Read Online Grounds for Appeal by Bernard Knight - Free Book Online

much!’
    â€˜Anything else you can tell us?’ asked Richard hopefully. ‘What about race, for instance?’
    Their tame anthropologist picked up the thigh bone again and turned it over in her hands, sighting along the shaft.
    â€˜Nothing significant without a skull, but the only racial variation in leg bones is in the length of the femur in Negroid ethnic groups. This one’s certainly not that.’
    â€˜What about the colour of that skin?’ asked Sian, pointing to a glass pot in which a scrap of loose skin was immersed in fixing fluid. ‘It’s even darker than that little bit we got from the borehole.’
    â€˜Years of being soaked in black peat can account for that,’ said Richard. ‘But you’ll have to process the bits for the microscope, just to check for melanin and exclude any racial marker.’
    This was getting a little complicated for Moira who, with a sigh, went back to her office. She felt a little depressed that the other three women seemed so much at home with these technical matters and wished that she had better skills than just hitting typewriter keys.
    However, Angela also felt she was contributing little to this latest case, as her expertise in serology seemed unlikely to assist in identifying ‘Mr Bog’, as Sian had started to call the victim.
    â€˜I suppose I had better do a blood group on the remains, though I can’t see that an ABO and Rhesus are going to help much,’ she said.
    Richard immediately picked up on the fact that his partner was feeling left out of this investigation and hastened to draw her in.
    â€˜Of course you should; we must have as much information as we can, Angela. You never know, we might need to exclude someone the cops turn up, even if we can’t get a positive match.’
    Priscilla was carefully replacing the thigh bone back on the table, after finishing with the measuring device. As she did so, she weighed it up and down in her hand before laying it back on the brown paper.
    â€˜I know I’m more used to handling frail archaeological skeletons, but don’t you think these are unusually heavy?’ she commented, looking at Richard with a slight frown.
    â€˜Yes, I noticed that in the mortuary yesterday,’ he agreed, taking the bone from her and hefting it a few times himself. He looked across at Sian. ‘Can you decalcify a piece, if I saw it out for you?’
    Their technician nodded. ‘But it’ll take a week before I can cut sections,’ she warned. To get a thin slice of bone suitable for looking at under the microscope required that the chalky calcium part must be dissolved out in weak acid.
    Richard tapped the long bone against the edge of the table and felt it as unyielding as a rod of iron.
    â€˜I’d like to get this X-rayed, too,’ he said. ‘I’ll take it up to Hereford Hospital; they’ll do it for me. I’ve got a coroner’s case there on Thursday, one of these operating theatre deaths.’
    â€˜What are you looking for, Richard?’ asked Angela.
    â€˜I’ve got an idea brewing in the back of my mind – and an X-ray may also give some indication of the age of this chap. The internal structure alters with advancing age, though admittedly it’s most useful when they are over fifty or sixty.’
    He set about sawing a narrow slice from the shaft of the bone with a stainless-steel implement from his autopsy kit. Though the slice was only a quarter of an inch wide and went less than halfway through the bone, it took him five minutes and left him with an aching arm.
    â€˜My God, that’s like flint!’ he complained, as he handed over the sliver of bone to Sian to put in a pot of formalin.
    â€˜What else can we do?’ asked Priscilla, waving a gloved hand at the debris on the table.
    â€˜This is where Angela comes in,’ he replied, eager to involve her in the examination. ‘I had a quick look at