Bernard Knight - Grounds for Appeal

‘Who is this pathologist? Is he used to this sort of case?’ asked the sergeant, in a tone that suggested that civilization petered out west of Reading.

Meirion Thomas jumped to defend Richard Pryor.

‘He’s a Home Office pathologist and, in fact, was a professor of forensic pathology. Not only that, but he had another lady scientist with him, who used to work in your laboratory in London.’

Vickers sat up in his chair and looked intently at the detective inspector. ‘What was her name? Was it Doctor Bray?’

His voice was suddenly tense, but Meirion shook his head. ‘No, it was Chambers; she said she specialized in anthropology.’

Sergeant Squires nodded. ‘I saw her at a scene in Battersea once. A very attractive lady indeed!’

Vickers seemed to relax. ‘The pathologist must have been Richard Pryor, the one that came back from Singapore. I met him briefly in a shooting near Gloucester some months ago.’

The social chat over, there was little else to be done except arrange for the two London men to be picked up at their hotel in the morning and taken to the incident room at Borth. The local DI and sergeant dropped them off at the Bellevue Hotel, just along the seafront from the police headquarters, then went to the nearest pub for a pint before going wearily to their own homes.

‘That pair think we are still in the colonies,’ grumbled Gwyn Parry. ‘Condescending couple of bastards!’

Antipathy between county police and the Metropolitan Police was traditional. Some forces felt it was an admission of inferiority to have to ‘call in the Yard’, but Meirion Thomas took a more phlegmatic view of the situation.

‘It’s no good getting uptight about them, Gwyn. There’s no way we can carry on with this on our own. This fellow could have been brought to Borth from anywhere and dumped in that bog. We can’t go looking all over Great Britain for him!’

Next morning, while Vickers and his sergeant were travelling towards Borth in the back seat of a police car, Richard Pryor was sitting in his office in Garth House. He was holding up a large X-ray film to the window, so that Angela and Priscilla could see it against the daylight outside. They all looked intently at the dense white image of the thigh bone, which contrasted sharply with the black of the surrounding celluloid.

‘What d’you make of that, ladies?’ he asked chirpily. Angela could tell that he was pleased with what he had discovered, but she was not going to give in easily.

‘I suppose the radiologist in Hereford told you what it was, clever-sticks!’ she chided.

Richard pretended to be affronted. ‘He only confirmed what I already suspected! Ever heard of Albers-Schonberg?’

‘Sounds like an Austrian composer or a psychiatrist,’ suggested Priscilla, facetiously. Richard grinned and waggled the film in his hand.

‘No, he was a German radiologist, who described this disease in 1904. It’s better known as “Marble Bone Disease”, for obvious reasons.’

‘It’s not obvious to me,’ said Angela, stoutly. ‘Pris and I are proper doctors, not physicians!’

Richard became serious and pointed to the dense white shaft of the bone.

‘We thought the femur was very heavy and with good reason. This is a quite rare genetic defect in which the bone becomes extraordinarily dense and thickened. Look, there’s hardly any marrow cavity down the middle of the bone. It’s all overgrown and as hard as a rock — in fact, the modern name for the disease is “osteopetrosis”, meaning rock-like bones.’

‘So what makes you so excited about this, apart from your academic interest?’ asked Priscilla. Richard dropped the film on to his desk.

‘Well, because it’s so rare. Maybe there’s a medical record somewhere of this chap, if he was ever seen in a hospital. Although the bone is so hard, it’s brittle, so they get a lot of fractures. And it seriously affects the skull as well, so if they ever find a spare head somewhere, we could match it to this fellow.’

The two scientists were quite impressed after all.

‘Quite a unique pair of identifying features, Richard,’ said Angela. ‘Albers-Schonberg disease and a Batman tattoo!’

‘Better than nothing, which is what we had when we dug him up,’ said Richard defensively. ‘Something useful to tell the cops, anyway.’

Angela hauled herself off the corner of his desk, ready to go back to her work in the laboratory.

‘You said something about possibly telling the age of the body from his bone X-rays… any joy there?

‘Not really, according to the radiologist,’ he replied.

‘The presence of this great thickening obscures the details of the internal structure, especially as the marrow cavity is partly obliterated. Normally, the internal architecture of weight-bearing bones is modified as people get older. But he said there was no positive evidence of advanced age, for what that’s worth.’

As the two women went out, he reached for the phone and dialled Aberystwyth, to leave a message for Meirion Thomas to contact him.

The investigators in Borth had just left the hut, to go over to the site of the excavation to show it to the London men. There was nothing really to see, apart from a hole in the ground surrounded by posts and tape, but Meirion Thomas felt that Vickers and his assistant should get a feel for the whole case. Howard Squires was very taken by the panoramic view, which included the huge bog, the sea and the surrounding hills, but his senior officer seemed distracted. He was thinking of a woman, in fact his former fiancee, Angela Bray. Engaged to her for over a year, he had suddenly become infatuated with a younger woman and broken it off. He was well aware how hard Angela had taken it and knew that it was a factor in her decision to leave London and team up with this Welsh pathologist, Richard Pryor. Some months earlier, he had been called to Gloucester to identify a murdered South London criminal, shot in a gang dispute. The pathologist was Richard Pryor and with him had been Angela Bray, which led to an embarrassing confrontation in the mortuary. Now history was in danger of repeating itself and he would have to be careful to avoid meeting her again, as ‘hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’.

‘Guv, have you seen enough here?’ His sergeant’s voice brought him back to earth.

‘Er, yes, I think so.’ With an effort, he focused his attention again and looked around. ‘How would they have brought a body here? The same way as we came?’ he asked the locals.

‘Probably, it’s only a few hundred yards from the road,’ answered the DI. ‘We assume that there were more than one and presumably they had some sort of transport. He was only of average height, but I doubt one person would have struggled here with the corpse.’

‘Unless he was killed right here?’ objected Squires.

Meirion gave a doubtful shrug. ‘Possible, but it seems unlikely that they would cut off his head here and take it away.’

‘The whole damned case seems unlikely!’ muttered Vickers, as he took a last look around.

They went back to the police car and drove back to the headquarters in Aberystwyth, where an office had been put at the disposal of the Scotland Yard men. Vickers said that he would have to make a lot of telephone calls to get things moving, before going back to Borth after lunch.

In Meirion’s own office, a message relayed from the incident room asked him to ring Doctor Richard Pryor and when he got through, the doctor told him of the confirmation of the rare bone disease discovered in the corpse. It took a few minutes for Richard to explain about Albers-Schonberg disease, but the detective quickly grasped its significance.

‘So we’ve got to find a guy somewhere in Britain who had this disease — and find a skull somewhere which also suffered from it?’