Grounds for Appeal

FOURTEEN

Richard Pryor took the call from Aberystwyth in his room and, after listening for a few moments, called out to Moira in the office next door. They had no intercom, but a good shout seemed to work equally well. When her neat, dark head appeared around the door, he asked if there were any local cases for him the next day.

‘There’s a sudden death at Chepstow, doctor, that’s all.’

‘I can leave that until Wednesday, can’t I?’ he reassured himself and, speaking into the phone again, arranged with Meirion Thomas to meet him in Birmingham the next day. The DI had already confirmed that noon would be a convenient time for them to descend on the mortuary there and after some amiable banter in Welsh, Richard put the phone down and followed Moira back to the laboratory, where the three women in his life were regaled with the news he had just had from the Midlands.

‘They’ve found the missing head!’ he told them. ‘In some chap’s shed in Birmingham, of all places.’ When he had repeated the sparse information that he had heard on the phone, he asked Angela if she would like to come with him in the morning when he went to examine it, but she gracefully declined.

‘No thanks, Richard. I’ve seen many horrid things, but unless you really need me, I think I’ll pass on looking at a ten-year-old head in a bucket!’

Later, he wondered if his astute partner had realized that it was possible that her former fiance, Paul Vickers, might also be present, as he was also involved in the investigation of the bog body.

Richard retired to his room to look at a road atlas to see the best way to get to Birmingham, as this was a part of the country which was unfamiliar to him. It was a good excuse for him to have a few minutes with one of his favourite books but he soon exhausted his quest, as the route from the Wye Valley was all too obvious.

‘Up to Ross, then Malvern, Worcester, Bromsgrove and then into B’rum,’ he murmured to himself.

When they assembled in the staff room for their afternoon tea and biscuits, Jimmy Jenkins came in from the vineyard where he had been hoeing the last of the weeds from around the roots before winter set in. When he heard that ‘the doctor’ was off to Birmingham next day, he immediately volunteered his services as a chauffeur and Richard could find no reason to disappoint him. Jimmy had acted as his driver from time to time, usually on long journeys and, despite being such a laid-back character, was actually very alert on the road.

They both agreed that it would be best to allow at least three hours for the journey and so at half-past eight next morning they set out, stopping in Monmouth to fill the Humber’s tank with National Benzole. Jimmy was incensed by the recent price increase, which took a gallon up to four shillings and threepence.

The going was easy on such a fine but chilly morning and the climb up over the Malvern Hills gave a superb view over the Midland Plain, which stretched away to the horizon.

‘First hills that way are the Urals, Jimmy!’ said Richard in a euphoric mood, but the geographic allusion was lost on his handyman. They stopped at a roadside cafe near Droitwich for a cup of tea, where Jimmy demolished a doorstep ham sandwich while Richard bought a copy of the Daily Telegraph. He scanned the news while his driver champed his way through his snack. Clement Attlee’s resignation from his chairmanship of the Labour Party, a black boycott of buses in Alabama, a patent taken out for something called a ‘hovercraft’ and sixteen new member countries admitted to the United Nations. None of it thrilling stuff, Richard decided and as soon as Jimmy had finished, they were back on the road again.

The last few miles into Birmingham itself were more difficult than the previous hundred, but using a street plan in the back of his atlas and then asking a police constable, they arrived in Newton Street with a few minutes to spare. The coroner’s court and mortuary were in this narrow side-street, near the centre of the city, not far from the main railway station and very close to the large children’s hospital. Courts, police stations and other civic buildings crowded the area, but to Jimmy’s satisfaction there were also several pubs within sight.

They cruised slowly down the short street until they saw the red-brick coroner’s court. It had a gate to a narrow lane at the side, from which a hearse appeared, marking it as the entrance to the mortuary.

There was no room to park in the lane, but Jimmy found a space further down the street. He declared his intention of finding the nearest boozer and promised to be back at the car in two hours’ time, happy to wait for his boss for as long as necessary.

Richard hauled his black bag out of the Humber’s boot and made his way back to the entrance of the court. Here a coroner’s officer showed him into a waiting room where DI Thomas from Cardiganshire was standing with several other plain-clothes officers from Birmingham.

Meirion Thomas introduced him to the Winson Green detectives, Trevor Hartnell and Tom Rickman. They brought him up to date with the finding of the head and the meagre information they had prised from the former publican of the Barley Mow.

‘We’re seeing another villain later this afternoon,’ explained Hartnell. ‘He’s banged up in prison, but we hope he can tell us a bit more, possibly even give us an identity.’

After a little more chat, the coroner’s officer, a middle-aged constable whose developing arthritis made him unfit to pound a beat, asked Richard if he would have a word with the coroner. He took him through into an inner sanctum, where he met Doctor Theobald Priestly, a dapper man in his fifties, who had qualified as a barrister at Lincoln’s Inn some years after becoming a medical practitioner. Richard knew that in some of the larger cities, such as London and Birmingham, doubly qualified men were preferred as coroners.

Doctor Priestly had greying ginger hair with a matching Van Dyke beard and Richard felt that with a lace collar and a rapier on his belt, he could have walked straight out of a Restoration portrait. He came around his desk and shook hands, motioning his visitor to a chair.

‘Damned odd affair this, doctor!’ he remarked, in what Richard’s mother would call a cut-glass accent. ‘Two coroners each with part of a body in two different countries!’

‘Well, we’re not yet sure that they are parts of the same body, but I’ll do my best to find out,’ replied Richard. ‘If it seems likely, which way will the parts go?’

The coroner gave his beard a brief massage.

‘I’ll have to discuss this with my counterpart at your end, but if what our CID fellows suggest may be true, then the cause of his death sounds as if it’s more a matter for this city than Aberystwyth. No hope of deciding where he died, I suppose?’

Richard shook his head. ‘I don’t see how that could be established, given the length of time that’s elapsed. With no known scene of death to examine, it seems impossible, unless some solid new evidence comes to light. But that’s a matter for the police, rather than me.’

A few minutes of chat established that they had several mutual acquaintances in the Royal Army Medical Corps, as Doctor Priestly had spent most of the war in a Field Ambulance, ending up commanding one in the Italian campaign. When Richard left his office, he felt pleased with this new contact, as the coroner had promised to keep him in mind whenever he need someone to stand in for one of his regular pathologists.

Outside, the coroner’s officer led him and the detectives down a passage and out into the body store of the mortuary, a busy place with a large throughput of bodies from the central part of the huge city. The outer area was where the hearses and plain vans loaded and unloaded coffins into a hall lined on one side by a bank of refrigerators. Beyond this was the mortuary assistants’ office, which housed the registers and the inevitable electric kettle and tray of chipped mugs and cups.

An amiable senior technician welcomed them and promised tea and biscuits as soon as they had finished.

‘A bit out of the usual run of “pee-ems”, doctor!’ he observed. ‘A body in a bucket, almost! I thought we could do the necessary on one of the tables, if that suits you.’

They trooped into the main post-mortem room, a large, bare chamber with a partial glass roof and half a dozen porcelain autopsy tables in a row down the centre. Waiting there was a police photographer with a large camera and flashgun.

Three of the slabs had corpses on them, one being in the process of being sewn up and made presentable by another mortuary attendant. On one of the empty tables stood a metal container with a police exhibits label tied to its handle with string. The photographer began by taking a few shots of it, the flashes from the bulbs illuminating the whole room.

‘What do you need, doctor?’ asked the senior technician solicitously. ‘Will just an apron and gloves do, or do you want a gown as well?

Richard settled for a green rubber apron and some rubber gloves and approached the table with the canister. Close behind came the two CID men, Trevor Hartnell already lighting up a cigarette. ‘Can’t stand the stink in these places,’ he said apologetically. ‘Blood and Lysol, I reckon!’

His detective sergeant seemed immune to smells and stood impassively on the opposite side of the white table, still wearing his belted mackintosh and wide-brimmed trilby.

‘Right, sir, I’d better identify this properly to you.’ Hartnell, who wore a heavy grey overcoat, tapped the label on the handle. ‘This is the container we recovered yesterday from a shed at 183 Markby Road, Handsworth. It’s been dusted for prints, not that I think that will help after it’s been knocking about for all these years.’

Richard took a stainless-steel T-bar from the assortment of mortuary tools left on the table. This was like a short, wide screwdriver with a crossbar, used for levering off skullcaps after they had been sawn through. He used it now to pop off the lid, which he laid to one side, allowing a pungent aroma to arise from the interior of the drum.

‘That’s mainly methylated spirit, by its smell,’ he remarked. Peering inside, he saw strands of hair floating under the surface, but resisted the temptation to use them to lift out the head, in case they detached from the scalp. Sliding both gloved hands down the sides, he carefully hoisted it out and laid it on the table.

The head was covered in shrivelled skin of a pale greyish colour, with a wizened caricature of a face. It seemed to have collapsed in on itself, the cheeks hollow and the eyelids lying back in sunken sockets. There was no sign of decomposition and the hair, which was still black, lay in wisps across the scalp. The lips had contracted back in a bizarre grin, showing irregular teeth in grey gums.

Richard stood back to allow the photographer to take a series of pictures from various angles.

‘Why the pale colour, Doc?’ asked Tom Rickman, who seemed unmoved by the gruesome object.

‘Alcohol fixes the tissue like that, making them hard, not like formaldehyde. It used to be used for preserving specimens many years ago and some of the pots in old medical museums are full of it.’

‘The head has lasted well, if it really is ten or more years old,’ observed Hartnell.

The pathologist agreed. ‘It also tells us that the head was put into preservative quite soon after death, as there’s no sign at all of decomposition.’

‘How soon, doctor?’

‘Depends on the environment and even the season. A head will last much better than the belly, but in cold weather like this December, it would keep fresh for a week at least, but left in a warm house or during hot summer weather, a couple of days would see it going off quickly.’

The two detectives peered intently at the face.

‘I haven’t been around our manor for very long, so I wouldn’t expect to recognize him, even if that horrible face was in better shape,’ said the inspector. ‘What about you, Tom? You’ve been in Winson Green for a long time.’

The sergeant leaned closer, then shook his head. ‘Doesn’t ring a bell with me. But I doubt his own mother would recognize him, all shrivelled like that.’

Richard got to work, taking the head in his hands and studying it closely from every angle. He lifted the stiff eyelids and saw the globes inside had collapsed completely. The jaw was immobile, due to the fixation of the muscles by the alcohol, but he could see almost a full set of teeth, even though some were chipped and discoloured.

‘Plenty for a dentist to get his teeth into, so to speak,’ he said. ‘I can see some metal fillings at the back and there’s one canine tooth missing.’

‘Is that going to tell us who he is, Doc?’ asked Rickman.

Richard shrugged. ‘Only if we get a name by some other means, so that you might be able to find a dentist who treated him and has some records.’

He had left his black bag on a table nearby and now opened it to take out a glass jar in which a piece of bone was padded in cotton wool. Fishing it out, he held it out to the watchers.

‘Now for the crunch question!’ he said lightly. ‘This is a vertebra from the top end of the spine of our friend in Borth Bog. It’s got tiny cuts on it where the head was detached, so I want to see if it matches up with the stump of spine on the head.’

The helpful attendant, himself aproned and gloved, held the grisly exhibit upside down on the table so that the ragged undersurface was uppermost. Amongst the tatters of grey muscle, the lower end of the spine was visible, with a central hole where the shrunken spinal cord lay. With a dissecting knife, Richard cut away some of the muscle and, with his fingers, delved down towards the base of the skull.

‘Three vertebrae left, which corresponds with being next to this one, which is number four of the seven bones in the neck.’ He pointed down at the dried specimen from Wales, which he had laid on the porcelain table.

‘Does that clinch it, doctor?’ asked Hartnell.

‘Suggestive, but not definite. I’d like to see some similar cut marks on the upper one, proving that a knife or something sharp had been used to sever the neck. I need to take it off and have it back in our laboratory for a good look under magnification, after cleaning all the tissue gubbins from it.’

The inspector looked disappointed at not getting a quick answer. ‘Nothing else you can do today, doctor?’

Richard grinned at him. ‘Fear not, Mr Hartnell! I’ve got one more trick up my sleeve.’

He turned the head right way up again and set it on the slab, its ghastly rictus of a smile beaming at the three police officers. Then he looked across at the mortuary technician.

‘Do you think you could saw the skull off for me, please? It’ll be a bit difficult, not being attached to a body.’

The man seemed pleased to have a challenge. ‘No problem, sir. I’ll get Reg to hold it for me.’

The other attendant, a much younger man, left his stitching tasks and came across to grip the head in his strong hands, while his senior took a knife and slit the scalp across the top of the head, from ear to ear. When he had peeled it back, a more difficult job than usual due to the stiffness of the tissues, he took a silvery handsaw and prepared to attack the exposed bone.

‘Don’t you use an electric saw?’ asked Richard.

‘The younger lads do, but I’m of the old school, doctor, I like to use a bit of muscle on it.’

Richard concealed a smile, as if he was right about the identity, quite a lot of muscle would be needed.

The technician laid the saw blade against the skull and began sawing almost horizontally around the circumference, with a slight V-shaped dip on each side to allow a good fit when it was replaced. However, as Richard watched his face, he was gratified to see a frown appear as the man’s efforts seemed abnormally strenuous.

After a few moments, he stopped for a rest. ‘Bloody hell, sir, this is as hard as flint!’ He tapped the top of the skull with the back of the saw, producing a dull, almost metallic sound.

Richard, with some relief, turned to the detectives.

‘I think we can take it that the rest of this fellow is lying in Aberystwyth mortuary. I’ll get it X-rayed to make certain and do some other tests, but I don’t think there’s any doubt at all now.’

An hour later, they were back in the coroner’s office where Richard gave his provisional findings to Theobald Priestly.

‘The head must be from the body in the bog,’ he said firmly. ‘It would be a remarkable coincidence if they both had the same very rare disease. The number of spinal vertebrae match up, three on the head, four on the body, which gives the correct total of seven.’ He added this for the benefit of the police, rather than a medical coroner.

‘You say you would like the head X-rayed, just to check on the bone density?’ asked Priestly.

‘Belt and braces, really, just to make sure. The skull thickness was hardly above average, but it certainly was abnormally dense. I’m afraid your mortuary technician had to swallow his pride and send for the electric saw!’

‘Fine, I can arrange to have it taken to the hospital for an X-ray,’ agreed the coroner. ‘One of the radiologists is a friend of mine, so he can look at the films. I’m sure he’d be interested in seeing an Albers-Schonberg, it’s so rare. You know, I’ve never seen one in my thirty years as a doctor.’ He sounded quite pensive, as if this had made his life incomplete.

‘Perhaps you could ask him if he knows of any cases reported in the Birmingham area,’ suggested Richard. ‘It might help to put a name to this chap.’

The group soon broke up, the coroner needing to contact his opposite number in Cardiganshire and the CID men going off to report to their seniors, before making their way to Winson Green prison.

For Richard, his priority was getting back to Jimmy Jenkins at the car and finding somewhere to have a late lunch, before setting off for the Wye Valley.

With some relief, he dumped his bag into the waiting Humber, complete with an extra vertebra and a fragment of skull for Sian to decalcify.

‘Home, James, and don’t spare the horses until we come to a cafe!’