connected to anything.

  While more photographs were being taken, Eva asked if he thought it was male or female.

  ‘We keep calling it “him”,’ replied Richard. ‘It’s so distorted that it’s hard to tell yet, until we can turn him — or her — over.’

  The piece of cord was hanging loose and Priscilla used a pair of forceps to pick up the end for a closer look.

  ‘That bit we had with the core sample must be a single strand of this — there are three, twisted in a loose spiral.’ The DI, true to his farming origins, said that it looked like binder twine, a hemp or sisal cord used to tie up bales of hay.

  The archaeologist’s main concern was the date of the remains, though she had more or less given up hope of it being very ancient. ‘Anything to suggest its age?’ she asked hopefully.

  Richard shook his head as he carried on digging away at surplus peat. ‘Nothing yet, but the problem is I don’t know how much being buried in an acidic bog full of tannin affects the rate of decay.’

  ‘How long would a body last in ordinary soil?’ asked Eva, who professionally had never had to deal with anything but ancient deaths.

  ‘Depends on many factors, like the type of soil, especially acidity, wetness and temperature,’ he replied, as he continued to ferret away at the encroaching peat. ‘Left on the surface, there’s often not much left after a year except bones, but animal predators like rats, foxes and insects are responsible for much of that. Buried, the corpse will last much longer, but again depending on whether or not it’s in a sound coffin.’

  ‘A couple of cases I saw when I was with the Met, still had cartilage on the joints and some tendons after a year,’ offered Priscilla.

  ‘Sure, but five years certainly sees off all the soft tissues, if they’re not buried. Doctor Boross, do you know what the old bog bodies were like internally after all that time?’

  The archaeologist, virtually a chain smoker, tapped the ash from her latest Gold Flake into the big porcelain sink.

  ‘Quite good organ preservation in some, I recall. Even the stomach contents were identifiable, but some had very pliable bones, due to the acid water decalcifying them.’

  Richard tapped the exposed thigh bone with a wide knife that he was using to dig out the peat. ‘These are exceptionally hard, I must say! So again that’s against our friend here being from the dawn of history.’

  It was when he started sponging down the shoulders and upper arms that this speculation was abruptly confirmed. The arms were still tucked under the body, but on wiping the slimy coating from just below the right shoulder, Richard stopped and bent to peer more closely at the dark grey, wrinkled skin.

  ‘What the hell’s this? Priscilla, there’s a torch in that case, can you bring it, please.’

  They all clustered round as she aimed the beam at where his finger was pointing. Very faintly, there were darker marks under the surface and when he smoothed out the wrinkles between a finger and thumb, they saw the blurred outlines of a tattoo.

  ‘I don’t think Batman was around in the Iron Age!’ he said, with a tinge of disappointment.

  After their session in the mortuary, they adjourned to the DCC’s office in the old police building on the promenade. It was now late afternoon and Richard and Priscilla had a long journey ahead of them back to the Wye Valley, but they needed to take stock of what they had learned so far.

  David John Jones sat behind his DI’s desk as they drank the inevitable cups of tea. The two from Tintern had been offered a meal in a local hotel, but as Richard deci
ded that they would stop somewhere on the way home, they held their discussion straight away.

  ‘So we’ve got a murder on our hands,’ said the senior officer, with a sigh of resignation. ‘We’ll have to get the Yard in straight away. This is beyond us. I’ve only got one ranking CID officer for the whole of Cardiganshire — and we’ve already got a clutch of burglaries and two sheep-stealings to cope with.’

  Richard nodded his understanding. ‘We’ll do all we can to help with the forensic pathology side, though of course, the Home Office lab in Cardiff must look at any physical evidence, like that cord that was used to strangle the fellow.’

  The post-mortem had not been all that helpful, with such an incomplete and decayed body to work with, but there seemed little doubt that the ligature that had been wound twice around the neck was the cause of death. A length of similar cord had tied both wrists together in front of the body, even though the underlying skin and bones had disintegrated inside it.

  ‘First thing is, we need to know who the bugger was!’ said Meirion Thomas in his forthright manner. ‘No fingerprints, as he had no fingers left. All we’ve got so far is a flaming tattoo!’

  ‘What’s this Batman business?’ demanded the DCC, who was hardly up to date with modern trends.

  ‘Apparently he’s a character in Yankee comics and films, sir,’ said Gwyn Parry.

  ‘At least it can give us an earliest date for this chap,’ declared Richard. ‘Though how you discover when the Batman character was first published, I’ve no idea.’

  Their earlier doubts of the sex of the body had been solved by the pathologist’s brief study of the pelvic bones, which were largely exposed in the collapsing corpse. The front of the cadaver was in a far worse state than the back, with hardly any skin left and all the organs degenerated, including the genitals. With no head, sexing it was down to an interpretation of the bones, but both Richard and Priscilla were in no doubt of its maleness — added to which was the fact that women rarely went in for tattoos.