left of the larynx had a crack through the cricoid cartilage. Of course, he might have been shot through the head as well, but as we haven’t got it, we can’t tell!’
‘And the poor chap’s hands were tied together,’ said Priscilla, with a shudder. ‘A nasty, sadistic sort of case.’
‘More like some gangland killing,’ agreed Richard. ‘But there are not many gangsters in sleepy Cardiganshire.’
Eventually, they reluctantly dragged themselves away from the fire in the lounge and Richard went to find the landlord to settle the bill. Priscilla offered to pay her share, but Richard waved it aside.
‘Like last night at Mrs Evans’, we can legitimately charge it to the partnership as expenses. The police or the coroner will foot the bill eventually.’
Before they left, Richard used the coin telephone in the hotel corridor to ring Garth House. When he pressed Button A, he was strangely happy to hear Angela’s calm tones, reassuring him that all was well and that she was looking forward to seeing them arrive home.
‘It’s not a bog body, but it’s a murder, though heaven knows when it happened,’ he told her. ‘We’ll tell you all about it in about an hour and a half.’
The rest of the journey seemed to take longer than that, as he peered down the tunnel cut by the headlights through the dark countryside. After her good meal and a brandy, Priscilla soon dozed off and only woke when the Humber revved up the driveway to the house. Angela had tea and biscuits ready for them and they sat in her lounge for a while, giving her a detailed account of their activities in Cardiganshire.
‘So you’ve no idea who he was or when he was killed?’ she asked at the end.
Priscilla raised her hands in mock despair. ‘Not a clue, Angela! At least the only one is that he had this Batman tattoo. Have you any idea when that idiotic business began?’
The other woman shook her head. ‘I’ve just about heard of it. Isn’t it an American comic strip or something? Perhaps the dead man was a Yank?’
‘Well, that’s not our problem,’ said Richard, yawning mightily. ‘Let the police follow it up — probably your pals from Scotland Yard.’
He immediately felt that he might have said the wrong thing, for Angela was still bitter about the defection of her former fiance in favour of another woman — and he was a detective superintendent from that same famous institution. However, she made no sign that it had registered, though he knew that Angela was adept at concealing her feelings.
‘Time for bed, folks,’ suggested Priscilla and soon Richard drove her the short distance to Tintern Parva, where she had comfortable lodgings in a bed and breakfast establishment used mostly by summer walkers and holidaymakers.
Angela waited up until he returned, then they both made for the stairs. ‘Did you enjoy your night away with our glamour girl, Richard?’ she said without a trace of sarcasm. ‘I think Moira was afraid that you’d be led off the path of righteousness!’
He gave her one of his famous grins. ‘Yes, we had a romantic drink in the local pub and then a passionate meat and two veg in Mrs Evans’ den of sin!’
‘No, somehow I don’t see you as a lecherous seducer, Richard,’ she said, as she left him at the upper landing.
As he went towards his own room, he wondered if he detected a hint of disappointment in her voice.
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.
