a Hungarian, but her accent was still strong after twenty years in Britain. With their similar professional backgrounds, Priscilla took to her immediately.
‘We started digging already,’ announced Eva. ‘The core sample was obtained from three feet down, so with care, nothing will be lost until we get near that depth.’
The posts and ropes had been moved further out and Doctor Boross had marked out a ten-foot square with pegs and white tape, centred on the borehole. Inside this, a couple of brawny policemen had dug out a deep hole four feet across. A portable pump, borrowed from the Fire Service, was chugging away nearby, discharging coffee- brown water from the hole into a pond fifty yards away. The diggers were putting the black peat into wheelbarrows, which another two constables were wheeling away to be placed carefully on a large tarpaulin laid well outside the working area.
‘That’s in case we need to go back to it and look through it in detail,’ Eva Boross explained. ‘Though trying to sieve this wet, fibrous stuff would be a nightmare!’
She retired to a safe distance to light a cigarette and meticulously dropped her ash back into the packet, though Richard thought this was a little overcautious. Even if the remains below were not all that ancient, he doubted whether a little fag ash on the surface would hinder any investigation.
‘How far down have they got?’ asked Richard, moving nearer the edge of the hole to take a look.
‘Most of the way, but keeping the bottom in sight is the problem, with the water oozing in all the time,’ said Gwyn Parry.
Shovelling more carefully now, the constables went down another six inches, then came up for a breather. Plastered up to their knees in black peat, they had a rest, then took over the wheelbarrows, while the other pair went down the hole.
For almost another hour, Priscilla and Richard waited patiently as relays of constables slid into the excavation, eventually using bricklayer’s trowels rather than spades. The lady from the university used a long measuring stick at intervals, to check the distance from the surface to the bottom of the pit.
‘Must be very near now,’ she muttered. ‘Those botany people were quite clear about the depth of their borehole.’
She had hardly spoken before one digger, almost doubled up in the hole, gave a muffled shout.
‘I can feel something here! It’s hard, like a stone.’ His pal decided to clamber up to the surface, to give the other man more room. Everyone came nearer, craning their heads to see down the pit, but the policeman’s large body and the muddy water defeated them.
‘Be careful the pump doesn’t suck anything out except water,’ cautioned Richard, imagining vital trace evidence vanishing down the pipe.
‘Easier said than done, sir! But I’ll dig a sump well away to one side and put the nozzle in that.’
A few moments later, he reported that the suction was gaining on the seeping water table and that when he momentarily swept the water away with his hand, he could see a blackened mound alongside a hard whitish thing.
Doctor Boross looked at Richard.
‘I think one of us should take over the digging now, doctor. Perhaps you should have a look first, to see what you can make of it?’
Thankfully, the constable climbed out of the excavation and Richard took his place. He wore a pair of old army jungle-green trousers inside his wellingtons and an even older leather jacket that he had had since his student days.
Immediately he was up to his ankles in water, but the powerful pump was more than holding its own, so that the level was slowly dropping back to the deep hole that the constable had dug in one corner. He could see a bulge in the bottom mud and pulled on a pair of thick rubber gloves that he had in his jacket pocket.
Feeling the lump, his fingers slid over a rounded mass and then, beneath the remaining water, encountered a hard structure, as unyielding as iron. Returning to the mound, he pressed into it and felt a slight indentation form under his fingers. More exploring under the surface gave him some idea of what was lurking beneath.
‘It’s a body alright,’ he reported. ‘I can feel bone — and from the shape, it’s certainly no sheep!’
There was a buzz of excitement from the watchers gathered around the excavation. ‘Is it human, d’you think?’ asked Eva Boross.
‘Can’t tell yet. We need to get more water out and a lot more peat.’
Richard asked for a trowel and when one was handed down, he began carefully digging around the sides of the bulge, as the pump continued to gurgle the opaque water from the sump. After a few minutes, he managed to free both sides of the protrusion, before again feeling around whatever was being exposed.
‘I’m sure this is a buttock!’ he proclaimed. ‘I can feel a small hole on top that I can get my finger into. It must be where their drill punched into it.’
‘So what shape is the hard stuff?’ demanded Priscilla, leaning over the edge of the cavity. Like the Hungarian lady, she was itching to get down there and use her archaeological talents.
Richard slid his hand lower, now getting the impression that the axis of the body was diagonally across the excavation. ‘I can feel a thick shaft of bone — and, yes, that must be a femoral head!’
This was the large knob on the top of thigh bone, where it fits into the hip joint. He straightened up, his back aching. Waving the trowel at the detective inspector, he sounded almost exultant as he confirmed that now the police had something definite to report to the coroner.
‘It’s certainly a human corpse — though God knows how long it’s been here!’
He clambered back out of the excavation, his old trousers plastered with black mud, for a discussion on how they should proceed.
‘I suppose now it must be treated as a crime scene, doctor,’ suggested Meirion Thomas. ‘Just in case it’s not a historical find.’
‘And if it is ancient, it needs an equally meticulous procedure,’ countered Doctor Boross firmly. ‘Perhaps Doctor Chambers and I should take over from here; we know how it needs to be done.’
They compromised on a combined operation and while both a police officer and Priscilla took some photographs of the first appearance of the cadaver, the remorseless action of the pump took yet more water from the hole, so that the mound that Richard thought was someone’s backside came more clearly into view.
It was now well past lunchtime and the DI called a halt, while a constable went back to the vans and returned with a large box of sandwiches, small pork pies and four Thermos flasks of tea.
‘We’re certainly not going to finish this tonight,’ said Richard Pryor. ‘We can’t just drag this out of the ground piecemeal. It will have to be removed as intact as we can manage.’
Priscilla and her new-found friend Eva agreed. ‘It will have to be moved on to some form of support. Perhaps a door or some planks would do,’ suggested the older archaeologist.
‘That means the hole will have to be enlarged to make more room,’ said Priscilla. ‘If it’s human, we need well over six feet clearance.’
Sergeant Parry gave some instructions to a constable who was driving one of the vans and he hurried off, with instructions to return to Aberystwyth and come back with a couple more men and some equipment suitable for moving the body.
Then, eating and drinking finished, they went back to the excavation, where the pump had now almost dried out the area around the remains.
‘We’ll have a go at it for a bit,’ declared Eva Boross and with Priscilla on the other side, they began carefully trowelling away peat into buckets, gradually exposing the corpse. Richard watched intently from above and saw the outline of a body slowly appear. It was obviously lying on its front, the buttocks and back exposed first.
When the slimy peat was wiped away with a hand, the wrinkled skin appeared almost black, though splits here and there allowed greyish adipocere to show through.
There was a circular hole in one buttock, where the botanist’s coring tube had penetrated, before hitting the underlying bone of the pelvis.
‘The legs are in a bad state, Richard!’ Priscilla called up, after another hour’s work. She was concentrating on the lower end of the body, while Doctor Boross was freeing the shoulders. ‘They are fraying off below thigh level, just bones and some tendon.’
‘Best leave them alone for now,’ he advised, peering down at what she was doing. ‘We’ll have to leave them in a block of peat and slide the whole thing on to whatever they bring as a support.’
