Grounds for Appeal

FIVE

Next day, they got down to the job of examining the material they had brought back from Aberystwyth.

The bones were laid out on a large sheet of brown paper on the big table in the laboratory and everyone, including Moira, was keen to see what could be discovered. They all stood around expectantly, the morning sun lighting the exhibits through the wide bay window.

‘We’ve got a right femur, a tibia and half the pelvis,’ pointed out Richard, who had put on a white coat and a pair of rubber gloves. ‘And there are three vertebrae from the neck, as well as some soft tissues.’

Priscilla, similarly attired, had their osteometry board ready on the side of the table. This was a varnished board a couple of feet long with a long ruler screwed along one edge and a fixed ledge sticking up at the bottom.

‘The police were keen to get his height, so shall I start with that?’ she said. At Richard’s nod, she put the long thigh bone, stained brown by the peat, on to the board, so that the knee end was against the ledge. Then she moved a sliding bar down from the top until it touched the upper knob of bone which would have fitted into the hip joint.

Adjusting the lie of the bone so that the maximum length was being measured, she read off the number of centimetres on the scale, which she wrote on a sheet of paper, then did the same for the tibia, the bone from the lower leg.

Turning to an open textbook and couple of loose dog-eared papers, she ran her finger down some columns of figures and scribbled some calculations on the sheet.

‘According to Trotter and Gleser, he should be between five-foot eight and five-ten. Using the old Pearson formula, he’s five-seven and five-nine.’

‘How do you make that out?’ demanded Sian, always thirsty for knowledge.

Priscilla laid a hand on the book and the reprints.

‘Anatomists have published several surveys of bone length from bodies where they already knew the height. Pearson did that at the end of the last century, but Krogman wrote a guide for the FBI in 1939 and only a few years ago, Trotter and Gleser did another big survey on war casualties, including many from Korea.’

‘So why do you get different answers?’ persisted their technician, a valid query which Richard answered.

‘These surveys were done on different populations, including different ethnic groups. And there’s always an error zone of at least an inch and a half.’

Angela, her arms folded, looked down at the bones on the table. ‘So the likelihood is that he was between five-feet eight and five-feet nine?’

‘That’s about the best we can do,’ replied Priscilla. ‘Certainly not very tall or very short. In fact, he was like most men in Britain, which doesn’t help the police much!’

‘Anything else you can tell us?’ asked Richard hopefully. ‘What about race, for instance?’

Their tame anthropologist picked up the thigh bone again and turned it over in her hands, sighting along the shaft.

‘Nothing significant without a skull, but the only racial variation in leg bones is in the length of the femur in Negroid ethnic groups. This one’s certainly not that.’

‘What about the colour of that skin?’ asked Sian, pointing to a glass pot in which a scrap of loose skin was immersed in fixing fluid. ‘It’s even darker than that little bit we got from the borehole.’

‘Years of being soaked in black peat can account for that,’ said Richard. ‘But you’ll have to process the bits for the microscope, just to check for melanin and exclude any racial marker.’

This was getting a little complicated for Moira who, with a sigh, went back to her office. She felt a little depressed that the other three women seemed so much at home with these technical matters and wished that she had better skills than just hitting typewriter keys.

However, Angela also felt she was contributing little to this latest case, as her expertise in serology seemed unlikely to assist in identifying ‘Mr Bog’, as Sian had started to call the victim.

‘I suppose I had better do a blood group on the remains, though I can’t see that an ABO and Rhesus are going to help much,’ she said.

Richard immediately picked up on the fact that his partner was feeling left out of this investigation and hastened to draw her in.

‘Of course you should; we must have as much information as we can, Angela. You never know, we might need to exclude someone the cops turn up, even if we can’t get a positive match.’

Priscilla was carefully replacing the thigh bone back on the table, after finishing with the measuring device. As she did so, she weighed it up and down in her hand before laying it back on the brown paper.

‘I know I’m more used to handling frail archaeological skeletons, but don’t you think these are unusually heavy?’ she commented, looking at Richard with a slight frown.

‘Yes, I noticed that in the mortuary yesterday,’ he agreed, taking the bone from her and hefting it a few times himself. He looked across at Sian. ‘Can you decalcify a piece, if I saw it out for you?’

Their technician nodded. ‘But it’ll take a week before I can cut sections,’ she warned. To get a thin slice of bone suitable for looking at under the microscope required that the chalky calcium part must be dissolved out in weak acid.

Richard tapped the long bone against the edge of the table and felt it as unyielding as a rod of iron.

‘I’d like to get this X-rayed, too,’ he said. ‘I’ll take it up to Hereford Hospital; they’ll do it for me. I’ve got a coroner’s case there on Thursday, one of these operating theatre deaths.’

‘What are you looking for, Richard?’ asked Angela.

‘I’ve got an idea brewing in the back of my mind — and an X-ray may also give some indication of the age of this chap. The internal structure alters with advancing age, though admittedly it’s most useful when they are over fifty or sixty.’

He set about sawing a narrow slice from the shaft of the bone with a stainless-steel implement from his autopsy kit. Though the slice was only a quarter of an inch wide and went less than halfway through the bone, it took him five minutes and left him with an aching arm.

‘My God, that’s like flint!’ he complained, as he handed over the sliver of bone to Sian to put in a pot of formalin.

‘What else can we do?’ asked Priscilla, waving a gloved hand at the debris on the table.

‘This is where Angela comes in,’ he replied, eager to involve her in the examination. ‘I had a quick look at the vertebrae in the mortuary, but the light was not at all good in the late afternoon. See what you make of them, Angela.’

Though primarily a forensic biologist, the handsome brunette had had many years’ general experience in the ‘Met Lab’, as everyone called it, and could turn her hand to most aspects of forensic science. She pulled on some gloves and carefully arranged the three spinal vertebrae so that they interlocked in the proper anatomical position.

‘That’s all there was left of the neck?’

He nodded. ‘Just the lower three of the seven vertebrae. The upper ones must have gone with the head, as there was no sign of them anywhere in the adjacent peat.’

Angela picked up the top one, and looked at the central part with the hole for the spinal cord and the long spine at the back, between the two shorter wings that stuck out each side.

‘It’s had a bit of a bashing! Must have been chopped from the back.’ She took a lens from the pocket of her white coat and studied the upper surface intently.

‘There are deep cut marks, one almost going right through the left transverse process. And another that’s split the back of the vertebral body.’

‘Yes, I saw those. But what do you think caused them? A knife or something heavier?’

Angela took her time in replying, as she peered again through her lens. ‘Heavier, definitely. The edges are crushed, rather than sliced. I would think something like a cleaver or one of those agricultural billhooks.’

‘Not an axe?’

‘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 fiance 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 and 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 fiancee, 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.