According to the Evidence rpm-2

by Bernard Knight

  ‘I’m trying to see the back of the neck. The skin there hasn’t suffered so badly,’ he murmured to his partner. But without turning the whole body over on to its face, there was no way he could get a satisfactory view, so he laid it down again and went to the legs. This time, he pulled down the woollen socks, as well as dragging up the trouser legs as high as they would go.

  ‘That’s just post-mortem lividity, surely?’ asked Angela, pointing at the purplish staining that covered all the exposed skin.

  ‘That’s just the problem,’ he said quietly, then looked across at the police officers, who were keeping at a respectful distance.

  ‘I’d like to get him to a mortuary as soon as we can, Mr Crippen,’ he said. ‘I can’t examine him properly out here, though I’ll have to take his temperature or it’ll be too late, given that he almost certainly died last night.’

  Like Angela, Arthur Crippen picked up a note of concern in the pathologist’s voice. ‘D’you think there’s a problem, doc?’ he asked.

  Richard declined to be drawn too far. ‘Let’s just say I’ll be happier after I’ve had a good look at him on the slab,’ he said. ‘Meanwhile, I’d suggest you preserve the scene until we know what we’ve got. And perhaps it would be wise to get a few more pictures of him, now that he’s out in the open.’

  The detective inspector, with years of experience behind him, recognized a hint when he heard one and rapidly began organizing his troops.

  THREE

  It was now a little late to have lunch, but the two scientists found a small cafe in the twisty little streets of Brecon that could offer them bacon, egg and chips with their bread, butter and tea.

  They had tried a pub on the way from Cwmcamlais, but after threading their way past sheepdogs and local farmers drinking Buckley’s Bitter, all that was on offer at the bar were crisps, desiccated pork pies or Scotch eggs.

  ‘So what’s all this mystery, Richard?’ demanded Angela as they sat over a second cup of Brooke Bond in the bay window of the little shop. He had refused to be drawn during the short journey from Cwmcamlais, promising to explain it after he had had more time to think.

  ‘Those legs,’ he said, stirring sugar into his tea. ‘Why is there all that lividity in them, especially on the front of the shins? The fellow had been on his back for hours.’

  Though she was a biologist, not a medical doctor, Angela immediately realized what he was implying. ‘But that seems impossible! He was found lying under a tractor with his neck squashed.’

  ‘The whole thing is bloody odd! No wonder Hawley Harvey Crippen wanted me to have a look at it.’

  She ignored his facetious renaming of the DI and demanded to know what he was going to do about it.

  ‘Depends on what else we find when I can go over every inch of that body.’ He looked at his wristwatch. ‘They should be at the hospital by now, so let’s get on with it.’

  It was a small hospital and a small mortuary, little more than a brick shed near the boiler house. There was no mortuary attendant, but Pryor was used to fending for himself. With the help of Billy Brown, the coroner’s officer, he was able to deal with the examination after two undertakers had carried the corpse in from their van and laid it on the solitary slate slab in the small, dingy room.

  Arthur Crippen and one of the detective constables crowded in behind, while the photographer took more pictures of the clothed body. Richard and Billy began removing the heavy boots, socks and then the crumpled dungarees and flannel shirt. As soon as the body was bare, Pryor again took great interest in studying the legs, then moved to the hands. Pulling off the underpants, he took the long thermometer which Angela handed him from their bag and slid it into the corpse’s back passage. Standing back, he waited for the mercury to settle and used the moments to speak to the detective inspector.

  ‘There’s something not right here, Mr Crippen. I’m not sure yet, but I suspect you’ve either got a concealed suicide here – or possibly even a murder.’

  The DI remained impassive, his features retaining his usual gloomy frown. ‘It didn’t ring true to me either, doc. But what makes you think that?’

  Richard turned to put on a long red rubber apron that the coroner’s officer took from a hook on the wall. After he had looped the chain over his neck and tied the tapes at the back, he put on the rubber gloves that Angela produced from their bag, then explained his suspicions.

  ‘A lot for me to do yet, but it’s those legs and hands that worry me. Look, from the knees right down into the feet, the skin is reddish-purple, even on the front of the shins. And both hands are the same colour.’

  This time Crippen’s face allowed itself to crease into an expression of incomprehension. ‘And that tells you what?’ he demanded.

  ‘That this poor chap didn’t die where he was found on the floor. At least, he hasn’t been lying there ever since he died. He must have been upright for some hours. And about the only way corpses can stay vertical is when they are hanging!’

  The four police officers stared at him incredulously.

  It was Crippen who reacted first. ‘You’re saying that someone put him under the tractor after he was dead?’

  Richard nodded. ‘The blood has drained down after death into the lowermost parts, the legs, feet and hands. Sure, it can move again afterwards, but often it becomes fixed within a few hours.’

  He moved to the body again and pulled out the thermometer. Glancing at it, he called out ‘eighty-one degrees’, which Angela wrote down on a clipboard. Then he helped the coroner’s officer to roll the body over on to its face.

  ‘See, very little lividity on the back, where it usually settles. Most of it went down into the legs.’

  Arthur Crippen, by no means an unintelligent man, struggled to adjust his mind to this new set of circumstances.

  ‘Doc, are you telling me that this fellow was hanged first, then stuck under that tractor?’

  Even Angela looked at her partner a little dubiously. She didn’t want him making an ass of himself on his very first Home Office call-out. However, Pryor’s quietly confident manner seemed to reassure her as he explained further.

  ‘The logical reason is that someone wanted to conceal the true cause of death by faking an apparent accident. Whether or not it’s a hanging remains to be seen, which is what I’m going to do next.’

  Taking a block of wood that stood on the foot of the autopsy table, he slipped it under the corpse’s chest as the coroner’s officer lifted the upper part of the body. This allowed the head to drop down on its mangled neck, so that the pathologist could get a good look at the skin between the hairline and the upper shoulders. It was wrinkled and bloodstained, with a few tears from the crushing weight of the great tyre, but Richard studied it with minute care.

  ‘I don’t want to wash it yet in case there’s trace evidence,’ he said, more to himself than the others. This prodded Angela into voicing her concern.

  ‘If this turns out to be criminal, what about forensic evidence?’ she asked crisply. ‘I’ve got no official standing here, so I can’t become involved, even though I’ve been doing the job for years!’

  Richard looked quizzically at the detective inspector. ‘That’s a point, Mr Crippen. What are we going to do?’

  The DI looked at his watch. ‘It’s mid-afternoon already. I don’t feel like hauling a chap up from the laboratory in Cardiff; it would put us back until after dark.’

  He looked across at the photographer and the other detective constable. ‘We can get all the pictures we need and Amos here can act as Exhibits Officer. As Dr Bray is your colleague, already helping you with the post-mortem, I don’t see why she can’t collect any trace evidence you find and hand it over to Amos. That’ll keep the chain of continuity intact.’

  It was always vital, if there was any chance of a case ending up in court, for any specimens to be accounted for every inch of the way, to be able to counter any defence accusation that samples had become mixed up.

  Angela
gave a little shrug, though she was secretly pleased to be more directly involved, even if it was only as a go-between.

  ‘Fine, but I’m only acting as a collector of any traces. I don’t want to get my knuckles rapped by the director of the Cardiff lab for sticking my nose in!’

  Richard was busy peering at the back of the corpse’s neck. There were wide smears of dried blood all over it, obscuring the view.

  ‘Considering the damage to the neck, which is virtually squashed, there wasn’t all that much blood on the floor,’ he observed, turning his face up towards the DI. ‘Tends to confirm that he was dead before that wheel landed on him.’

  He continued to study the neck, twisting the head a little each way to get a view of the sides. Then he straightened up and beckoned to the photographer. ‘Best get some pictures as close up as you can before I start cleaning it up,’ he suggested.

  He stood back as the DC took his photos, a slow process as he had to change the one-shot flashbulbs between each exposure. When he had finished, Pryor asked Angela to come around his side of the table and have a close look at the neck.

  ‘Is there something there to pick off or is it my imagination?’ he asked her, pointing at the side and back of the neck with a gloved finger.

  The biologist stared for a moment, then put on her own rubber gloves. She took a small lens and a pair of forceps from their case and bent back for another look.

  ‘There are a few fibres stuck in the dried blood,’ she murmured, delicately picking something off, though they were invisible to the watching policemen. She carefully placed whatever she had recovered in a small screw-top vial from the case and handed it to Amos, the detective constable whom Crippen had nominated as the Exhibits Officer.

  ‘What about taping the neck?’ asked her partner.

  Angela nodded. ‘Better do it, though we’ll get a lot of dried blood as well.’

  Another dip into the apparently bottomless murder bag produced a roll of Sellotape and some glass microscope slides. Cutting lengths off the tape, she pressed the sticky side against the skin of the neck, dabbing the whole area to pick up any tiny threads and fibres that might be there. Then she placed the tapes firmly on to the slides and again handed them to the DC, who placed them in brown exhibit envelopes which he had brought from his van and began to fill in the labels.

  ‘Better keep all the clothing, especially the shirt,’ she advised. ‘The lab may want to look for more fibres on them.’

  What had started as an accident or possibly a suicide had escalated into a suspected homicide, so all the usual forensic precautions had to be taken.

  Richard Pryor went back to his labours. ‘I’ll have to wipe it down now, if there’s nothing wanted,’ he announced.

  Billy Brown brought over a sponge and an enamel pan of water from the sink so that the pathologist could clean away the blood from the neck. As soon as he had done so, he gave a grunt of satisfaction.

  ‘I was right, thank God! I was afraid that I might have been making a fool of myself!’

  The detectives crowded closer as Richard’s finger pointed at a brownish line on each side of the neck, rising at the back towards the hairline between the ears but vanishing in the centre.

  ‘Typical hanging mark! Strung up with a rope or some sort of line, with the knot at the back.’

  As the photographer got busy again, he explained to Arthur Crippen. ‘The rope cuts into the front of the neck, then the mark comes around the sides and rises because of the down-drag of the body. As the head falls forward the suspension point is moved away from the skin, unless it’s a slip knot, causing a gap in the mark right at the back.’

  ‘So he died by hanging?’ growled the DI.

  ‘That’s jumping ahead a bit, but it’s certainly the favourite at the moment,’ replied Richard, moving back to the mortuary slab. Again with the help of the coroner’s officer, he turned the body on to its back again. After more photographs, Angela came with her sticky tape and did her best to cover the wreckage of torn skin that had mangled the whole of the front of the neck and chin.

  Then Pryor sponged it down as well as he could, holding the ripped segments of skin one at a time. Then he tried to reassemble them to cover the jagged wound made by the tyre treads. The half-inch brown-red mark was now seen to run across the throat below the jaw, but there were other marks as well, apart from the tyre crushing.

  ‘Ho ho, the plot thickens!’ He looked across at Arthur Crippen again. ‘Just as well I didn’t plump for a hanging just now. I think this chap had been strangled first!’

  As the DI and his sergeant pushed nearer, Richard pointed out a series of blue bruises the size of a fingertip each side of the rope mark and some more up under angles of the jaw on each side. In addition, there were several crescent-shaped scratches among the larger abrasions from the tractor tyre.

  ‘No doubt that he’s been squeezed around the neck while he’s still alive. But that rope mark and the grazes from the wheel are post-mortem.’ He turned back the flaps of skin and showed that the only blood in the tissue under them was where the tears went across the blue bruises.

  His next examination was of the eyes, which were well above the destruction of the neck and lower jaw. In the outer lids he found some fine blood spots in the skin and on opening the eyes with his fingers there were several more small haemorrhages in the whites.

  ‘They could be either from hanging or strangulation,’ he admitted. ‘But if the hanging was done after death, then they’re down to throttling.’

  Arthur Crippen digested these rapid changes in the nature of the case. ‘Why the hell would anyone want to go through all this rigmarole, doc?’

  Pryor shrugged. It wasn’t his job to be a detective, but he allowed himself an opinion. ‘Whoever did this started off by strangling the fellow, then thought he’d cover it up by hanging the body. Later he saw that the neck bruises gave the show away, so he devised a way he thought would destroy the evidence on the neck by crushing it.’

  ‘You say “he”, doctor,’ interposed Sergeant Nichols. ‘So we needn’t be looking for a woman?’

  Richard grinned. ‘A good forensic motto is never say never, never say always, but I doubt if you need to cherchez la femme this time. In fact, manual strangulation is uncommon in men; it’s usually inflicted on women and children. But there are plenty of exceptions, of which this seems one.’

  Crippen looked at his watch. ‘Four o’clock now. Any idea when you’ll finish up here, doctor? I’d like you and Dr Bray to come back to the scene afterwards, to have a look at a possible hanging site.’ He moved towards the door, sighing deeply.

  ‘Meanwhile, I’d better go and phone the good news to my chief inspector. It’ll make his day, I don’t think!’

  It was almost three hours later before they got back to the barn.

  After finishing the post-mortem and closing the body, they were taken into the hospital dining room and given tea and sandwiches. Billy Brown, being coroner’s officer, knew all the staff and had no problem in arranging some refreshment, the ghoulish activities of the past few hours having had no effect on their appetites.

  When they returned to Ty Croes Farm, they found the same police team, but reinforced with two more uniformed constables, as the scene was to be guarded all night. It was now early evening and, although there was still full daylight, another van had brought a floodlight powered by a gas cylinder and some large torches, in case they were needed.

  Arthur Crippen was waiting for them at the gate, where a PC stood to repel any spectators, not that this was likely in such a remote spot.

  ‘I’ve spent the time since I left you in questioning all the folks at the farm,’ he said mournfully. ‘But no one admits to hearing a damned thing last night. The farmhouse where Aubrey Evans and his family lives, as well as his cousin’s cottage nearby, are a good quarter of a mile away and no one had any reason to come down here until this morning.’

  They walked over to the barn, where the big doo
r was still open. Richard and Angela stood on the threshold and looked at the cavernous space, half filled with vehicles. The blue Fordson was still propped up on the jack, a few spanners scattered under the back end.

  ‘We didn’t put those blocks back under the axle,’ explained the detective sergeant. ‘They might have to be fingerprinted, though probably a dozen people will have handled them, like everything else in this jumble sale!’

  ‘I spoke to the liaison officer in the Cardiff lab,’ added Crippen. ‘He’s coming up in the morning with a scientist. We’ll keep the place battened down until then, but I just wanted you to point out any spot where the hanging could have taken place.’

  The pair from the Wye Valley stood and looked around them. The barn had a high-pitched roof of galvanized sheets laid on wooden rafters supported by a number of thick metal cross-beams held up by rusty steel pillars. At one place on their right, a chain was slung over a beam, the two free ends holding a large pulley-block. From this dangled a continuous loop of thin chain, the lower end of which was at shoulder height. Hanging below the drum was a sturdy metal hook, and a length of heavier chain dangled down to floor level.

  ‘That chain hoist looks a likely candidate,’ said Richard, pointing at the device.

  Crippen nodded his agreement. ‘I thought that, too. How’s it work?’

  The DC with the passion for tractors enlightened him. ‘You keep pulling on that loop of chain, which lowers the hook down. To lift it up, you just reverse the direction of pull. It’s geared so you can lift a hell of a weight, though it’s slow.’

  ‘What’s it for?’ asked Angela.

  ‘Lifting anything heavy – here it would be for hoisting an engine out of its chassis, things like that.’

  The DI contemplated the device hanging up in the air. ‘It’s the obvious place, but that was a rope mark around the neck, not a chain.’

  ‘The surface of the hook should be taped for fibres,’ said Angela. ‘If there are any, they might match those I took from the victim’s neck.’