He gave her one of his famous grins. ‘Yes, we had a romantic drink in the local pub and then a passionate meat and two veg in Mrs Evans’ den of sin!’
‘No, somehow I don’t see you as a lecherous seducer, Richard,’ she said, as she left him at the upper landing.
As he went towards his own room, he wondered if he detected a hint of disappointment in her voice.
FIVE
Next day, they got down to the job of examining the material they had brought back from Aberystwyth.
The bones were laid out on a large sheet of brown paper on the big table in the laboratory and everyone, including Moira, was keen to see what could be discovered. They all stood around expectantly, the morning sun lighting the exhibits through the wide bay window.
‘We’ve got a right femur, a tibia and half the pelvis,’ pointed out Richard, who had put on a white coat and a pair of rubber gloves. ‘And there are three vertebrae from the neck, as well as some soft tissues.’
Priscilla, similarly attired, had their osteometry board ready on the side of the table. This was a varnished board a couple of feet long with a long ruler screwed along one edge and a fixed ledge sticking up at the bottom.
‘The police were keen to get his height, so shall I start with that?’ she said. At Richard’s nod, she put the long thigh bone, stained brown by the peat, on to the board, so that the knee end was against the ledge. Then she moved a sliding bar down from the top until it touched the upper knob of bone which would have fitted into the hip joint.
Adjusting the lie of the bone so that the maximum length was being measured, she read off the number of centimetres on the scale, which she wrote on a sheet of paper, then did the same for the tibia, the bone from the lower leg.
Turning to an open textbook and couple of loose dog-eared papers, she ran her finger down some columns of figures and scribbled some calculations on the sheet.
‘According to Trotter and Gleser, he should be between five-foot eight and five-ten. Using the old Pearson formula, he’s five-seven and five-nine.’
‘How do you make that out?’ demanded Sian, always thirsty for knowledge.
Priscilla laid a hand on the book and the reprints.
‘Anatomists have published several surveys of bone length from bodies where they already knew the height. Pearson did that at the end of the last century, but Krogman wrote a guide for the FBI in 1939 and only a few years ago, Trotter and Gleser did another big survey on war casualties, including many from Korea.’
‘So why do you get different answers?’ persisted their technician, a valid query which Richard answered.
‘These surveys were done on different populations, including different ethnic groups. And there’s always an error zone of at least an inch and a half.’
Angela, her arms folded, looked down at the bones on the table. ‘So the likelihood is that he was between five-feet eight and five-feet nine?’
‘That’s about the best we can do,’ replied Priscilla. ‘Certainly not very tall or very short. In fact, he was like most men in Britain, which doesn’t help the police much!’
‘Anything else you can tell us?’ asked Richard hopefully. ‘What about race, for instance?’
Their tame anthropologist picked up the thigh bone again and turned it over in her hands, sighting along the shaft.
‘Nothing significant without a skull, but the only racial variation in leg bones is in the length of the femur in Negroid ethnic groups. This one’s certainly not that.’
‘What about the colour of that skin?’ asked Sian, pointing to a glass pot in which a scrap of loose skin was immersed in fixing fluid. ‘It’s even darker than that little bit we got from the borehole.’
‘Years of being soaked in black peat can account for that,’ said Richard. ‘But you’ll have to process the bits for the microscope, just to check for melanin and exclude any racial marker.’
This was getting a little complicated for Moira who, with a sigh, went back to her office. She felt a little depressed that the other three women seemed so much at home with these technical matters and wished that she had better skills than just hitting typewriter keys.
However, Angela also felt she was contributing little to this latest case, as her expertise in serology seemed unlikely to assist in identifying ‘Mr Bog’, as Sian had started to call the victim.
‘I suppose I had better do a blood group on the remains, though I can’t see that an ABO and Rhesus are going to help much,’ she said.
Richard immediately picked up on the fact that his partner was feeling left out of this investigation and hastened to draw her in.
‘Of course you should; we must have as much information as we can, Angela. You never know, we might need to exclude someone the cops turn up, even if we can’t get a positive match.’
Priscilla was carefully replacing the thigh bone back on the table, after finishing with the measuring device. As she did so, she weighed it up and down in her hand before laying it back on the brown paper.
‘I know I’m more used to handling frail archaeological skeletons, but don’t you think these are unusually heavy?’ she commented, looking at Richard with a slight frown.
‘Yes, I noticed that in the mortuary yesterday,’ he agreed, taking the bone from her and hefting it a few times himself. He looked across at Sian. ‘Can you decalcify a piece, if I saw it out for you?’
Their technician nodded. ‘But it’ll take a week before I can cut sections,’ she warned. To get a thin slice of bone suitable for looking at under the microscope required that the chalky calcium part must be dissolved out in weak acid.
Richard tapped the long bone against the edge of the table and felt it as unyielding as a rod of iron.
‘I’d like to get this X-rayed, too,’ he said. ‘I’ll take it up to Hereford Hospital; they’ll do it for me. I’ve got a coroner’s case there on Thursday, one of these operating theatre deaths.’
‘What are you looking for, Richard?’ asked Angela.
‘I’ve got an idea brewing in the back of my mind — and an X-ray may also give some indication of the age of this chap. The internal structure alters with advancing age, though admittedly it’s most useful when they are over fifty or sixty.’
He set about sawing a narrow slice from the shaft of the bone with a stainless-steel implement from his autopsy kit. Though the slice was only a quarter of an inch wide and went less than halfway through the bone, it took him five minutes and left him with an aching arm.
‘My God, that’s like flint!’ he complained, as he handed over the sliver of bone to Sian to put in a pot of formalin.
‘What else can we do?’ asked Priscilla, waving a gloved hand at the debris on the table.
‘This is where Angela comes in,’ he replied, eager to involve her in the examination. ‘I had a quick look at the vertebrae in the mortuary, but the light was not at all good in the late afternoon. See what you make of them, Angela.’
Though primarily a forensic biologist, the handsome brunette had had many years’ general experience in the ‘Met Lab’, as everyone called it, and could turn her hand to most aspects of forensic science. She pulled on some gloves and carefully arranged the three spinal vertebrae so that they interlocked in the proper anatomical position.
‘That’s all there was left of the neck?’
He nodded. ‘Just the lower three of the seven vertebrae. The upper ones must have gone with the head, as there was no sign of them anywhere in the adjacent peat.’
Angela picked up the top one, and looked at the central part with the hole for the spinal cord and the long spine at the back, between the two shorter wings that stuck out each side.
‘It’s had a bit of a bashing! Must have been chopped from the back.’ She took a lens from the pocket of her white coat and studied the upper surface intently.