According to the Evidence rpm-2

by Bernard Knight

  The Queen Alexandra Military Hospital was squeezed into one of the most densely built-up areas of London, on the north side of a rectangle of roads that abutted on to Millbank, not far from the Houses of Parliament. A classical red-brick building on Bulinca Street, it faced the Tate Gallery, on the other side of which was the Royal Army Medical College. As a taxi dropped Angela and Richard on Millbank next morning, his nostalgia was stimulated once again as he looked back at the RAMC Officers’ Mess on the corner of Atterbury Street, where he had spent some weeks during the war before being posted abroad. He still remembered the Blitz and the fire-watching duty that occupied many of the nights.

  They walked around the block to the hospital and when Richard enquired at the porter’s lodge to introduce themselves, a staff sergeant shepherded them towards a nearby side room.

  ‘Colonel Bannerman wants a word with you, sir, before you go to the mortuary.’

  He opened the door and ushered them into a bare interview room, normally used for talking to relatives of patients in the hospital. Bannerman was sitting at a table and rose as they entered, greeting them both and shaking hands.

  ‘I wanted a quick chat before we start, doctors,’ he said. ‘Since we last spoke, the lawyer for the wife has engaged a medical expert and wants him to attend the examination.’

  Richard nodded. This was the usual procedure in criminal cases, where the defence could engage their own expert to either attend the first autopsy or perform one of his own later, as he had done on a number of occasions.

  ‘Where is he?’ he asked. ‘And who is he?’

  ‘A surgeon, apparently, not a pathologist,’ replied Bannerman. ‘He’s waiting in the mortuary for us, a chap named Lorimer. It seems he’s a general surgeon from Farnborough Hospital, down in the direction where the widow lives.’

  ‘Do we know what his opinion is on the case?’ asked Pryor. ‘I presume he’s seen the same material as I have – the photographs and the background story?’

  The War Office man fished in his black document case and pulled out a thin folder, which he handed to Richard. ‘Their solicitor sent me a copy of Lorimer’s report. It’s quite short, if you want to look at it before meeting him.’

  Pryor sat on the edge of the table and scanned through the two stapled pages. ‘I see he was a doctor in the RAF towards the end of the war,’ he observed. ‘I’m not sure they saw a great many bullet wounds from small arms.’

  He read through the brief opinion and handed the papers back to Bannerman. ‘Let’s see what he has to say when we both look at the actual wound for the first time.’

  The staff sergeant led them through some corridors and then out through a door at the back of the ground floor. As usual, the mortuary was hidden in the nether regions, next to the boiler house. Thankfully, it was little used, as the hospital catered mainly for young and often otherwise usually fit service personnel, so there were few deaths in peacetime.

  ‘Small, but well formed!’ murmured Angela as they entered the featureless concrete building, externally resembling a large garage. Inside, it was spartan and spotlessly clean, with a small refrigerated body-store and a post-mortem room with a single table. An RAMC corporal, a technician from the pathology laboratory in the college, was waiting to act as mortuary assistant, and the body of Herbert Bulmer was already on the table, decently covered with a white sheet. As they entered, a tall man came forward to introduce himself as Steven Lorimer.

  He still had a bushy moustache, which used to be referred to as the ‘Flying-Officer Kite’ style, even though he had been an RAF surgeon rather than an aviator.

  Richard and Bannerman chatted to him for a few moments, partly to cover the slight stiffness than often existed when two strange experts met, who may have potentially opposing opinions. The presence of the handsome Angela helped to ease the moment, as she was adept at social lubrication.

  Then they got down to business, and the corporal handed the two doctors rubber aprons and gloves before he removed the sheet from the corpse. The smell of formalin and other preservatives confirmed that the body had been embalmed, which was obligatory before it could have been flown home from the Gulf. Although dead and buried for several months, this had kept it in fairly good condition, apart from the unnatural grey-green colour and the waxy texture of the peeling skin.

  ‘It’s really only the head wound that concerns us, would you agree?’ asked Richard courteously. ‘I doubt looking at what’s left of the internal organs is relevant, especially after a previous autopsy.’

  Steven Lorimer readily agreed, as, not being a pathologist himself, he was not keen to go groping through the debris that lay beneath the long stitched incision down the front of the body. ‘Let’s have a look at his head, then. I’ve only seen the photographs, which weren’t all that brilliant,’ he said.

  With the head propped up on a wooden block, they stooped to stare at the back of the scalp. Another line of stitches ran over the head from ear to ear, but Richard wanted to see the outside before he opened this up.

  ‘Of course, the hair has been washed after the first post-mortem, so there would be no signs left of any propellant or soot deposit from a close discharge,’ said the surgeon.

  Pryor agreed, but pointed out that the record stated that the man had been wearing a bush hat at the time. ‘They didn’t think to keep that or even take a photo of it,’ he added. ‘So we’ll never know if it was soiled or scorched.’

  ‘Given the size of the wound shown in the photographs, I feel sure this was a very close discharge,’ said Lorimer rather stubbornly. ‘Can we have a good look at it in the flesh, so to speak?’

  Richard carefully parted the brown hair that lay over the back point of the head. It was short, as was to be expected in a serving soldier, and when moved aside revealed a roughly oblong wound in the scalp. The edges were ragged and inverted. Thankfully, the previous doctor in Al Tallah had not stitched it up at the end of the examination, so it was in its original state.

  ‘Certainly no sign of burning or blackening,’ said Richard. ‘The hairs aren’t clubbed, either.’

  Angela noticed that Lorimer looked slightly bemused by this and she explained for his benefit, as this was marginally within her expertise. ‘The keratin of the hair can melt under intense heat and then re-solidify, so you get little beads on the ends like the head of a match.’

  ‘I see. But, again, if a hat was interposed, we wouldn’t expect heating effects on the surface.’

  Richard began to carefully shave the hair from a rim around the wound, to be able to see the margins more clearly. As he did so, he questioned Lorimer. ‘So why do you feel this was a close, almost contact wound?’

  ‘Because of the size of the wound,’ answered the surgeon confidently. ‘It must be over an inch long and half that wide. If it was a more distant discharge, a forty-five-calibre missile would have punched a clean, round hole of about that diameter. This big hole is due to the gas from the muzzle blasting into the tissues.’

  Richard suspected that the surgeon was repeating the usual mantras from the standard textbooks, rather than from his own experience, and had several reservations about that claim. He kept his thoughts to himself and turned his attention to the scalp wound again. When the hair was removed from around it, it was seen to be a wide slit, with tearing at the left end and some brown scuffing at the other end.

  He stood back to let Lorimer have a good long look, then suggested to Bannerman, who was waiting well back in the doorway that they should get some close-up photographs.

  ‘I’d anticipated that, doctor. There’s a photographer from the RAM College outside now.’

  While the man came in and began taking some flash photographs, Bannerman invited the three doctors out into the body-store, where there was a desk against one wall. Again he rooted around in his leather case and pulled out a glass tube with a screw top.

  ‘While we’re waiting, perhaps you’d like to look at the bullet. It was flown back from Al Tallah aft
er our liaison officer retrieved it from the police.’

  He placed the tube on the table. Richard Pryor opened it and carefully unwrapped a wad of cotton wool to reveal a badly deformed bullet. It was heavy and bent, like a small banana. The two doctors studied it for a long moment, then Richard carefully turned it over to look at the whole distorted surface. When he had satisfied himself, the other doctor prodded it rather aimlessly and then nodded his agreement to having the missile put back into its protective wrappings.

  ‘I think you should send it to your army experts in Woolwich to examine it fully,’ said Richard, looking at the man from the War Office.

  He didn’t actually wink at Bannerman, but the astute colonel got the message that there was something significant in this suggestion.

  When the photographer had finished, Richard went back to the head and cut the stitches that had secured the scalp after the original post-mortem. Pulling the tissues back, the two doctors studied the exposed skull, which had several fractures running up from the area of the bullet wound. Carefully lifting off the skullcap, which had been sawn around its circumference by the Al Tallah pathologist, Richard placed it on a dissecting table that the mortuary assistant had placed over the legs of the corpse. He then removed a large wad of crumpled bandages that had been used to stuff the cranial cavity after the first examination.

  ‘They cut through just below the point of impact,’ observed Pryor, ‘so bits of skull have fallen out, where the fracture lines cross his saw line.’

  The back point of the skull had been shattered, and Richard retrieved several loose fragments and fitted them together as best he could, like the pieces of a jigsaw. This produced a defect with jagged edges, roughly the size of the external scalp wound.

  ‘Is there any point at looking at what’s left of the brain?’ asked Lorimer, looking askance at the front of the cadaver, where the long line of string stitches stretched down the middle of the chest and belly.

  Richard shrugged. ‘I very much doubt it. It was pretty mashed up by the bullet, according to the first autopsy report and the poor photos we have. Since then, it’s been dissected, then no doubt stuffed back into the abdominal cavity and then buried for three months.’

  ‘Where exactly was the bullet found, d’you recall?’ asked the surgeon.

  ‘It was up against the inner wall of the skull, on the left side, just above the inner ear.’

  The two doctors spent a few more minutes exploring the inside of the cranium and studying the defect in the back of the skull, from which fracture lines ran in several directions, including across the base of the skull. Angela watched silently, leaving medical matters to the other two, as there was nothing that her specialism could offer, apart from the working knowledge of firearms examination that she had picked up from her years in the Met Lab.

  Eventually, Richard and the defence expert had seen all they wanted of the body, and Richard indicated to the technician that he could restore the head, ready for return to the grave in Lewisham. They removed their gloves and aprons and washed up in a sink in the corner, where with true army efficiency there was a new tablet of soap and clean towels.

  ‘Different from the usual public mortuaries I have to work in,’ observed Richard. ‘In some of them you’re lucky to have running water!’

  The surgeon, used to spotless operating theatres and nurses anxious to offer sterile gowns and instruments, failed to follow Richard’s appreciation of military organization, but he courteously motioned Angela out of the mortuary as they left to speak to Bannerman, who had gone out into the outer room.

  ‘All finished?’ asked the War Office man. ‘Any conclusions yet?’

  Lorimer seemed to stiffen at this. ‘I don’t think it proper if we discuss the outcome at this stage,’ he said rather pompously. ‘It might prejudice any later disputes between us.’

  Richard raised his eyebrows at Bannerman. It was usual for medical witnesses to exchange an informal impression of their examination and to indicate where they agreed and disagreed. It was for the lawyers and the courts to sort out the eventual decisions.

  However, he had met a few expert witnesses who played their cards close to their chest and it was within their right to do so, if they were that way inclined.

  ‘Fine, I’ll just go off with the colonel here and have a talk,’ replied Pryor. ‘We can leave you in peace, if you want to make some notes or anything.’

  The surgeon had left his dark overcoat and homburg in the outer room, together with a slim briefcase. He drew a writing pad from that and laid it on the small desk. ‘Thank you very much for your courtesy, Dr Pryor.’

  He shook hands with Angela, Richard and Bannerman, who left him to write whatever conclusions he had come to about the examination.

  ‘Stuffy sort of chap, that!’ observed the colonel as they walked back into the hospital. ‘Seemed a bit out of his depth to me.’

  Richard grinned. ‘I don’t think he cottoned on to what I was suggesting, but if he doesn’t want to talk about it, that’s up to him.’

  They went back to the small interview room, where the helpful reception sergeant had organized a pot of coffee and some biscuits. Angela handed round the cups as they sat at the table and Richard explained his thinking about the injury. He spoke for a couple of minutes, Bannerman nodding sagaciously at intervals.

  When the pathologist had finished, the War Office man tapped the side of his briefcase. ‘So I gather from your expression in there that getting this bullet examined at Woolwich might be an important part of the exercise?’

  Woolwich Arsenal, a name perhaps better known for its football team, was the long-established military centre for anything to do with arms and ammunition, being founded back in the seventeenth century.

  Richard nodded. ‘Get them to have a good look at it, especially on the outside. I’ll wait for their report before firming up on my opinion.’

  Bannerman nodded. ‘I’ll twist a few arms to get it done as quickly as possible and let you know on the telephone.’

  A few minutes later the bowler-hatted bureaucrat said farewell and strode off towards Whitehall, leaving Richard and Angela to find a cab to take them back to Paddington.

  ‘Do you really think that’s the answer, Richard?’ she asked, referring to the provisional explanation he had just given to Bannerman.

  ‘I can’t fault it and, if their laboratory in Woolwich confirms what I think, then it has to be accepted. A pity they’ve since destroyed the fuselage of that old Dakota out in the Gulf; that would have really clinched it.’

  They had lunch in the Great Western Hotel, then caught a mid-afternoon express back to Newport, arriving home in the valley tired but pleased with their trip to the big city.

  After one of Moira’s casseroles left for them in the Aga, and a couple of relaxing gin and tonics, they talked over the events of their spree in London, feeling more than usually comfortable with each other’s company. Eventually, they went to their separate rooms and, when in bed, both spent some time staring at the ceiling and thinking about the previous evening, which had been so different from their usual routine.

  NINETEEN

  Colonel Bannerman telephoned the following Monday, when Richard Pryor was away at Hereford County Hospital, the local coroner having asked him to perform a post-mortem on a patient who had died during an abdominal operation. Moira took the call and when Richard returned at lunchtime she passed on the message from the War Office, checking the actual words from a note she had made.

  ‘The colonel said he had had a report from the Woolwich place and would like to talk it over with you. He has to come to Bristol tomorrow on another matter and wonders if you could meet him at lunchtime at his hotel, as he would prefer to speak to you personally, rather than over the telephone.’

  Richard had no commitments on that Tuesday and readily agreed. Moira had the name of the hotel in Clifton and he asked her to phone Bannerman’s secretary to confirm that he would be there.

  �
��You must come too, Angela,’ he said over lunch. ‘You were at the examination last week, so you need to see the thing right through with me.’

  Next morning they drove down to the Beachley–Aust ferry, which intrigued Angela, as she had never seen it before. When they trundled the Humber off the ungainly vessel on the Somerset side, she declared that the sooner they built a bridge, the better she would be pleased.

  They found Bannerman’s hotel, a large, Edwardian building in Whiteladies Road, and discovered the War Office man waiting for them in the bar. His tall figure hovered over them as he invited them to sit at a small table in the corner and signalled to a waiter to take an order for drinks. When Angela had been served with a gin and tonic and Richard with a half of bitter, Bannerman raised his own glass of whisky in a toast.

  ‘To your good health and my thanks for your able assistance,’ he said genially. ‘I think the report from Woolwich will confirm what you outlined to me when we last met in London.’

  He pulled out a thin folder from his black briefcase, which seemed as much a part of him as his pinstriped suit and old school tie.

  ‘Perhaps we can look at this now, then we can have lunch in peace. I have to be at a conference with counsel at two, over a legal problem with a procurement contract, but I’ve booked a table in the dining room, if you would care to be my guests.’

  Angela obviously appreciated his old-world courtesy and Richard covertly felt that his partner came from the same social stratum as the rather upstage colonel.

  Bannerman opened the file and put it on the table so that they could all see it. ‘They sent this photograph as well,’ he began, tapping a long finger on a large black and white print.

  It showed a much-magnified image of the distorted bullet, the sharp focus emphasizing a pale streak on the least-damaged side.

  ‘That was the thing you were interested in, doctor. They concentrated on that and sent this short report that confirms what you suggested to me.’