Richard pretended to be affronted. ‘He only confirmed what I already suspected! Ever heard of Albers-Schonberg?’
‘Sounds like an Austrian composer or a psychiatrist,’ suggested Priscilla, facetiously. Richard grinned and waggled the film in his hand.
‘No, he was a German radiologist, who described this disease in 1904. It’s better known as “Marble Bone Disease”, for obvious reasons.’
‘It’s not obvious to me,’ said Angela, stoutly. ‘Pris and I are proper doctors, not physicians!’
Richard became serious and pointed to the dense white shaft of the bone.
‘We thought the femur was very heavy and with good reason. This is a quite rare genetic defect in which the bone becomes extraordinarily dense and thickened. Look, there’s hardly any marrow cavity down the middle of the bone. It’s all overgrown and as hard as a rock — in fact, the modern name for the disease is “osteopetrosis”, meaning rock-like bones.’
‘So what makes you so excited about this, apart from your academic interest?’ asked Priscilla. Richard dropped the film on to his desk.
‘Well, because it’s so rare. Maybe there’s a medical record somewhere of this chap, if he was ever seen in a hospital. Although the bone is so hard, it’s brittle, so they get a lot of fractures. And it seriously affects the skull as well, so if they ever find a spare head somewhere, we could match it to this fellow.’
The two scientists were quite impressed after all.
‘Quite a unique pair of identifying features, Richard,’ said Angela. ‘Albers-Schonberg disease and a Batman tattoo!’
‘Better than nothing, which is what we had when we dug him up,’ said Richard defensively. ‘Something useful to tell the cops, anyway.’
Angela hauled herself off the corner of his desk, ready to go back to her work in the laboratory.
‘You said something about possibly telling the age of the body from his bone X-rays… any joy there?
‘Not really, according to the radiologist,’ he replied.
‘The presence of this great thickening obscures the details of the internal structure, especially as the marrow cavity is partly obliterated. Normally, the internal architecture of weight-bearing bones is modified as people get older. But he said there was no positive evidence of advanced age, for what that’s worth.’
As the two women went out, he reached for the phone and dialled Aberystwyth, to leave a message for Meirion Thomas to contact him.
The investigators in Borth had just left the hut, to go over to the site of the excavation to show it to the London men. There was nothing really to see, apart from a hole in the ground surrounded by posts and tape, but Meirion Thomas felt that Vickers and his assistant should get a feel for the whole case. Howard Squires was very taken by the panoramic view, which included the huge bog, the sea and the surrounding hills, but his senior officer seemed distracted. He was thinking of a woman, in fact his former fiancee, Angela Bray. Engaged to her for over a year, he had suddenly become infatuated with a younger woman and broken it off. He was well aware how hard Angela had taken it and knew that it was a factor in her decision to leave London and team up with this Welsh pathologist, Richard Pryor. Some months earlier, he had been called to Gloucester to identify a murdered South London criminal, shot in a gang dispute. The pathologist was Richard Pryor and with him had been Angela Bray, which led to an embarrassing confrontation in the mortuary. Now history was in danger of repeating itself and he would have to be careful to avoid meeting her again, as ‘hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’.
‘Guv, have you seen enough here?’ His sergeant’s voice brought him back to earth.
‘Er, yes, I think so.’ With an effort, he focused his attention again and looked around. ‘How would they have brought a body here? The same way as we came?’ he asked the locals.
‘Probably, it’s only a few hundred yards from the road,’ answered the DI. ‘We assume that there were more than one and presumably they had some sort of transport. He was only of average height, but I doubt one person would have struggled here with the corpse.’
‘Unless he was killed right here?’ objected Squires.
Meirion gave a doubtful shrug. ‘Possible, but it seems unlikely that they would cut off his head here and take it away.’
‘The whole damned case seems unlikely!’ muttered Vickers, as he took a last look around.
They went back to the police car and drove back to the headquarters in Aberystwyth, where an office had been put at the disposal of the Scotland Yard men. Vickers said that he would have to make a lot of telephone calls to get things moving, before going back to Borth after lunch.
In Meirion’s own office, a message relayed from the incident room asked him to ring Doctor Richard Pryor and when he got through, the doctor told him of the confirmation of the rare bone disease discovered in the corpse. It took a few minutes for Richard to explain about Albers-Schonberg disease, but the detective quickly grasped its significance.
‘So we’ve got to find a guy somewhere in Britain who had this disease — and find a skull somewhere which also suffered from it?’
‘That’s about it, Inspector! I’ll see if I can find if there is any kind of central medical register of patients who have been diagnosed with marble bone disease. I doubt it, as it’s so uncommon, but there may be some orthopaedic surgeons who have an interest in it.’ He thought for a moment, then went on. ‘It’s a pity that I didn’t find any old fractures in the skeleton. They are quite common in Albers-Schonberg, as the bones are brittle. They could have been matched with the X-rays of patients who had had multiple breaks, but we’re out of luck on that score.’
‘So we’ve got to find a head somewhere?’ repeated the detective.
‘That’s about it — as well as someone with a Batman tattoo!’ agreed Richard. ‘Any progress on discovering when that character became popular?’
‘The chaps from the Yard are looking into that. They’re more likely to have people in London who would know.’
‘Who have they sent down to you?’
When the DI gave the names, he heard a low whistle coming down the phone. ‘Paul Vickers, eh? That’s a coincidence, as I met him not long ago.’
He avoided mentioning that Doctor Bray knew him even better and soon they finished their conversation and rang off. Richard pondered for a moment, then went in search of his business partner. He found her in her room on the other side of the hall, at her desk writing up some paternity results for Moira to type.
‘Got a minute, Angela?’
She looked up and saw that he seemed to have lost some of his usual light-hearted manner.
‘Why so serious? Have you just had our latest bank statement?’
He dropped on to the chair opposite her. ‘Just a word of caution. The police in this bog case have had to call in the Yard to help — and the help they’ve been sent is Paul Vickers. It’s none of my business, but after that incident in Gloucester, I thought I’d better tell you, so that it doesn’t come as a surprise.’
She put down her pen and looked at him fondly.
‘Thanks, Richard. You are a nice chap, aren’t you? But it’s OK, really, I’m rapidly putting all that behind me, thanks to Garth House and all this Wye Valley tranquillity.’
Relieved, his cheerful grin returned. ‘Fine, but perhaps we’d better keep you away from Aberystwyth for the time being.’
Angela reached out a hand and laid it on his arm.
‘Thanks again! But perhaps it would better to keep Priscilla away from him, rather than me. Attractive women act like a magnet on Paul Vickers!’
His duty done, Richard went back to the laboratory to see if Sian had started to decalcify the scrap of bone from the skeleton, so that he could confirm his diagnosis under the microscope, but he had time to hope that the Yard man would have no reason to come down to Garth House.
SIX
A week later, the only development that was made in the ‘Mystery of Borth Bog’, as the Press now called it, was some clarification about the Batman tattoo. Paul Vickers had phoned several of his colleagues in Scotland Yard and asked them to canvas any contacts they had in the newspaper and magazine business in London.