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.
SIX
A week later, the only development that was made in the ‘Mystery of Borth Bog’, as the Press now called it, was some clarification about the Batman tattoo. Paul Vickers had phoned several of his colleagues in Scotland Yard and asked them to canvas any contacts they had in the newspaper and magazine business in London.
Several days later, he had a call from a detective sergeant who had been sent to lurk in the pubs around Fleet Street, an area which he knew well from other somewhat dubious assignments. He found it a salubrious assignment, as after a few pints of beer and the odd gin and tonic, he learned from men who worked in various publications that Batman was the creation of a couple of American cartoon writers in 1939, who had sold the idea to Detective Comics and it had taken off from there in the United States.
‘Very popular over there, sir, all through the war and now increasingly so. But virtually unknown here in Britain until recent years.’
Vickers had known that, according to the pathologist, it was unlikely that the body had been killed less than a decade ago, which took the murder back to at least the last year of the war.
‘So do you think anyone over here, that long ago, would been keen enough on Batman to have it as a tattoo?’ he asked, though he realized that the sergeant would have no better guess to make than himself.
‘Well, he could have seen comic books about him brought over by Yank servicemen, I suppose. He could even have been a GI himself, comes to that. God knows there were enough of them knocking about here before D- Day.’
There was nothing else useful that he could tell him and they rang off. Vickers was becoming increasingly frustrated by being stuck in the back of beyond, as he thought of Cardiganshire. He had given up going to the incident room in Borth, as it seemed entirely futile. His sergeant, Howard Squires, stayed there for the sake of appearances, but absolutely no progress was being made. They could not even blame the lack of it on the ‘local yokels’, as Squires called them, as everything that could have been done, had been done. Nothing had come of extensive interviews with the community in Borth and a trawl of the hotels and boarding houses over the wider area had been equally unrewarding. Revisiting all the missing persons enquiries over the past few years again drew a blank. It was difficult to see how it could be otherwise, given that the dates were vague to within a number of years and they had no physical description of the deceased man.
Paul had spoken to his senior officer in London and told him that he felt they were wasting both their time and the Home Office’s money, in keeping them down here.
‘I feel sure this body was dumped a long way from where he was killed, sir,’ he complained. ‘That could have been anywhere in Britain and the investigation could just as well be run from London, as there’s damn-all to be learned down here.’
The chief superintendent sounded sympathetic, but told Vickers to hang on for a few more days.
‘But I’ve got to come back next week for a trial at the Old Bailey, sir,’ protested Paul. ‘I don’t see much point in waiting. You could leave Squires here if you think it necessary.’
After getting a non-committal answer, Vickers went to find the local DI to tell him the little he had gained from London. Irritably, he repeated the sergeant’s scanty information.
‘He made the suggestion that perhaps the fellow was American, as this Batman was certainly not well known here in the time frame that we’re thinking of. Were there any US army personnel in this area during the war?’
Meirion Thomas pensively rubbed the stubble on his chin.
‘Yanks? I can’t recall many, but I was a PC in Tregaron when the war ended. I’d just joined, having been on the farm before that, so I wouldn’t have seen many strangers.’
‘The incident room in Borth is in what used to be an army camp, I’m told. Were there any Americans there?’
Meirion Thomas shook his head slowly.
‘Not that I know of. It was a purely British establishment, so I’m told. No one seemed to know what it was for. It was a bit hush-hush.’
Vickers gave up in disgust, as every lead seemed to peter out. He went back to his cubbyhole of an office and began making more phone calls to London, trying to keep in touch with other cases he had been forced to leave behind when he was sent into exile.
At Garth House, they settled back into their usual routine after the brief excitement of the headless corpse.
A police car had collected the bones he had brought back from Aberystwyth and returned them to the mortuary there, to be reunited with the rest of the mortal remains of the unknown victim. They would be kept in the refrigerator until the coroner decided what should be done with them. Richard explained to the mystified Moira that they could not be buried for a considerable time — and never cremated — in case someone was arrested and charged with murder, as the defence lawyers would then have the right to require an independent opinion from another pathologist. The coroner had decided to delay an inquest until, hopefully, some useful evidence was turned up, as there seemed little point in holding a useless enquiry.
It was now nearing the end of November and the days were becoming very short. The autumn colours had almost gone and even the Wye Valley looked sombre, as its trees became bare. Most days, Richard Pryor went off to local mortuaries to perform post-mortems on coroners’ cases, which was the mainstay of his contribution to the partnership’s budget.
He had been fortunate in that the coroner who served the area was an old classmate of his in the Welsh National School of Medicine, where they had qualified before the war. Brian Meredith had become a family doctor in Monmouth, but had also obtained the job of coroner for a wide area of the county. The old retired doctor who had previously provided him with a post-mortem service had died and Brian was happy to give his old friend a welcome start in his new venture as a freelance. So at the small public mortuaries at Chepstow and Monmouth, together with locums at the big hospital at Newport and sometimes Hereford, Richard had a few days’ regular work each week. During the university terms, he gave lectures on forensic medicine to the undergraduates at the medical school in Bristol, travelling there across the Severn estuary on the ferry between Beachley and Aust. All this, together with
