Bernard Knight - Grounds for Appeal

‘It’s a body alright,’ he reported. ‘I can feel bone — and from the shape, it’s certainly no sheep!’

There was a buzz of excitement from the watchers gathered around the excavation. ‘Is it human, d’you think?’ asked Eva Boross.

‘Can’t tell yet. We need to get more water out and a lot more peat.’

Richard asked for a trowel and when one was handed down, he began carefully digging around the sides of the bulge, as the pump continued to gurgle the opaque water from the sump. After a few minutes, he managed to free both sides of the protrusion, before again feeling around whatever was being exposed.

‘I’m sure this is a buttock!’ he proclaimed. ‘I can feel a small hole on top that I can get my finger into. It must be where their drill punched into it.’

‘So what shape is the hard stuff?’ demanded Priscilla, leaning over the edge of the cavity. Like the Hungarian lady, she was itching to get down there and use her archaeological talents.

Richard slid his hand lower, now getting the impression that the axis of the body was diagonally across the excavation. ‘I can feel a thick shaft of bone — and, yes, that must be a femoral head!’

This was the large knob on the top of thigh bone, where it fits into the hip joint. He straightened up, his back aching. Waving the trowel at the detective inspector, he sounded almost exultant as he confirmed that now the police had something definite to report to the coroner.

‘It’s certainly a human corpse — though God knows how long it’s been here!’

He clambered back out of the excavation, his old trousers plastered with black mud, for a discussion on how they should proceed.

‘I suppose now it must be treated as a crime scene, doctor,’ suggested Meirion Thomas. ‘Just in case it’s not a historical find.’

‘And if it is ancient, it needs an equally meticulous procedure,’ countered Doctor Boross firmly. ‘Perhaps Doctor Chambers and I should take over from here; we know how it needs to be done.’

They compromised on a combined operation and while both a police officer and Priscilla took some photographs of the first appearance of the cadaver, the remorseless action of the pump took yet more water from the hole, so that the mound that Richard thought was someone’s backside came more clearly into view.

It was now well past lunchtime and the DI called a halt, while a constable went back to the vans and returned with a large box of sandwiches, small pork pies and four Thermos flasks of tea.

‘We’re certainly not going to finish this tonight,’ said Richard Pryor. ‘We can’t just drag this out of the ground piecemeal. It will have to be removed as intact as we can manage.’

Priscilla and her new-found friend Eva agreed. ‘It will have to be moved on to some form of support. Perhaps a door or some planks would do,’ suggested the older archaeologist.

‘That means the hole will have to be enlarged to make more room,’ said Priscilla. ‘If it’s human, we need well over six feet clearance.’

Sergeant Parry gave some instructions to a constable who was driving one of the vans and he hurried off, with instructions to return to Aberystwyth and come back with a couple more men and some equipment suitable for moving the body.

Then, eating and drinking finished, they went back to the excavation, where the pump had now almost dried out the area around the remains.

‘We’ll have a go at it for a bit,’ declared Eva Boross and with Priscilla on the other side, they began carefully trowelling away peat into buckets, gradually exposing the corpse. Richard watched intently from above and saw the outline of a body slowly appear. It was obviously lying on its front, the buttocks and back exposed first.

When the slimy peat was wiped away with a hand, the wrinkled skin appeared almost black, though splits here and there allowed greyish adipocere to show through.

There was a circular hole in one buttock, where the botanist’s coring tube had penetrated, before hitting the underlying bone of the pelvis.

‘The legs are in a bad state, Richard!’ Priscilla called up, after another hour’s work. She was concentrating on the lower end of the body, while Doctor Boross was freeing the shoulders. ‘They are fraying off below thigh level, just bones and some tendon.’

‘Best leave them alone for now,’ he advised, peering down at what she was doing. ‘We’ll have to leave them in a block of peat and slide the whole thing on to whatever they bring as a support.’

A couple of feet away, Eva Boross was also having problems. ‘The skin is very friable, like wet paper,’ she reported. ‘The arms must be tucked under the body. And so far, I haven’t located the head, though I’ve cleared the peat almost to the neck.’

The photographer was taking pictures every few minutes to record the progress of the exposure of the tattered corpse. The light was now fading as the afternoon wore on, so at intervals the scene was illuminated by the artificial lightning of a flashgun.

When the two women came up for a rest, two policemen enlarged the edges of the hole to make more room for removing the remains. The van came back with the top of a trestle table and some planks, together with a couple more muscular PCs.

When Doctor Boross went back down the hole after a quick smoke, she soon discovered two disturbing facts.

‘Doctor Pryor, there’s some thin rope here, coming round from the front, it seems. Very frayed, and seems fixed underneath.’

Richard looked down at a ragged end that she held up.

‘There was a tiny strand of what could have come from that, caught up in the botanist’s sample,’ he said.

‘Some of the foreign bog bodies were strangled with a cord ligature,’ she said hopefully. ‘I’ll try to expose the neck area. I’m almost up to it.’

A few moments later, she made another more grisly discovery.

‘There’s no head here! I’ve probed up beyond the neck and there’s nothing there except soft peat.’

Priscilla squelched up from her end and after feeling around, confirmed Eva’s finding. ‘Nothing there, Richard! Unless it’s buried some distance away, it’s certainly not attached to the body. I can feel the ends of the lower neck vertebrae with my fingers.’

With light rapidly fading under a leaden sky, it was obvious that they could do little more that day except secure the site, so after a discussion, they turned the pump off and laid planks across the hole, with the trestle holding down a large tarpaulin.

‘I’ll leave an officer on watch all night,’ said Meirion Thomas. ‘He can sit in a van up on the road and keep an eye out, just in case anyone comes nosing around.’

The sergeant and his constable from Borth had been around all day, keeping a few curious spectators away from the operation. Now the local PC was deputed for the night watch while the other uniformed men went back to Aberystwyth.

‘We’ll have to stay somewhere overnight, Inspector,’ said Richard. ‘It’s impossible to go back to Monmouthshire and then return by morning.’

‘I’d love to put you up myself,’ said Eva Boross. ‘But I’ve only got a two-roomed flat near the university.’

‘Don’t worry, we can find you somewhere here in Borth,’ said the detective inspector. ‘A lot of bed and breakfasts will be shut in the off season, but I’m sure Sergeant Edwards here knows someone who can put you up. I’ll have to go back to Aber now to report to the chief and notify the coroner.’

The sergeant, who knew every soul in the little seaside town, had no difficulty in finding them lodgings and after dumping their muddy boots into the back of the Humber, he drove back with them to a line of tall boarding houses facing the sea across the main road. Edwards went into one, part of a three-storey terrace, and conferred with the lady who answered the door.