Bernard Knight - Grounds for Appeal

‘I’m sure they won’t turf you out into the street tonight, Priscilla!’ said Sian. ‘Perhaps you can stay with us for good?’

Moira managed to suppress a frown as she went through to her office next door. Apart from the fact that there was not enough work for two biologists, the prospect of both Angela and Priscilla living in Garth House under the same roof as Richard was not one that appealed to her. She would have been reassured to hear the conversation that continued after she left the laboratory, for Priscilla, as she continued to pipette sera into her banks of little tubes, replied to the suggestion that she stayed on in the Wye Valley.

‘It’s great here, Sian, you’ve all been so kind to me. But I don’t want to stay in forensic science permanently. I’d like to get back to my first love, anthropology. That’s why I’ve been dithering around lately, waiting for a vacancy to turn up somewhere.’

The technician loved a good gossip and this was a chance to delve some more. ‘I’m not quite clear what you did before this,’ she asked.

Priscilla filled her last tube, then swung around on her swivel chair, her long auburn hair swirling above the collar of her white coat.

‘I did a degree in physical anthropology in London, then my doctorate on blood types in different ethnic groups. After that, I went to the Natural History Museum in Kensington for a while, then moved to the police laboratory in New Scotland Yard, doing this sort of work.’ She waved a manicured hand at the tubes and bottles on her bench top.

Sian listened avidly to this recital of achievement. ‘And then to Australia and back!’ she said enviously. ‘You’ve never been married?’

Priscilla shook her head. ‘Never seemed to have time — or stayed long enough in one place. Plenty of chaps, though!’ she added with a smile.

‘My life has been deadly dull compared with yours,’ sighed Sian regretfully. ‘I left school soon after the war to work in a hospital lab in Newport and stayed there until I had the chance to come here. I love this forensic work so much that I’m doing an external degree in biochemistry now.’

‘What about chaps, though?’ called Priscilla over her shoulder, as she swung back to get on with her work.

‘Nothing serious yet, though there’s a fellow on my day-release course that I get on with very well.’

Their tete-a-tete was interrupted by the door into the hall opening to admit Richard Glanville Pryor, the founder of the Garth House venture. Tall and wiry, he wore a rather crumpled suit of fawn linen, with button-down pockets and a half-belt at the back. It was one of those he had brought back from Singapore, which the ladies claimed made him look like a big-game hunter. Under a bush of brown hair, his lean face, which usually creased so easily into a grin, was looking serious for once.

‘Just had a phone call from the police. Curious business! Sounds as if it might be right up your street, Priscilla.’

Moira came back in through the office door, clutching some unnecessary papers as an excuse to hear what was going on.

‘Why me, Richard?’ asked the glamorous serologist.

The doctor squatted on the corner of the big table that filled the large bay window. ‘There’s some suggestion that it might be a bog body, though I doubt it very much.’

Priscilla’s hazel eyes lit up at the mention of these curiosities.

‘A bog body! It would be a first in Wales, then. I’ve read a great deal about them. I even met Professor Glob once, at a congress.’

At Sian’s insistence, she had to explain briefly about these ancient corpses, found mainly in Northern Europe, assumed to be sacrificial victims who were dumped in marshes, where their tissues were preserved for centuries by the tannins of the peat and the acid bog water. Professor Glob was the doyen on the subject, a Danish archaeologist who had studied a number found in his homeland.

‘As I said, it sounds highly unlikely to me,’ continued Richard. ‘But the cops in Aberystwyth want an opinion. The forensic lab in Cardiff suggested me, as I’m now on their Home Office list.’

He told them the story, such as it was. ‘So far, the only evidence is a bit of tissue accidentally recovered by a botanist. The police sent it to Cardiff, mainly to check whether it came from a dead sheep. But it seems that a precipitation test showed that it was human.’

‘So what’s going to happen next?’ asked Moira, as intrigued as the rest of them with such an unusual story.

‘I agreed that we’d do what we could for them, but we wanted to look at the sample ourselves first. The police are bringing it up from Cardiff in the morning. If it’s definitely human, then I suspect they’ll ask us to look at the body, if they can find it.’

‘What do you want me to do?’ asked Priscilla. ‘Angela will be back at work tomorrow, so she may want to deal with it, especially as now I may soon be moving on.’

Richard laid a hand on her shoulder, raising another covert frown on Moira’s face.

‘She’ll want a day or two to settle in, I expect. Then we’ll decide how to play it. If our own tests on the sample show it to be a sheep or something, that’s the end of it, but the Home Office lads in Cardiff are unlikely to have got it wrong.’

The matter was left in abeyance and was soon overshadowed by the sound of Angela’s little Renault coming up the steep slope of the drive from the main road below. They all trooped down the corridor past the kitchen to the back door, to greet her as she stopped in the yard behind and then reversed into the open garages beneath the coach house.

She stepped out, as elegant as her friend Priscilla, both of whom were classy dressers. A few years older than Priscilla, Doctor Bray was tall, slim and had a mane of light brown hair in place of the striking auburn of her friend. Handsome rather than pretty, she had the features of what the somewhat socialistic Sian thought of as a typical English ‘hunting, shooting and fishing’ aristocrat. This didn’t stop the technician impulsively running forward to give her boss a welcoming hug.

‘Great to have you back, doctor! We’ve all missed you.’

Priscilla gave her a more restrained peck on the check, being careful of their make-up, and Moira went to squeeze her hand in both of hers and enquire after her mother.

Richard let the women do their thing, before going over and putting a welcoming arm around her shoulders.

‘Time for a cup of tea before you get back to work, Angela!’ he joked and steered her towards the back door. There was one more greeting to be offered en route, this time from the edge of the four acres that lay behind the house. Their handyman, gardener and occasional chauffeur was Jimmy Jenkins, a middle-aged scruff whom Richard had inherited along with the large house after the death of his aged aunt.

‘Good to see you back, Doc,’ he called, half a Woodbine bobbing on his lip as he spoke. ‘Hope your mam is better! I’ll bring your luggage in from the car.’

Angela smiled as she gave him a wave. She was glad to be back amongst her good friends, even though she loved the comforts of her family home, a large stud farm in Berkshire where her father was a successful breeder of racehorses. Their first stop was the big kitchen at the back of the house, where Moira bustled about making tea so that they could hear Angela’s news and bring her up to date with events at Garth House.

Eventually, the three doctors adjourned to Angela’s study-cum-sitting room, on the other side of the front hall from the laboratory. It had a matching bay window looking out over the valley, with the little-used front door between.

Priscilla came directly to the point. ‘Now that you’re back, I feel redundant,’ she said. ‘I’d better start making plans to move out.’