They are pretty uncommon events.’
Angela shuddered. ‘I’ve led a sheltered life in a laboratory, I suppose. Seeing where you end up at the bottom of a deep hole is a powerful reminder of your mortality.’
Hereford was not many miles away and the road from Ledbury came in past the County Hospital, so within a short time the cortege arrived at the mortuary. In the small office, a police photographer was waiting, organized by John Christie, as well as Dr Bogdan Marek, whose territory this was. In addition, Edward Lethbridge was there. He had had no desire to attend the exhumation nor view the disputed remains, but he felt that he should represent his client, on whose behalf he had set all this performance in motion.
The undertakers wheeled the coffin in on a trolley to the outer room where the body store was situated and proceeded to unscrew the lid. Richard Pryor put on a rubber apron and offered one to Angela.
‘It’ll keep the earth off your clothes, if nothing else,’ he said cheerfully.
They stood at the side of the coffin as the lid was taken off and propped against the wall. As the contents were virtually skeletal and very incomplete, there was no satin lining, but a sheet of rubberized fabric covered the bottom and was folded over the remains, which were laid out in an approximately correct pattern.
‘Better push the whole lot into the post-mortem room,’ said Pryor to the mortuary attendant and they followed the trolley into the stark chamber next door. Angela had seen plenty of dead bodies when called out to London scenes of crime, some in all stages of decay and mutilation, so she had no qualms about being in such close proximity to what was left of a corpse, though after lying about in the open air for several years, it was not particularly offensive, being mainly bones.
Pushing the coffin close to the porcelain table, Richard took charge and folded back the flaps of fabric to expose what was left of the body. After he had had a good look, he asked the hovering photographer to take pictures in situ and, for a few moments, the room was dazzled by flashes of home-made lightning.
Then the pathologist began taking the bones out one by one and reassembling them in proper anatomical order on the white table, when Dr Marek began peering intently at them.
‘There’s quite a lot missing,’ observed Richard. ‘Some of the ribs and quite a few vertebrae, as well as the skull. A lot of the smaller hand and foot bones have gone, too. There are small teeth marks on some of them, foxes and rats, probably.’
He waited until he had all the skeleton laid out before addressing the vital point.
‘Thank God we’ve still got the sternum!’ he muttered and though he had already handled it, he picked it from between the ribs and held it between the fingers and thumbs of each hand. The breastbone was blade-shaped, about six inches long and an inch and a half wide, tapering to a point. Richard studied it, turned it over, then held it out to the others, who were clustered around.
‘Flat as a pancake!’ he announced. ‘Doctor Marek was quite right, no sign of a
The Polish pathologist looked pleased at being proved right, though he had had no doubts about his memory of it. While the photographer took some close-ups of the bone, the coroner’s officer wanted some firm assurance to take back to Brian Meredith.
‘So we can definitely say that this is not Albert Barnes, Doc?’
Richard was more cautious. ‘We mustn’t jump to conclusions, there’s a lot more we can do yet. Certainly there’s nothing unusual about his sternum, but of course we’re relying on Dr Welton’s clinical examination for the truth of that. Mind you, I can’t see any possible reason for him being wrong about Barnes having a depressed sternum, but after all the fuss we’ve caused, we’ve got to be a hundred per cent sure.’
Angela volunteered to write a list of all the bones for Richard, being a good enough biologist not to need advice about any but a couple of small wrist and ankle bones. While she was doing this, Pryor examined every bone minutely, looking for any signs of old injury, but he found nothing.
‘There are still a few tendon tags here and there,’ he said. ‘As well as some joint cartilage, so death must have been within about the last five years.’
‘But it could have been less, I suppose?’ asked Marek.
‘Yes, it depends on the appetite of all those predators out there. They haven’t left much.’
When he had finished looking at the remains, Richard measured the surviving long bones of the legs and arms. He used an osteometry board which he had made himself in Singapore, a two-foot plank with a long ruler screwed to one edge. At one end was a ledge and a slider moved along a groove in the middle. He put a bone against the ledge, then slid the moving part until it touched the other end of the bone, reading off the length on the scale.
Angela wrote down all the measurements and after some hurried calculations on a sheet of paper, he turned again to the others.
‘I’ll do it properly when I get home, but I reckon that he was about five feet ten inches, with an error of up to two inches either way.’
John Christie nodded wisely. ‘That’s against it being Barnes, too. He was supposed to be only about five- seven.’
The photographer left, after being assured that there were no more pictures needed and Dr Marek went off to more pressing duties in his laboratory.
‘What else can we do, Doc?’ asked the coroner’s officer, anxious to come to a final decision.
‘We need some X-rays, certainly. Can you fix that? Tell the hospital that the coroner will pay!’ Richard turned to Angela, who was finishing off her notes.
‘What do you need for blood grouping? There’s hardly any soft tissue left.’
‘Any chance of some marrow? A vertebra or a small section out of a long bone would be enough.’
‘His clinical X-rays would be from a leg, so I can’t take any from a femur or tibia. A piece of ulna should do.’
Under the statutory Coroner’s Rules, a pathologist was not only allowed, but was obliged, to retain any material which might assist the coroner in his enquiries. Richard used a small saw to cut a sliver from an arm bone that exposed the marrow inside, which was ideal for determining the blood group. Then he collected his instruments, washed his hands and went out to see the solicitor in the office.
He told him what had transpired so far and that it looked very much as if the remains could not be those of Albert Barnes. ‘When I see the X-rays, I’ll be in a position to give a definite answer,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I can phone you later today.’
The elderly lawyer remained impassive, but as he left, he gave a sigh. ‘This means that Mrs Oldfield will be convinced that the remains are those of her nephew! I’ll get no peace now, mark my words!’
While they waited for the radiographers to arrive, which was forecast as being at least an hour, Richard drove down to the town centre and found a parking place.
‘A celebratory coffee is called for, partner,’ he declared and taking Angela’s arm they walked past the old jail and police station into the shopping streets. Finding a cafe of the ‘Olde Tea Shoppe’ style, they each ordered coffee and a cream cake, exhumation having done nothing to impair their appetite.
‘It’s nice to have things in the shops again,’ said Angela. ‘Ten years since the war finished and at last things are now virtually back to normal.’
They talked about their memories of pre-war days for a while. Both were from well-off families, Angela more so that the doctor’s son Richard, who remembered the South Wales valleys in the depression of the early thirties. He had more sympathy with Sian Lloyd’s pink politics than Angela, a ‘true blue’ who had been brought up in an affluent Home Counties’ environment.
The hour went quickly and he realized again how much he enjoyed talking to his partner, who was highly intelligent, well educated and sensitive to other people’s feelings. He began to wonder if their partnership would eventually take on another meaning.
When they got back to the hospital, a middle-aged woman was pushing a portable X-ray machine into the outer room of the mortuary. The device was like a washing machine with a thick chrome pole sticking out of the top, carrying a cabled tube on a side arm.
‘Sorry about this,’ apologized Richard, helping her push the machine into the post-mortem room ‘Must be a bit different to your usual patients – but these don’t smell or anything.’
The woman smiled and shook her head. ‘Saw a lot worse than this in the war! What exactly do you want done?’
John Christie was there with the X-rays from Barnes’s admission four years previously and he handed them to
