Though covering a large area, it was sparsely populated, except in the summer, when holidaymakers flocked to the beautiful coast and mountains. Meirion’s usual diet of criminal investigations consisted of housebreaking, theft of outboard motors and sheep stealing. To have a buried corpse was indeed a novelty.
As Richard Pryor had anticipated, Meirion’s first task was to notify the coroner, a local solicitor in the town. This gentleman was a little hesitant about taking official notice of the matter, as he felt that so far, the evidence of a corpse buried near Borth was a little flimsy. He recalled reading about a fellow coroner in London, who some years ago had declined to hold an inquest on a decayed foot found inside a shoe. It had been washed up on the banks of the Thames, but that coroner had decided that he had no proof that the owner of the foot was necessarily dead!
Cautiously, his Aberystwyth counterpart asked the detective to keep him informed of any developments and Meirion went off to arrange for the two young botanists from the university to revisit the scene next day.
Early in the afternoon, he picked them up from Penglais, the hill overlooking the town where many of the college buildings stood, and took Louise Palmer and her student away in a black Wolseley driven by his sergeant, Gwyn Parry. A small van followed them, containing a couple of uniformed constables and some scene equipment. They drove north up the main A487 road through Bow Street, then turned left on to a minor road that looped down towards Borth. After Louise’s description of where in the bog they had made their discovery, the DI parked just beyond the hamlet of Llancynfelyn and they walked across sloping fields down to the level plain of the bog. Geraint Williams soon found the spot where his ragged piece of gorse was still sticking up from the bore hole.
‘Here we are, the spot marked “X”!’ he said with almost proprietorial satisfaction. ‘The ground has dried out a bit since then.’
The detective inspector stared at the mottled browns and greens of the soggy marsh without enthusiasm. He was a stocky, red-faced man of about forty-five, looking more like a farmer than a police officer. This image was enhanced by the long, belted brown raincoat and the flat cap whose peak was pulled down over his forehead. He had a hunch that they were all wasting their time and that a dead sheep lay under the coarse grass and sphagnum moss at their feet. But his immediate superior, a superintendent who was also the Deputy Chief Constable, had said that both the forensic boys in Cardiff and this new Home Office chap in Tintern had declared the stuff that these students had found was human, so they had no choice but to investigate.
His detective sergeant, though younger and thinner, was another officer of agricultural appearance. Both of them were from farming families and spent a lot of time at night crouched under hedges or in the back of plain vans, waiting in a usually futile attempt to ambush the gangs of Midlands rustlers who invaded Mid-Wales in the small hours. Not unnaturally, sheep were very familiar to them and Gwyn Parry had similar thoughts as his DI about this patch of bog probably hiding a four-legged victim.
‘What do you want to do about it, Meirion?’ he asked in Welsh. The inspector pointed behind him to where two constables were approaching, carrying bundles of stakes and a coil of rope.
‘Can’t start any digging until the doctor comes tomorrow,’ he replied, using English for Louise’s benefit. ‘We’ll have to organize some muscle from the uniformed boys to do that. Just get our lads to put a cordon around this patch of ground. Though if this young lady is right and what’s down there is a couple of thousand years old, I can’t see that fencing it off for a night is going to matter much!’
Moira took the call from Aberystwyth later that afternoon and went to find Richard, who was up with Jimmy Jenkins on the sloping field behind the house. They were discussing the two long rows of young vines that they had recently planted, the first stage in Richard’s almost obsessive desire to start a vineyard at Garth House.
He came in to speak to Meirion Thomas, who confirmed the arrangements for digging into the bog next day. Having already discussed it with Priscilla, he suggested to the detective that it would be wise to have someone else there who had experience of archaeological excavations, either an academic or the county archaeologist, if there was one. Confirming that they would be at the police headquarters by eleven o’clock, Richard went off to talk to the rest of the team.
‘Who’s coming with me tomorrow?’ was his first question, as he entered the laboratory. Angela pre-empted any discussion by nominating Priscilla.
‘She’s the obvious person for this one, with her anthropology and museum experience,’ she declared. ‘Anyway, someone has to look after the shop and I’m still settling in after being away for weeks.’
Richard suspected that she was being diplomatic in not wanting her friend to feel as if she was being sidelined, now that she herself was back in harness, but it did seem sensible to take someone who had the most appropriate knowledge.
‘An early start, then,’ he said briskly. ‘If it proves to be more than a dead sheep, we may have to stay the night, so throw your toothbrush into a case. It’s at least three hours’ drive from here to Aber, so wagons roll soon after seven o’clock.’
Next day, the autumn dawn had grown into a red sky over the eastern rim of the valley as the black Humber Hawk set off northwards. Richard Pryor had bought it second-hand when he came home from Singapore almost a year before and, like his vines, it was his pride and joy. The car purred its way towards Monmouth and he settled back for the long ride, feeling contented at doing a job he relished, in spite of its often morbid and sometimes distasteful nature. He was glad to be back in his native Wales after fourteen years in the Far East — and glad also to be sitting alongside such an attractive and vivacious woman as Priscilla Chambers. Today she was dressed in gear suitable for digging corpses from a swamp, but still managed to look elegant. She wore a military-looking raincoat over a green roll-neck sweater and grey trousers. If necessary, her ‘sensible’ shoes could be replaced by a pair of wellingtons carried in the car boot.
Although Priscilla had been working at Garth House for the past three weeks, he had not learned much about her personal affairs, though he did not doubt that Sian and Moira had already extracted every detail of her life story. However, on the long journey across the centre of Wales, there was plenty of time to talk and Richard soon learned that Priscilla was born in Gibraltar of a military family, her father being a retired major in the Intelligence Corps. He was now teaching mathematics in an Oxford school, where her mother ran a small secretarial agency.
Priscilla had spent most of the war years in a boarding school in Gloucestershire, then in 1944 went to university on a scholarship. Some mental arithmetic told him that she must be just over thirty years of age, a decade younger than himself.
For her part, the drive gave Priscilla the chance to fill in the gaps in her knowledge of Richard. From laboratory gossip, she knew some of the facts, but by the time they reached Cardiganshire, she knew that he was the son of a retired family doctor in Merthyr Tydfil, where he had been brought up. Grammar school was followed by medical college in Cardiff before the war, then a couple of years’ pathology training before being called up. He spent the war as an RAMC officer in military hospitals in Egypt and Ceylon before being finally posted to Singapore, when it was reclaimed from the Japanese. Taking local release with the rank of major there in 1946, he stayed on as a civilian pathologist in the General Hospital, doing coroner’s and police work. This came with a part-time teaching post in the university and he ended his nine-year’s service with a professorship in forensic medicine. A very generous redundancy payment had coincided with his aunt’s bequest of Garth House and he had returned at the beginning of the year to set up his private forensic consultant practice with Angela. They had hatched his idea after meeting at a forensic congress the previous year. Angela was disillusioned with her job at the Metropolitan Police Laboratory, where there was little prospect of further promotion, so she threw in her lot with Richard and moved to the Wye Valley. That was six months ago and after a hesitant start, they were now becoming well established, gathering work from coroners, solicitors and the police, as well as Richard’s part-time contract as a lecturer at the medical school in Bristol.