‘Yes, it wouldn’t cause immediate death, but he would have been rapidly disabled and could die within a few minutes.’
‘What about this blood on her sleeve?’ asked Angela. ‘Is this the picture?’ She held up the last photograph in the scene album. It was of a pale bolero type jacket, laid out on a table.
‘Yes, you can see a few small spots on the outside of the right sleeve, just above the cuff.
The two biologists looked at the photographs again, spending most time on the pictures of the scene, especially ones of the dead man lying on his back on the linoleum in the rather squalid living room, whose sagging furniture was decorated with empty beer bottles and overflowing ashtrays.
‘Any blood elsewhere in the flat?’ queried Angela.
‘Nothing mentioned in the statements. It looks as if he was stabbed at or near the point where he fell. The only other room is the adjacent bedroom and there was nothing of interest found in there. The police searched the rest of the house, but again nothing significant turned up.’
‘So how did the pathologist arrive at such a tight estimate of the time of death?’ demanded Priscilla.
Richard shrugged. ‘Using the old routine — temperature of the body, rigor mortis, post-mortem lividity, amount and state of the stomach contents… the same old mumbo-jumbo. Pick some figures from the air, then take away the number you first thought of!’
Angela smiled to herself at his forceful tone. She had heard this particular tirade several times, as time of death was one of Richard’s hobby horses.
‘So you think you can challenge that for the Appeal?’ asked Priscilla.
‘Damn right I can — and I will, given the chance!’
The Borth Bog investigation had run completely out of steam by the middle of the following week. There were only a few days left before the December page appeared on Detective Inspector Meirion Thomas’s calender, a rather racy one from a local garage, depicting a fluffy blonde wearing more eyeshadow than clothes, sitting provocatively on the bonnet of the new Ford Zephyr Zodiac.
He looked at the dates glumly, thinking that his only murder investigation for the last five years had run into the sand and that its pathetically thin file would soon end up at the back of the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet.
Though he knew it was traditional in detective novels for senior officers and the Chief Constable to come breathing fire down the neck of the failing investigating officer, he had to admit that the two men above him in their small police force had accepted the dead-end philosophically. They had seemed relieved that the two rather supercilious men from Scotland Yard had gone home and that the Press, after a brief frenzy, seemed to have forgotten all about the case. But being a conscientious man, Meirion would have liked to have nailed someone for such a nasty crime. Failing that, it would have at least been satisfying to have identified the body.
With a sigh, he pulled a wad of papers towards him and settled down to devising night-observation rotas for the painfully few men he had available. Sheep rustling had become fashionable again and several irate farmers near Tregaron were demanding some action from the police, backed up by their insurance companies. This issue was of far greater concern to the inhabitants of Cardiganshire than one solitary, if bizarre death that probably occurred long ago.
Yet as he pulled out his Parker 51 pen, the previous year’s Christmas present from his wife, the strange force of serendipity was working on someone he knew well, a hundred miles away in Birmingham.
‘Not a bad pint, this!’ said Gwyn Parry, studying the amber liquid in his glass, pulled from a barrel of Atkinson’s Bitter. He was sitting in the snug of the Red Lion in Moseley, a southern suburb of Birmingham. He had been taken there for a pre-lunch drink by his wife’s brother-in-law, Tony Cooper. The detective sergeant from Aberystwyth was spending two days’ leave in the Midlands, bringing his wife to stay with her sister, who had just come out of hospital after an operation on some obscure part of her female anatomy. He was leaving Bethan there for a couple of weeks to help look after her, as Tony had to work shifts, being a sergeant in the Birmingham City Police. He was not in the CID like Gwyn, but was a custody officer in one of the central police stations.
Their talk was the usual mix of topics always voiced by off-duty policemen — complaints about pay, pensions and conditions of service, mixed with anecdotes of unusual cases they had encountered. They had been joined in the pub by an elderly friend of Tony’s who lived nearby, a chain-smoking man in his late sixties with horn-rimmed glasses with lenses like bottle bottoms. Oscar Stanton was a retired journalist from a city newspaper and had a large fund of stories, ranging from the hilarious to the horrific.
Gwyn looked at the bar clock and reckoned that they had time for another round before going back home, where Bethan was making a meal. After that, he was driving back to Wales, to join in the fight against the sheep rustlers. When the drinks were in, their conversation continued and the detective got around to telling them of the curious case of the body in the bog, which seemed to have come to a dead end.
‘So we haven’t a clue who the fellow is,’ he concluded. ‘All we’ve got is a tattoo and a vague guess that he died sometime around ten years ago.’
‘Strangled and his head taken off?’ said his brother-in-law, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘So certainly not some domestic squabble. It sounds like some gangster execution, but you couldn’t get one of those in peaceful West Wales, surely!’
Oscar Stanton was looking thoughtful, slowly rubbing his bristly chin. ‘Rings a bell, this does,’ he said ruminatively. ‘I’ve got this dim recollection of some rumour going around amongst the lads on the paper, way back around the time the war ended.’
The two policemen stared at him. ‘What rumour?’ asked Tony.
‘I can’t remember any details. It was a long time ago. But one of the older reporters who covered crime in those days had this yarn about a pub somewhere, where the landlord claimed to have a pickled head in his beer cellar.’
Gwyn Parry looked dubious. ‘It could be a wind-up — or maybe some practical joke. I remember hearing about a shrivelled hand being found on the upper deck of a Cardiff bus. Turned out that a medical student had taken it from the college dissecting room.’
Tony was not so sceptical. Maybe after twenty years of policing a big, bad city, he was ready to believe anything. ‘Have you any idea if the chap who was telling the story is still around, Oscar?’
‘He died a couple of years ago, I’m afraid. But I still have a drink now and then with some of my old mates from the paper. I could ask around and see if anyone remembers the story.’
The Aberystwyth sergeant nodded his thanks. ‘We’ve got damn all to go on at present, so any lead is better than none. Could you let Tony here know if you dig up anything?’
With this appropriate plea, they moved on to Aston Villa’s chances at the coming weekend.
Richard Pryor, after a few hours poring over his collection of textbooks and journals, had written a considered appreciation of the possible forensic medical avenues that might assist Millie Wilson’s lawyers. He was used to calling them ‘the defence’, but this was not strictly accurate in this instance, as she was ‘the appellant’. The time for defending her was in the past, at the trial held at Bristol Assizes more than a year ago.
His report was carefully typed by Moira Anderson and sent off to the suave Mr Bailey. A couple of days later, he had a phone call asking him to attend a preliminary conference with their junior counsel, Miss Penelope Forbes, in Bristol on the last day of November.
‘I think you should come with me, Angela,’ he said to his partner. ‘These blood spots on the coat are more in your territory than mine.’