A couple of feet away, Eva Boross was also having problems. ‘The skin is very friable, like wet paper,’ she reported. ‘The arms must be tucked under the body. And so far, I haven’t located the head, though I’ve cleared the peat almost to the neck.’
The photographer was taking pictures every few minutes to record the progress of the exposure of the tattered corpse. The light was now fading as the afternoon wore on, so at intervals the scene was illuminated by the artificial lightning of a flashgun.
When the two women came up for a rest, two policemen enlarged the edges of the hole to make more room for removing the remains. The van came back with the top of a trestle table and some planks, together with a couple more muscular PCs.
When Doctor Boross went back down the hole after a quick smoke, she soon discovered two disturbing facts.
‘Doctor Pryor, there’s some thin rope here, coming round from the front, it seems. Very frayed, and seems fixed underneath.’
Richard looked down at a ragged end that she held up.
‘There was a tiny strand of what could have come from that, caught up in the botanist’s sample,’ he said.
‘Some of the foreign bog bodies were strangled with a cord ligature,’ she said hopefully. ‘I’ll try to expose the neck area. I’m almost up to it.’
A few moments later, she made another more grisly discovery.
‘There’s no head here! I’ve probed up beyond the neck and there’s nothing there except soft peat.’
Priscilla squelched up from her end and after feeling around, confirmed Eva’s finding. ‘Nothing there, Richard! Unless it’s buried some distance away, it’s certainly not attached to the body. I can feel the ends of the lower neck vertebrae with my fingers.’
With light rapidly fading under a leaden sky, it was obvious that they could do little more that day except secure the site, so after a discussion, they turned the pump off and laid planks across the hole, with the trestle holding down a large tarpaulin.
‘I’ll leave an officer on watch all night,’ said Meirion Thomas. ‘He can sit in a van up on the road and keep an eye out, just in case anyone comes nosing around.’
The sergeant and his constable from Borth had been around all day, keeping a few curious spectators away from the operation. Now the local PC was deputed for the night watch while the other uniformed men went back to Aberystwyth.
‘We’ll have to stay somewhere overnight, Inspector,’ said Richard. ‘It’s impossible to go back to Monmouthshire and then return by morning.’
‘I’d love to put you up myself,’ said Eva Boross. ‘But I’ve only got a two-roomed flat near the university.’
‘Don’t worry, we can find you somewhere here in Borth,’ said the detective inspector. ‘A lot of bed and breakfasts will be shut in the off season, but I’m sure Sergeant Edwards here knows someone who can put you up. I’ll have to go back to Aber now to report to the chief and notify the coroner.’
The sergeant, who knew every soul in the little seaside town, had no difficulty in finding them lodgings and after dumping their muddy boots into the back of the Humber, he drove back with them to a line of tall boarding houses facing the sea across the main road. Edwards went into one, part of a three-storey terrace, and conferred with the lady who answered the door.
Within minutes, they were receiving a warm welcome from Mrs Gwenllian Evans, a genial lady of ample proportions, who showed them to a pair of rooms on the first floor, which had a superb view of the twilit sea just across the road.
‘I’ve only got a couple of commercial gentlemen staying tonight,’ she explained. ‘So there’ll be plenty of hot water for a good bath — you look as if you could do with one, with all that old peat on you!’
She was obviously bursting to know what was going on up on Cors Fachno, the news of which was all over Borth within an hour of the arrival of the police that morning. Taking pity on her, after Priscilla had taken her small case into her room, Richard gave Mrs Evans a short, discreet version, suggesting that it might be a historical burial and that an archaeologist from the university was there with them. He spoke to her in Welsh and was pleased to discover that after years of disuse, he was still reasonably fluent. Both his parents came from Lower Brynaman in Carmarthenshire and at home in Merthyr he had spoken his native language until he left for medical school.
After he had hauled a decent pair of trousers, pyjamas and dressing gown from his case in the room, he followed the landlady’s instructions to one of the bathrooms down the corridor. Here he washed off the smears of Borth Bog and soaked away the slight aches from even his limited efforts of digging in a cramped hole in the ground.
He heard the door of Priscilla’s room next door being closed after she returned from her own ablutions and, after a decent interval, went out and tapped on it.
It opened a short way and he got a glimpse of a silk petticoat and bare feet.
‘Sorry, I thought you might be decent by now!’
She grinned at him. ‘Don’t worry, we’re both doctors, of a sort!’ she joked.
‘I wondered if you fancied a walk along the prom and a drink at the nearest pub?’ he offered. ‘The landlady said that supper won’t be until half-past seven.’
‘Good idea! Give me ten minutes and I’ll be with you.’
The walk along the prom turned out to be a trudge in the dark along the top of the two-mile embankment that kept the sea from inundating Borth. Richard entertained Priscilla with the ancient legend of Cantref Gwaelod, the sunken land directly out at sea, flooded when Seithenyn, the drunken custodian of the sluice gates, allowed the sea to inundate it. She listened intently and he realized that part of her undoubted attractiveness was the fact that she made everyone she met feel that they had her undivided attention.
After a quarter of a mile, they turned around and walked back to the town. Richard had an unerring instinct for good pubs and soon found a cosy snug in the Victoria Inn. In front of an open fire, Priscilla had a gin and tonic and Richard a pint of Felinfoel ale from the famous brewery in Llanelli, the first he had enjoyed for fifteen years.
She had changed into a different jumper and a flared green skirt, a camel-hair coat thrown over her shoulders. They sat in comfortable companionship, discussing first the events of the day and the prospects for tomorrow.
Richard felt utterly relaxed in the company of this stunning woman, though little niggles of guilt assailed him from time to time. By the middle of his second pint, he was feeling vaguely disloyal to Angela for being so contented, whilst she was sitting alone in an empty house a hundred miles away. The two women were totally different, he thought. Angela was very good-looking and exceptionally well dressed, but was a rather quiet, reserved woman. When Richard had first met her at that conference, he had thought her something of an ice maiden, though better acquaintance proved that she had considerable warmth under her protective aloofness.
In spite of living in such close proximity for months, their relationship had never strayed from the strictly platonic, though on a recent visit to London when they went up for a case, the glimmerings of romance had arisen, to be quickly suppressed for the sake of their professional relationship.
Priscilla, so very attractive in a more overt way, was a talkative, gregarious extrovert, spontaneous in the expression of her feelings. In Singapore, he had had several affairs with expatriates since his divorce, but that had all ended more than a year ago and being with Priscilla now revived feelings that had lain dormant all that time.
He thought ruefully that perhaps it was just as well that she was not a permanent fixture in Garth House — and that they were not living under the same roof, as he was with Angela. Reluctantly, he looked at his watch.
‘Another quarter of an hour and we’d better get back to Mrs Evans,’ he said. ‘Mustn’t miss her meat and two veg after all that digging we’ve done today.’
Priscilla used the time to discover more about his marital history. Though she had had an outline from Sian, she openly fished for more details and learned that he had met his former wife Miriam in the military hospital in Ceylon where he had been a medical officer during the war.
‘She was a civilian radiographer and British girls were in short supply there,’ he explained. ‘We got married Army style, dress uniforms, arcade of swords, the whole works!’
Priscilla’s big eyes gleamed at the thought of a tropical wedding with all the trimmings. ‘But it didn’t last?’
