Free Grounds for Appeal by Bernard Knight Page B

who would know.’
    â€˜Who have they sent down to you?’
    When the DI gave the names, he heard a low whistle coming down the phone. ‘Paul Vickers, eh? That’s a coincidence, as I met him not long ago.’
    He avoided mentioning that Doctor Bray knew him even better and soon they finished their conversation and rang off. Richard pondered for a moment, then went in search of his business partner. He found her in her room on the other side of the hall, at her desk writing up some paternity results for Moira to type.
    â€˜Got a minute, Angela?’
    She looked up and saw that he seemed to have lost some of his usual light-hearted manner.
    â€˜Why so serious? Have you just had our latest bank statement?’
    He dropped on to the chair opposite her. ‘Just a word of caution. The police in this bog case have had to call in the Yard to help – and the help they’ve been sent is Paul Vickers. It’s none of my business, but after that incident in Gloucester, I thought I’d better tell you, so that it doesn’t come as a surprise.’
    She put down her pen and looked at him fondly.
    â€˜Thanks, Richard. You are a nice chap, aren’t you? But it’s OK, really, I’m rapidly putting all that behind me, thanks to Garth House and all this Wye Valley tranquillity.’
    Relieved, his cheerful grin returned. ‘Fine, but perhaps we’d better keep you away from Aberystwyth for the time being.’
    Angela reached out a hand and laid it on his arm.
    â€˜Thanks again! But perhaps it would better to keep Priscilla away from him, rather than me. Attractive women act like a magnet on Paul Vickers!’
    His duty done, Richard went back to the laboratory to see if Sian had started to decalcify the scrap of bone from the skeleton, so that he could confirm his diagnosis under the microscope, but he had time to hope that the Yard man would have no reason to come down to Garth House.

SIX
    A week later, the only development that was made in the ‘Mystery of Borth Bog’, as the Press now called it, was some clarification about the Batman tattoo. Paul Vickers had phoned several of his colleagues in Scotland Yard and asked them to canvas any contacts they had in the newspaper and magazine business in London.
    Several days later, he had a call from a detective sergeant who had been sent to lurk in the pubs around Fleet Street, an area which he knew well from other somewhat dubious assignments. He found it a salubrious assignment, as after a few pints of beer and the odd gin and tonic, he learned from men who worked in various publications that Batman was the creation of a couple of American cartoon writers in 1939, who had sold the idea to Detective Comics and it had taken off from there in the United States.
    â€˜Very popular over there, sir, all through the war and now increasingly so. But virtually unknown here in Britain until recent years.’
    Vickers had known that, according to the pathologist, it was unlikely that the body had been killed less than a decade ago, which took the murder back to at least the last year of the war.
    â€˜So do you think anyone over here, that long ago, would been keen enough on Batman to have it as a tattoo?’ he asked, though he realized that the sergeant would have no better guess to make than himself.
    â€˜Well, he could have seen comic books about him brought over by Yank servicemen, I suppose. He could even have been a GI himself, comes to that. God knows there were enough of them knocking about here before D-Day.’
    There was nothing else useful that he could tell him and they rang off. Vickers was becoming increasingly frustrated by being stuck in the back of beyond, as he thought of Cardiganshire. He had given up going to the incident room in Borth, as it seemed entirely futile. His sergeant, Howard Squires, stayed there for the sake of appearances, but absolutely no progress was being made. They could not even