The Thread of Evidence (6 page)

‘We'd better get back into that damn hole, Willie – here's the other shift coming out.'

Another trio of perspiring diggers trudged out of the entrance, to have a well-earned rest outside.

‘Keep an eye on that lot of Nosy Parkers,' advised Pacey, pointing to the skyline where Griffith still kept a dozen snoopers at bay.

He stooped and plunged into the dark shaft, fumbling a torch from his pocket as he entered. With Rees close behind him, he shuffled down to the far end of the tunnel.

Inspector Morris, the uniformed man from Aberystwyth, was directing the efforts of the excavators. A detective-sergeant was waiting to take charge of any more finds; and a police photographer stood ready with his flash-camera at one side.

‘Well done, Morris, not much left now,' said Pacey.

Morris, dressed in a suit of dungarees, shone his hand lamp on the side wall of the shaft.

‘I'm beginning to wonder what that is up there,' he said.

Pacey picked up another powerful electric lamp from the floor and directed it at the wall.

‘You mean that shelf affair up there?'

‘Yes, it's right up against the old working face – looks as if they started to cut a side gallery, then gave it up.' Pacey saw that about six feet from the ground, there was a rough ledge running back from the blind end of the working for a few yards. It was covered with loose stones; and, above it, the beam of the light vanished into a black cavern in the roof.

‘I'm wondering if these bones might have been on that ledge originally,' suggested Morris. He was an oldish man, humourless and severe, although quite an efficient officer, as far as Pacey knew.

The superintendent looked hard at the shelf.

‘Yes, could quite well have been,' he agreed. ‘And that fall of roof might have swept it off onto the floor, eh?' Rees waggled his own torch to draw attention to the rocks which lay on the nearer end of the ledge.

‘Those stones look as if they've been stacked there deliberately. They're covered in slime – not like the ones that have fallen out of the roof.'

Pacey looked closely and saw that half a dozen big stones were stacked tidily at the end of the ledge, like bricks in a wall.

‘Nip up and have a look, Willie. You're the tallest. Get on Edward's back.'

The inspector hoisted himself onto the shoulders of one of the more burly constables and peered over the barrier of stones on the shelf, his head up in the cavity in the roof.

‘Have a few of these big 'uns down there, will you.' He passed a few large rocks down to waiting hands and thrust his hand lamp over the rubble.

There was a moment's silence.

‘Ugh! For Christ's sake, let me down!'

Willie Rees slid to the floor more quickly than he had gone up. Even in the poor light, his face could be seen to be paler than usual.

‘What's up there?' demanded the detective-superintendent.

‘At one end there's a head – a skull, rather. And, down the bottom, there's a pair of legs with sort of waxy flesh on them and the bones sticking up out of the middle, They look bloody horrible!' His lips pulled back in an expression of revulsion.

Pacey turned a satisfied face to the dour Morris.

‘You were dead right, then. That's where it came from.'

The constable who had supported Rees offered to climb up and get the remains from the ledge.

‘No, hang on a bit, we'd better get a photo first, before we shift them.'

Whilst the photographer was doing contortions in order to get a record of the gruesome discovery, Pacey discussed its significance with the inspectors.

‘It's getting to look nasty, isn't it? What do you think about it, Morris?'

‘Must be murder, surely – no other reason for such an elaborate hiding place, and that's apart from that saw cut.'

Pacey rubbed his bristly chin.

‘Looks like it, I'll admit. Certainly can't be accident or suicide. And I can't see anyone going to all this trouble just to get rid of a body that died of natural causes. The only point now is: when did all this happen? If this is some flaming Roman, or even mid-Victorian, corpse, it's no concern of ours. The coroner can amuse himself with it, if he likes, but there's no possibility of charging anyone if it's older than, say, fifty years.'

His train of thought was broken by an exclamation from one of the constables who was clearing the rubble beneath the ledge.

‘Something here, Super!'

As the others bent down and focused their torches, the PC carefully removed a tarnished piece of metal from the pile of debris.

‘Looks like brass – yes, it's the clasp of an old purse, sir.' He displayed it on the palm of his hand, a bent strip of metal, hinged at each end, covered with a green coating of verdigris.

‘Watch how you handle it,' ordered Pacey. ‘Sergeant, have you got another plastic bag?'

While the find was being carefully wrapped, Morris moved some more small stones from the same area of floor.

‘Here we are, some more. Looks like finger bones. And here's a ring, by damn!'

Pacey watched him fish out a wide gold band. Immediately, his eyes were caught by more metal lower down in the hole that Morris had made.

‘And there are some coins, too. We've struck it rich this time!'

He reached into the cavity and delicately picked out a coin, holding it by its edges.

Pacey gazed at the corroded brown surface for a moment. Then he looked up at the faces of the other policemen, who were staring at him expectantly.

‘Well, we can forget our Romans –
and
our Victorians! This penny has the head of George V on it!'

Chapter Four

‘This stuff is called “adipocere”. It's near enough to being soap as makes little difference.'

The speaker prodded the pallid fat of a disintegrating leg which was lying before him on an enamel tray.

Professor Powell seemed to be enjoying himself. Apart from the rubber gloves on his hands, he looked more like a successful stockbroker having a chat at his club than a coroner's pathologist at work.

‘What exactly does that mean?' asked Charles Pacey, who was seated on the other side of John Ellis-Morgan's consulting room desk. The little doctor had offered them the use of his surgery for the afternoon, so that the Home Office man could study the remains in comparative comfort. Leighton Powell began to explain:

‘It forms when the body is exposed to a lot of damp – the fats are changed to a kind of soap. This change is permanent, as far as I know. It lasts for many years, anyway – unless rats come and eat it, which is quite common.'

Pacey looked a little disappointed.

‘So it doesn't help to time the date of death?'

‘No, only that it must be at least a few months since death, it doesn't happen in a shorter time than that.'

Pacey looked with revulsion at the two decaying legs lying on the white tray.

‘I was hoping that the persistence of flesh meant that death couldn't have taken place more than a short time ago.'

‘It isn't really flesh,' explained the pathologist. ‘It's only the fat – the actual flesh has gone long ago.'

The detective abandoned the subject and started on another.

‘Well, Professor, you've seen all the stuff we've got – and you've been up to the mine yourself. Everything we've found is on those trays.'

He waved at another pair of white surgical trays belonging to the surgery, on which were heaped the polythene bags full of trophies from the shaft.

‘So if we could have a quick recap, I can get some sort of preliminary story ready for my chief constable. He's expecting me to ring him at about four o'clock, to tell him what the situation is.'

Pacey's mind was flying ahead to this telephone call. He knew from experience that the chief, an ex-infantry colonel, would expect a detailed account of the day's findings presented to him with military precision. In arriving at this summary for the police chief, Pacey was glad that he had such a sensible man as Powell to work with. He had known other pathologists who were either misleadingly dogmatic, or so woolly-headed that they could not be pinned down to any opinion, even if it was a firm ‘I don't know'.

‘What do you want to know first?' asked the professor cheerfully, polishing his glasses with a flourish of a dazzling white handkerchief.

‘All about that lot,' requested Pacey, with a sweep of his great hand towards the heap of debris on the trays.

‘Right-oh. One body, as far as I can tell now. I'll have to get the anatomy people to check on the small and broken stuff, but I don't think there's any duplication at all.'

‘How much is missing?'

Powell pursed his lips. ‘Mmm, very little, really. All the limb bones are there, though some are broken. The skull, pelvis and most of the spine are there. Probably some ribs and toe and finger bones are missing. But that's about all.'

Pacey nodded and scribbled on a piece of paper for the benefit of Colonel Barton. Then he looked up.

‘The next thing is sex, Professor.'

Leighton Powell almost giggled. ‘Yes; it usually is, Mr Pacey – even at my age. But seriously, that's easy here. Definitely a woman. I'll get the anatomy boys in Swansea to make dead sure. But there's almost no doubt at all; it's female all right.'

‘And what about her age, sir?'

The doctor's eyes twinkled above his chubby pink cheeks. He had a round, almost babyish face, with a shiny, scrubbed look about it, which extended up to his polished pink bald head.

‘Yes, Superintendent, that's an Eleven-plus question, isn't it! I can give you a definite age bracket now, but to narrow it down within that range will take a day or two. I'll have to get X-ray and other things to get as near as I can to the actual year.'

‘And what's your bracket, Professor?'

‘Definitely more than eighteen, and probably less than thirty-three.'

Pacey's face registered his disappointment. ‘That's a pretty wide range, isn't it?'

Powell grinned at him. ‘We can do a lot better than that eventually, but I don't want to mislead you at this stage. With X-rays and other dodges, we can get much closer than that. As it is, I'd put a couple of bob on her being somewhere in the middle or late twenties.'

‘That's better,' Pacey said grudgingly. ‘Now, what about her height and that sort of thing?'

The Home Office man held up a thigh bone, the one found by the boys on the previous day.

‘She was five foot four, give or take an inch either way.'

‘How can you tell from just a leg bone?' Willie Rees asked curiously. He sat on the examination couch, along with Inspector Meadows, the liaison officer from the Forensic Science laboratory in Swansea.

‘There are special calculations for it, worked out years ago from hundreds of bodies – one of these “double it and take away the number you first thought of” efforts! Again, I'll have it checked by the anatomy department when I get back to the University. But five foot four will be pretty near her true height, I'm sure.'

Pacey scribbled away on his pad before shooting the next question.

‘Now, sir, how long would you say that the body has been in the shaft?'

Powell chuckled. ‘If you'd asked me that before you showed me those pennies, I'd have said that I hadn't the faintest idea. But, as I've seen them, I'll say thirty years!'

Pacey grinned sheepishly in his turn. ‘I suppose I should have kept those up my sleeve, shouldn't I? But seriously, what's the medical angle on the time of death?'

‘Anything from two years to two hundred. I was going to say two thousand – but I think, on second thoughts, that they are too well-preserved for that. There is still a lot of organic matrix in the bones. They would be dry and crumbly if they were really ancient.'

‘Two years!' echoed Inspector Meadows incredulously. ‘Can they get that bad in such a short time?'

Powell nodded. ‘I've seen a body converted completely to a skeleton – clean as a whistle – in eight months. That was out in the open, I'll admit, with bugs and birds and mice after it. But, even in a cave like this, I'd say it could happen in a couple of years. It was very wet there, remember, and there would be a lot of contaminated surface water seeping through from the ground not far overhead.'

Pacey spread his hands out in an almost French gesture. ‘Well, as it happens, it doesn't matter much – we've got all this other evidence. But can you say, Professor, that the state of the body is consistent with thirty years' burial?'

‘Yes, quite definitely,' Powell said firmly.

‘Any clue as to the cause of death?' asked the superintendent.

‘Not a chance, Mr Pacey. All the organs and soft tissues have gone, except these bits of leg. No skin left – nothing. Unless there was a bullet hole in one of the bones, no form of violence would leave any signs on a heap of junk like this.'

Pacey leaned forward and picked up the brown skull. ‘What about these holes in the top.'

Powell brushed a speck of dirt from his city suit and smiled sadly.

‘Sorry, nothing doing. There's nothing about those fractures that could tell me they were done before death. In fact, from the size and shape of them, I'd be inclined to say that they were due to a load of rock falling down on the head.'

Pacey sighed and put the skull down.

‘Anything else you can tell me at present, sir?'

Powell rubbed a palm over his bald head as though he were polishing it.

‘I don't think so,' he said with studied care. ‘Even what I've said now is provisional, most of it. I'll need a long session with the anatomy boys, and some time to myself back at the department, to clinch the facts.'

‘You're taking all this stuff back with you this afternoon, then?'