However, there was no sign of curious crowds as they drove into the deserted cemetery. All they met was a local police constable, who directed them to a parking space near a hut where the staff kept their shovels and made their tea.
‘The others are up at the top end, Doctor,’ he said helpfully, as Richard clambered out with his black bag.
They walked the length of the tree-lined path, Angela noticing that the headstones of the graves became more modern as they went. Soon they saw a police car and a plain black van parked opposite a canvas screen. It was stretched on poles around a few recent graves, which were still mounds of turf with wooden crosses instead of headstones. Inside, one of these had been excavated and a heap of red soil was piled to one side. A pair of undertaker’s men lounged against their van, smoking until they were needed.
Also inside the screens was John Christie, the Monmouth coroner’s officer, attired as usual in his tweeds and trilby.
With him was a council official from the Parks and Cemeteries Department, clutching a plan of the burial sites and two gravediggers, who had been removing all the earth that they had laboriously filled in a few weeks earlier.
‘I’ve had the soil removed down to the top of the coffin, Doctor,’ said the official importantly. ‘Once the coffin plate is checked, my men can get it up for you.’
He stepped to the edge of the hole and waved his papers.
‘I can confirm that this is Plot 275 E, occupied by Albert John Barnes.’
‘Mebbe, mebbe not!’ muttered Christie, under his breath, as one of the gravediggers went down the short ladder into the hole and, with a trowel, began excavating two tunnels under the coffin for ropes to be passed through. The soil was fairly dry and not hard-packed, as it had so recently been disturbed. Within a few minutes, the veneer-covered chipboard had been hauled out and laid on two timbers set across the top of the grave. One of the workers rubbed at the brass plate to remove the earth. The council official peered at it and nodded.
‘Albert John Barnes, it says. Would one of you gentlemen please confirm that?’
John Christie bent to look at the nameplate and nodded.
‘That’s the one! We’ll have it away to Hereford now.’
As the two undertaker’s men carted it off to their van, Richard wondered what would happen to the empty grave if the remains proved not to be Barnes – but that was not his problem.
Angela was very quiet on the journey to Hereford.
‘I’ve never been to an exhumation before,’ she said suddenly.
‘If you want the truth, neither have I!’ confessed Richard. ‘The need never arose in the Army, nor in Singapore. They are pretty uncommon events.’
Angela shuddered. ‘I’ve led a sheltered life in a laboratory, I suppose. Seeing where you end up at the bottom of a deep hole is a powerful reminder of your mortality.’
Hereford was not many miles away and the road from Ledbury came in past the County Hospital, so within a short time the cortège arrived at the mortuary. In the small office, a police photographer was waiting, organized by John Christie, as well as Dr Bogdan Marek, whose territory this was. In addition, Edward Lethbridge was there. He had had no desire to attend the exhumation nor view the disputed remains, but he felt that he should represent his client, on whose behalf he had set all this performance in motion.
The undertakers wheeled the coffin in on a trolley to the outer room where the body store was situated and proceeded to unscrew the lid. Richard Pryor put on a rubber apron and offered one to Angela.
‘It’ll keep the earth off your clothes, if nothing else,’ he said cheerfully.
They stood at the side of the coffin as the lid was taken off and propped against the wall. As the contents were virtually skeletal and very incomplete, there was no satin lining, but a sheet of rubberized fabric covered the bottom and was folded over the remains, which were laid out in an approximately correct pattern.
‘Better push the whole lot into the post-mortem room,’ said Pryor to the mortuary attendant and they followed the trolley into the stark chamber next door. Angela had seen plenty of dead bodies when called out to London scenes of crime, some in all stages of decay and mutilation, so she had no qualms about being in such close proximity to what was left of a corpse, though after lying about in the open air for several years, it was not particularly offensive, being mainly bones.
Pushing the coffin close to the porcelain table, Richard took charge and folded back the flaps of fabric to expose what was left of the body. After he had had a good look, he asked the hovering photographer to take pictures in situ and, for a few moments, the room was dazzled by flashes of home-made lightning.
Then the pathologist began taking the bones out one by one and reassembling them in proper anatomical order on the white table, when Dr Marek began peering intently at them.
‘There’s quite a lot missing,’ observed Richard. ‘Some of the ribs and quite a few vertebrae, as well as the skull. A lot of the smaller hand and foot bones have gone, too. There are small teeth marks on some of them, foxes and rats, probably.’
He waited until he had all the skeleton laid out before addressing the vital point.
‘Thank God we’ve still got the sternum!’ he muttered and though he had already handled it, he picked it from between the ribs and held it between the fingers and thumbs of each hand. The breastbone was blade-shaped, about six inches long and an inch and a half wide, tapering to a point. Richard studied it, turned it over, then held it out to the others, who were clustered around.
‘Flat as a pancake!’ he announced. ‘Doctor Marek was quite right, no sign of a pec rec there!’
The Polish pathologist looked pleased at being proved right, though he had had no doubts about his memory of it. While the photographer took some close-ups of the bone, the coroner’s officer wanted some firm assurance to take back to Brian Meredith.
‘So we can definitely say that this is not Albert Barnes, Doc?’
Richard was more cautious. ‘We mustn’t jump to conclusions, there’s a lot more we can do yet. Certainly there’s nothing unusual about his sternum, but of course we’re relying on Dr Welton’s clinical examination for the truth of that. Mind you, I can’t see any possible reason for him being wrong about Barnes having a depressed sternum, but after all the fuss we’ve caused, we’ve got to be a hundred per cent sure.’
Angela volunteered to write a list of all the bones for Richard, being a good enough biologist not to need advice about any but a couple of small wrist and ankle bones. While she was doing this, Pryor examined every bone minutely, looking for any signs of old injury, but he found nothing.
‘There are still a few tendon tags here and there,’ he said. ‘As well as some joint cartilage, so death must have been within about the last five years.’
‘But it could have been less, I suppose?’ asked Marek.
‘Yes, it depends on the appetite of all those predators out there. They haven’t left much.’
When he had finished looking at the remains, Richard measured the surviving long bones of the legs and arms. He used an osteometry board which he had made himself in Singapore, a two-foot plank with a long ruler screwed to one edge. At one end was a ledge and a slider moved along a groove in the middle. He put a bone against the ledge, then slid the moving part until it touched the other end of the bone, reading off the length on the scale.
Angela wrote down all the measurements and after some hurried calculations on a sheet of paper, he turned again to the others.
‘I’ll do it properly when I get home, but I reckon that he was about five feet ten inches, with an error of up to two inches either way.’