It opened a short way and he got a glimpse of a silk petticoat and bare feet.
‘Sorry, I thought you might be decent by now!’
She grinned at him. ‘Don’t worry, we’re both doctors, of a sort!’ she joked.
‘I wondered if you fancied a walk along the prom and a drink at the nearest pub?’ he offered. ‘The landlady said that supper won’t be until half-past seven.’
‘Good idea! Give me ten minutes and I’ll be with you.’
The walk along the prom turned out to be a trudge in the dark along the top of the two-mile embankment that kept the sea from inundating Borth. Richard entertained Priscilla with the ancient legend of Cantref Gwaelod, the sunken land directly out at sea, flooded when Seithenyn, the drunken custodian of the sluice gates, allowed the sea to inundate it. She listened intently and he realized that part of her undoubted attractiveness was the fact that she made everyone she met feel that they had her undivided attention.
After a quarter of a mile, they turned around and walked back to the town. Richard had an unerring instinct for good pubs and soon found a cosy snug in the Victoria Inn. In front of an open fire, Priscilla had a gin and tonic and Richard a pint of Felinfoel ale from the famous brewery in Llanelli, the first he had enjoyed for fifteen years.
She had changed into a different jumper and a flared green skirt, a camel-hair coat thrown over her shoulders. They sat in comfortable companionship, discussing first the events of the day and the prospects for tomorrow.
Richard felt utterly relaxed in the company of this stunning woman, though little niggles of guilt assailed him from time to time. By the middle of his second pint, he was feeling vaguely disloyal to Angela for being so contented, whilst she was sitting alone in an empty house a hundred miles away. The two women were totally different, he thought. Angela was very good-looking and exceptionally well dressed, but was a rather quiet, reserved woman. When Richard had first met her at that conference, he had thought her something of an ice maiden, though better acquaintance proved that she had considerable warmth under her protective aloofness.
In spite of living in such close proximity for months, their relationship had never strayed from the strictly platonic, though on a recent visit to London when they went up for a case, the glimmerings of romance had arisen, to be quickly suppressed for the sake of their professional relationship.
Priscilla, so very attractive in a more overt way, was a talkative, gregarious extrovert, spontaneous in the expression of her feelings. In Singapore, he had had several affairs with expatriates since his divorce, but that had all ended more than a year ago and being with Priscilla now revived feelings that had lain dormant all that time.
He thought ruefully that perhaps it was just as well that she was not a permanent fixture in Garth House — and that they were not living under the same roof, as he was with Angela. Reluctantly, he looked at his watch.
‘Another quarter of an hour and we’d better get back to Mrs Evans,’ he said. ‘Mustn’t miss her meat and two veg after all that digging we’ve done today.’
Priscilla used the time to discover more about his marital history. Though she had had an outline from Sian, she openly fished for more details and learned that he had met his former wife Miriam in the military hospital in Ceylon where he had been a medical officer during the war.
‘She was a civilian radiographer and British girls were in short supply there,’ he explained. ‘We got married Army style, dress uniforms, arcade of swords, the whole works!’
Priscilla’s big eyes gleamed at the thought of a tropical wedding with all the trimmings. ‘But it didn’t last?’ she asked.
‘It was fine for a few years. Then I was posted to Singapore and she came over when things settled down and I got a job in the teaching hospital. But we had no children and she got bored, I suppose. An expat society like that is not the best place for an attractive woman with too much time on her hands.’
Priscilla took his meaning and smiled sadly. Getting up, she shrugged her coat back over her shoulders and held out a hand to pull him from his chair.
‘Come on, professor or major or whatever you are. Time for that meat and veg!’
As they walked back along the main street in the dark, she slipped her arm easily through his, as the waves hissed and sighed on the shingle beach nearby.
That night, as he lay on his bed, he was very conscious of the fact that Priscilla was lying only a couple of feet away on the other side of the wall.
FOUR
After a hearty Welsh breakfast at seven o’clock, they said goodbye to the amiable Mrs Evans, and in their working clothes once more, set off in the Humber, which had been parked all night in the road outside. When they reached the scene, all the players from the previous day were there, with the addition of the deputy chief constable, who in such a small police force as Cardiganshire, only held the rank of superintendent. David John Jones was a tall, dark man with the deep-set eyes of an Iberian Celt and though he was perfectly civil to them, Richard had the feeling that he was rather suspicious of outsiders from Monmouthshire on his patch. However, when the pathologist spoke to him in his native language, he loosened up and informed Richard that if this turned out to be a suspicious death, Scotland Yard may have to be called in, as their minuscule CID was not manned or equipped to run a murder investigation. This was a standing arrangement made by the Home Office to assist smaller constabularies.
They moved across to the excavation, where some officers had removed the coverings. Underneath, the hole was still partly full of water, though as the body had already been in a waterlogged swamp for an unknown number of years, another night’s soaking should make no difference. The pump had been started and the level was dropping quickly. As they waited, Richard asked what facilities were available for him once they had got the body out of the marsh.
‘There’s a decent mortuary at Aberystwyth General Hospital,’ replied Meirion Thomas. ‘The whole place was rebuilt just before the outbreak of war. That’s where the coroner’s cases are sent.’
‘You’ve told the coroner, Meirion?’ demanded David Jones.
‘Yes, sir, last night. He said to keep him informed about what we find today.’
Soon the pump had sucked the water down to the level of the sump and the remains were once again exposed. Richard courteously invited Eva Boross to be first in the hole, as she had the most experience of digging artefacts from the ground.
‘Looks much the same as we left it, but some of the peat underneath has washed away while under the water,’ she reported. ‘Best plan is to clear all around now, then undercut the peat until we can slide the whole thing on to that door.’
It took an hour to carefully isolate the long rectangle of peat supporting the body, Priscilla and Richard taking turns to relieve Eva of the back-breaking task. Then a couple of PCs manoeuvred the door alongside and gently, the block of peat and its macabre cargo were slid across on to its firm support.
As the door was manhandled to the surface and laid on the large tarpaulin, the Deputy Chief stared at the body with a frown on his saturnine features. ‘It’s a very dark colour! D’you think he’s black?’
‘All those foreign bog bodies were like that,’ said the archaeologist. ‘It’s the tannin in the peat that does it.’
The detective sergeant was whispering something to his inspector and Meirion turned around to look. Up on the road, there was now a small crowd of onlookers and he saw one with a camera.
‘We’ve got an audience already! I’ll bet the Cambrian News has got wind of it by now.’
The DCC scowled. ‘Damned nuisance, they are! I’ll bet if you found a body in the middle of the Sahara, there’d be people popping up from behind rocks inside half an hour.’