The bog was bounded on the seaward side by the dead-straight railway and road that ran a stone’s throw from the two miles of beach. At the southern end was the small town of Borth, a popular holiday resort. A one-street ribbon settlement, it suddenly rose at the end of the beach on to the hill of Upper Borth, from where the road carried on southwards to Aberystwyth. The two researchers had trudged across the marshland to reach the road and now walked downwards to the line of shops and boarding houses.
‘I wonder where the police station is?’ said Louise. ‘I presume they’ve got coppers in a place like this.’
Geraint stopped a man coming towards them to ask directions, but he was obviously a late holidaymaker, as he replied in a strong Cockney accent that he hadn’t the faintest idea.
‘Better luck next time,’ waspishly muttered Louise.
A little further on, they saw a young woman brushing the path in front of a three-storied house. A very pretty brunette, Letitia Matthews was a nurse, home on leave from her training in Cardiff. Trusting that she was a native and not another Londoner, Geraint spoke to her in Welsh and received a brilliant smile and exact directions in the same language. Smitten, as he often was by attractive girls, he would have lingered, but Louise prodded him in the back and, reluctantly, he began lugging his bundle of pipes further into the town.
‘Well, did she tell you where The Law was to be found?’ demanded his companion.
‘In Upper Borth, apparently, so we’ll have to walk on a fair way yet.’
Louise groaned. ‘It’s even difficult to report a murder in this place.’
Ten minutes later, after Geraint’s longing glances into a fish-and-chip shop were ignored, they reached Borth’s answer to Scotland Yard. This was a small annexe built on to the side of a police house, where a sergeant and a constable of the Cardiganshire Constabulary sat at a table behind a wooden counter.
Sergeant Edwards, a large man with a bushy moustache, left his cup of Nescafe and came to attend to them. Louise dumped her haversack on the counter and explained who she was, ignoring Geraint, who was content to sit on a hard chair near the door to listen to the rumbles of his empty stomach. After listening to the botanist’s story about her unexpected find, the officer regarded her gravely. She seemed a sensible sort of young woman, he thought, not one given to making up fairy stories.
‘Have you got this specimen with you, miss?’
Louise fished in the bag and took out the small bottle containing the lower part of the core.
‘This is it. There’s a piece of cord in there as well. I’ve read about a number of these bog bodies. They’ve been found mainly in Denmark and Germany in recent years, but there have been reports of them for centuries, some in Britain.’
The constable, a fresh-faced young man with big ears, ambled over to the counter to look at the sample. ‘Yes, sarge, I’ve read about those. There was an article in Reader’s Digest some time ago. Some horrible pictures of them, all shrivelled up and looking like leather.’
Sergeant Edwards ran his fingers across his moustache as an aid to thought. If even his constable had heard of this phenomenon, then he could hardly dismiss it out of hand.
‘You found this just by drilling a hole in the ground?’
Louise Palmer nodded impatiently. ‘We’ve taken about forty cores from the bog this last week. This was the only time we found anything unusual.’
‘Can you find the spot again?’ asked the constable.
Geraint answered this from his chair. ‘Our coring plan tells us where it is to within a couple of feet — and I stuck a gorse branch in the hole to mark the exact place.’
Edwards pondered again and after Louise had again dismissed the obvious explanation that it might be a dead sheep, he turned the tube over his fingers and made his decision.
‘I’ll have to talk to my superiors in Aberystwyth, Miss Palmer. They may want to send this off to Cardiff to see if it really could be human.’
‘That’ll take ages, surely?’ objected the young woman, who was anxious to claim the glory for finding a Welsh bog body.
The sergeant shrugged. ‘If it’s as you say and the body has been there for centuries, then a few days or even a week or two won’t matter much, will it? If they decide it’s worth investigating, we’ll need you back up here to show us exactly where you found it.’
And with that, Louise had to be content, while Geraint was more concerned with calling at the fish-and-chip shop on their way back to the railway station.
TWO
Fortunately, Doctor Richard Pryor liked women and was very comfortable in their company. It was just as well, as there were already three attractive ladies in Garth House and a fourth was expected later that day. At the moment, he was hidden away in his study at the back of the detached Edwardian house, which sat on the western slope of the Wye Valley, with a great view across the river to the English side.
In the laboratory, which had been converted from the large dining room at the front, Priscilla Chambers sat at her bench facing a series of racks which held the day’s quota of paternity tests. Across the room behind her, technician Sian Lloyd was handing some alcohol results to Moira Davison, their housekeeper-cum-secretary, for her to type in the adjacent office.
‘It’ll be great to have Doctor Bray back,’ enthused Sian.
It was becoming difficult for her to know what titles to give the various members of the Garth House team, as when alone, the secretary and technician would refer to their two employers as ‘Richard’ and ‘Angela’, but to their faces called them ‘doctor’. During the past few weeks, matters had become more complicated by the arrival of Priscilla, who although possessing a PhD like Angela Bray, insisted on being called by her Christian name.
‘Angela was afraid she would be away for at least month,’ agreed Moira, a neat dark-haired woman of about thirty. ‘I’m so glad her mother’s stroke wasn’t as serious as they feared.’
‘So am I, though it means I might be out of a job sooner than I thought!’ contributed Priscilla from her workbench. When Angela Bray had hurried home to Berkshire to look after her stricken mother, she had agreed to stand in as a locum to cope with the forensic serology and biology that was Angela’s preserve. They had once been colleagues in the Metropolitan Police Laboratory in London, until Priscilla had emigrated to Australia several years earlier. This hadn’t worked out and, since her return a few months earlier, she was existing on various locum jobs until something more permanent turned up.
Moira, though a good-natured woman who got on well with Priscilla, was secretly pleased that the very attractive redhead was not going to be a long-term fixture at Garth House. Though the young widow would hardly admit it even to herself, Moira was very much attracted to Richard Pryor and already had enough competition in the shapely form of Doctor Angela Bray, as well as the pretty and vivacious blonde technician, though realistically, Sian was too young to be a serious challenge.
Angela had left the ‘Met Lab’ earlier that year to go into partnership with Richard Pryor when they founded this private forensic consultancy. Moira, who lived alone in the next house down the valley, had impulsively taken on the job of part-time housekeeper and rapidly slid into being their typist as well, reviving her spirits from the loneliness that followed the death of her husband in an industrial accident.
‘I’m sure they won’t turf you out into the street tonight, Priscilla!’ said Sian. ‘Perhaps you can stay with us for good?’
Moira managed to suppress a frown as she went through to her office next door. Apart from the fact that there was not enough work for two biologists, the prospect of both Angela and Priscilla living in Garth House under the same roof as Richard was not one that appealed to her. She would have been reassured to hear the conversation that continued after she left the laboratory, for Priscilla, as she continued to pipette sera into her banks of little tubes, replied to the suggestion that she stayed on in the Wye Valley.