Bernard Knight - Grounds for Appeal

Richard Pryor shook his head. ‘Angela and I discussed this on the phone the other night. We were fortunate in getting you to stand in when she had to go away, and we thought it would be for much longer than this. Thankfully, it wasn’t, but we can’t chuck you out so soon. Business is building up quite well, so will you stay for a bit longer? In fact, until you get fixed up with something else.’

Priscilla looked from one to the other. ‘I’d love to — but I really think I should get back to London and keep looking for a job in archaeology. That’s where most opportunities are likely to arise.’

She had been lodging in a bed and breakfast in the village half a mile away and, though it was quite comfortable, she missed the bustle of the metropolis, unlike Richard and Angela, who had settled happily into these beautiful rural surroundings.

Since they first moved in the previous May, they had lived together in the big house, no doubt giving ammunition for the village tongue-waggers in Tintern Parva, just down the valley. However, the arrangement had remained professional and platonic, though there had been a couple of occasions when the conventions had been a little strained.

Angela and Richard were equal partners in the venture, as when they had set up their partnership earlier that year, Richard contributed both his golden handshake from Singapore University, where he had been Professor of Forensic Medicine, as well as the house he had been left by his aunt. On her part, Angela had put the proceeds of the sale of her London flat into the pot and with the added help of a modest mortgage, they had raised the capital needed to make some alterations to the rooms and equip the laboratory.

‘Then stay until the end of this month, at least,’ suggested Angela and, without more persuasion, her friend agreed to remain for a couple more weeks.

When their business discussions were done, Richard told Angela of current cases and especially the odd request he had had from Cardiganshire about the alleged ‘bog body’. Like Priscilla, his partner knew quite a lot about the finds reported in Denmark and elsewhere, which were obviously of considerable interest to all forensic biologists.

‘Let’s see tomorrow whether it’s a sheep or King Arthur!’ said Angela, happy to be back in harness herself.

The tests next day confirmed that it was not a sheep and, at a stretch, it could be King Arthur, for at least it was human.

At about ten o’clock next morning, a Triumph motorcycle roared up to the house and a helmeted police officer handed over a small package in return for a signature on his exhibit docket. Richard was due to go down to Chepstow to carry out a couple of routine post-mortems for the coroner at the public mortuary there, but he could not resist waiting to have a look at the specimen. The others crowded around, even Moira, who left her typewriter to have a look at such a curious sample.

Richard took the small glass bottle from the plywood box that protected it and found a sheet of paper wrapped around it. It was a note on Home Office letter-heading from Philip Rees, one of the forensic scientists at the Cardiff laboratory, whom they had met in a case a month or so earlier.

‘It just says that they did a precipitin test and it was unequivocally human tissue,’ he announced. ‘He also says there’s a small piece of cord as well, but they did nothing with that, as they were only asked to carry out a species identification.’

He peered into the bottle, then handed it to Angela, who diplomatically gave it to Priscilla to deal with. With the others watching, she carefully slid the contents out into a shallow glass dish. A greyish cylinder sat there, with a leathery cap. A short length of thin cord lay alongside it.

‘Not very exciting, is it?’ said Sian. ‘Looks like a lump of dirty candle grease.’

Richard picked up the dish and held it to his nose. ‘Adipocere, as I suspected from the story.’

He then had to explain to Sian and Moira. ‘When body fat is left for a long time in moist surroundings, it’s often converted into a kind of soap, which can persist for centuries. But bog bodies are usually around two thousand years since death and I just don’t know if adipocere would last that long.’

‘What about the scrap of string?’ asked Priscilla.

Richard shrugged. ‘I’ll leave that to you clever ladies. If we confirm it is human — and I’ve no reason to doubt Cardiff — then there’ll have to be an exhumation. Maybe then the reason for the string will become clear.’

‘What about that dark bit on top of the fatty stuff?’ asked Priscilla.

‘Could be skin, I suppose. Can you snip a bit off one edge and give it to Sian to process for histology? We can have a look under the microscope then, see what the structure is like.’

He looked at his watch and hurriedly left for his post-mortem session. Angela, not wanting to appear as if she was supervising her friend, left to do her unpacking upstairs and Moira drifted back to the office before starting on lunch, as her duties included making a light meal for the doctors at midday and something more substantial in the evening. Cleaning, washing and bed-making were now the province of the appropriately-named Mrs Daley, from the village.

Sian began processing the skin fragment by dropping it into formalin, then had some spare time. She wandered over to Priscilla and watched her deft fingers manipulating small pipettes and a rack of narrow tubes. Sian marvelled at how she could keep her long red-varnished nails so perfect when handling glassware and chemicals.

‘What exactly is this test?’ she asked. ‘I’ve heard of it, but I’m not quite sure how it works.’

‘It’s been around for ages,’ answered the biologist, always happy to instruct. She pointed to a rack of labelled vials, taken from the refrigerator. ‘These are made from the blood of rabbits immunized with sera from different animals, including humans. A small quantity is injected, which doesn’t hurt the rabbit, but stimulates the production of antibodies specific for the proteins of that particular beast.’

Sian nodded, she knew about antigen-antibody reactions from her time in the hospital laboratory.

‘How do you get a result, then?’

‘Basically, an extract is made from the test sample and layered on top of each specific serum in a tube. If an antigen for a particular species is present, then a white line appears at the junction between the two fluids, due to protein being precipitated.’

She added small amounts of the fluids into a series of tubes as she talked. ‘In this case, I’ll have to get rid of all this fat first and get a clear solution. Let it incubate for a few hours and see what happens. Naturally, we have to set up controls and blanks to make sure the result is genuine.’

It was the afternoon before all this was done and Priscilla was able to confirm that the substance was definitely human in origin by the time they assembled for tea in the ‘staff room’, between the kitchen and the staircase that went up from the centre of the hall.

‘I’d better confirm to the cops in Aberystwyth that they’ve probably got an unexplained body on their patch,’ said Richard. ‘They’ll have to inform the coroner first of all.’

‘Could it be an accident or a natural death?’ asked Moira, pouring Brooke Bond into the cups from a large brown pot.

‘Could be, I suppose. But when, that’s the question? It was about three feet down and it takes a long time for that thickness of peat to accumulate if the deceased just fell on to the surface.’

‘Someone would have seen him then,’ objected the ever-practical Sian. ‘Someone must have dug a hole to put him in.’

Priscilla looked doubtful. She had plenty of experience of holes in the ground from her work as an archaeologist.