Bernard Knight - Grounds for Appeal

‘Plenty for a dentist to get his teeth into, so to speak,’ he said. ‘I can see some metal fillings at the back and there’s one canine tooth missing.’

‘Is that going to tell us who he is, Doc?’ asked Rickman.

Richard shrugged. ‘Only if we get a name by some other means, so that you might be able to find a dentist who treated him and has some records.’

He had left his black bag on a table nearby and now opened it to take out a glass jar in which a piece of bone was padded in cotton wool. Fishing it out, he held it out to the watchers.

‘Now for the crunch question!’ he said lightly. ‘This is a vertebra from the top end of the spine of our friend in Borth Bog. It’s got tiny cuts on it where the head was detached, so I want to see if it matches up with the stump of spine on the head.’

The helpful attendant, himself aproned and gloved, held the grisly exhibit upside down on the table so that the ragged undersurface was uppermost. Amongst the tatters of grey muscle, the lower end of the spine was visible, with a central hole where the shrunken spinal cord lay. With a dissecting knife, Richard cut away some of the muscle and, with his fingers, delved down towards the base of the skull.

‘Three vertebrae left, which corresponds with being next to this one, which is number four of the seven bones in the neck.’ He pointed down at the dried specimen from Wales, which he had laid on the porcelain table.

‘Does that clinch it, doctor?’ asked Hartnell.

‘Suggestive, but not definite. I’d like to see some similar cut marks on the upper one, proving that a knife or something sharp had been used to sever the neck. I need to take it off and have it back in our laboratory for a good look under magnification, after cleaning all the tissue gubbins from it.’

The inspector looked disappointed at not getting a quick answer. ‘Nothing else you can do today, doctor?’

Richard grinned at him. ‘Fear not, Mr Hartnell! I’ve got one more trick up my sleeve.’

He turned the head right way up again and set it on the slab, its ghastly rictus of a smile beaming at the three police officers. Then he looked across at the mortuary technician.

‘Do you think you could saw the skull off for me, please? It’ll be a bit difficult, not being attached to a body.’

The man seemed pleased to have a challenge. ‘No problem, sir. I’ll get Reg to hold it for me.’

The other attendant, a much younger man, left his stitching tasks and came across to grip the head in his strong hands, while his senior took a knife and slit the scalp across the top of the head, from ear to ear. When he had peeled it back, a more difficult job than usual due to the stiffness of the tissues, he took a silvery handsaw and prepared to attack the exposed bone.

‘Don’t you use an electric saw?’ asked Richard.

‘The younger lads do, but I’m of the old school, doctor, I like to use a bit of muscle on it.’

Richard concealed a smile, as if he was right about the identity, quite a lot of muscle would be needed.

The technician laid the saw blade against the skull and began sawing almost horizontally around the circumference, with a slight V-shaped dip on each side to allow a good fit when it was replaced. However, as Richard watched his face, he was gratified to see a frown appear as the man’s efforts seemed abnormally strenuous.

After a few moments, he stopped for a rest. ‘Bloody hell, sir, this is as hard as flint!’ He tapped the top of the skull with the back of the saw, producing a dull, almost metallic sound.

Richard, with some relief, turned to the detectives.

‘I think we can take it that the rest of this fellow is lying in Aberystwyth mortuary. I’ll get it X-rayed to make certain and do some other tests, but I don’t think there’s any doubt at all now.’

An hour later, they were back in the coroner’s office where Richard gave his provisional findings to Theobald Priestly.

‘The head must be from the body in the bog,’ he said firmly. ‘It would be a remarkable coincidence if they both had the same very rare disease. The number of spinal vertebrae match up, three on the head, four on the body, which gives the correct total of seven.’ He added this for the benefit of the police, rather than a medical coroner.

‘You say you would like the head X-rayed, just to check on the bone density?’ asked Priestly.

‘Belt and braces, really, just to make sure. The skull thickness was hardly above average, but it certainly was abnormally dense. I’m afraid your mortuary technician had to swallow his pride and send for the electric saw!’

‘Fine, I can arrange to have it taken to the hospital for an X-ray,’ agreed the coroner. ‘One of the radiologists is a friend of mine, so he can look at the films. I’m sure he’d be interested in seeing an Albers-Schonberg, it’s so rare. You know, I’ve never seen one in my thirty years as a doctor.’ He sounded quite pensive, as if this had made his life incomplete.

‘Perhaps you could ask him if he knows of any cases reported in the Birmingham area,’ suggested Richard. ‘It might help to put a name to this chap.’

The group soon broke up, the coroner needing to contact his opposite number in Cardiganshire and the CID men going off to report to their seniors, before making their way to Winson Green prison.

For Richard, his priority was getting back to Jimmy Jenkins at the car and finding somewhere to have a late lunch, before setting off for the Wye Valley.

With some relief, he dumped his bag into the waiting Humber, complete with an extra vertebra and a fragment of skull for Sian to decalcify.

‘Home, James, and don’t spare the horses until we come to a cafe!’

Winson Green Prison was a huge and forbidding Victorian structure stretching along the A4040 in the centre of the suburb of the same name. It had a high stone wall and an entrance which looked as if it should have ‘Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here’ carved above it. With a bad reputation even among English prisons, both for the prisoners’ living conditions and the degree of violence of both inmates and warders, it was often in the news for one scandal or other.

Given the now major status of the death of the bog man — and the possible involvement of one of Birmingham’s most notorious gang leaders — the Assistant Chief Constable had pulled enough strings with the prison authorities to get a rapid approval for his detectives to interview Billy Blair that day.

As DI Hartnell and Sergeant Rickman waited in the cold outside the wicket gate in the massive main doors, the inspector asked Tom if he knew Blair, as the convict had been incarcerated before Hartnell had arrived in this part of the city.

‘Yes, a real toerag is Billy Blair,’ growled the sergeant. ‘One of Doyle’s gang from way back. He’s done a couple of stretches before, mainly for assault and obtaining money by menaces. This time he’s doing six years for robbery with violence. He must be getting near time for release; he lost his chance of parole because of an attack on a warder.’

‘Sounds a nice chap,’ said Hartnell sarcastically, as the door opened and they began the laborious process of being admitted, with much signing of passes and jangling of keys as they were escorted through half a dozen gates and doors.

Eventually they came to an interview room, the bleakness of which made their similar facility in the police station look like a luxury boudoir. The bare concrete chamber was divided in half by a heavy wooden counter, above which was a high barrier of steel mesh.

A few hard stools stood on their side and as they sat down, a door opened in the far wall beyond the screen and a sullen-looking warder led in a man in grey prison overalls, who he pushed towards a single stool opposite the policemen, before moving back to lean against the wall. ‘This is your William Blair,’ he announced in a surly voice.