Grounds for Appeal

by Bernard Knight

  As soon as he had finished, Angela, Priscilla and Sian came in to share the coffee that Moira was making and to hear what had happened in Bristol. He gave them a quick rundown of the case as he knew it so far, which was rather sketchy until he had read the case papers. ‘So basically, it’s an alibi problem. They say she did, she says she didn’t!’

  Sian, whose left-wing views ran in her family, was always a fiery advocate for the underdog, especially if they were female.

  ‘Typical Establishment stitch-up!’ she snapped. ‘Some poor woman gets regularly beaten up by some drunken thug and when she cracks and sticks a knife in him, she gets life imprisonment and probably told she’s lucky not to have been hanged!’

  Richard smiled at her predictably feisty reaction. ‘But she says she didn’t do it, Sian,’ he protested mildly. ‘And we’re being hired to see if we can prove she didn’t.’

  Moira put down her coffee percolator. ‘I thought the prosecution had to prove guilt, not the defence prove innocence?’ she objected.

  Angela looked at Richard and both their eyebrows rose.

  ‘We’ve got a budding lawyer in the house, folks! And you’re absolutely right, Moira. But in practice, the two things are not all that distinct, especially in an Appeal. The appellant’s lawyers try to torpedo the prosecution’s case.’

  Priscilla was listening with interest to this dialogue.

  ‘I had a barrister boyfriend a couple of years ago and he used to say that evidence didn’t matter much in the Appeal Courts – they were more interested in procedural errors. If the trial judge put a foot wrong, that offered a better chance of succeeding with the Appeal than picking holes in the factual evidence.’

  Moira listened intently as the three doctors bandied experiences and hearsay about the rigid legal system. When there was a pause, she declared her fascination with the law. ‘I used to be a typist in a solicitor’s office, but it’s only since I came to Garth House that it seemed to come alive for me. Thank goodness this poor woman in Bristol didn’t hang, as she might well have done. I suppose it’s all this fuss about Timothy Evans and John Christie that has made them reluctant to carry out the death penalty?’

  ‘Evans came from my home town of Merthyr, poor chap,’ said Richard, soberly. ‘I see there’s a strong movement again to get him a retrospective pardon this year.’

  ‘And push forward the political campaign for abolition of hanging,’ said Sian robustly. Timothy Evans had been hanged five years previously for murdering his wife and baby, but John Christie, the serial killer of Rillington Place in Notting Hill, had then confessed to the murders two years ago and caused a national furore about miscarriages of justice. Several major newspaper editors were trying to get the issue raised once again in Parliament, the campaign having been stimulated by the hanging of a woman, Ruth Ellis, earlier in the year.

  Richard rose and started back to his office to read the file. ‘Better start seeing if we can do anything to help this unfortunate lady – though of course, she might be guilty anyway. We mustn’t prejudge these things.’

  He winked at Sian as he left.

  SEVEN

  On the following Saturday afternoon, when Sian had gone home to Chepstow and Moira had returned to her house and little dog just down the road, the three doctors assembled in Angela’s sitting room in the front of the house. It was a typical Welsh autumn day outside, a cold drizzle under grey skies, so Richard had no urge to go out and play with his embryonic vineyard on the hillside behind the house.

  Instead, he sat with Angela and Priscilla on the old but comfortable three-piece suite that had been Aunt Gladys’s pride and joy, to talk about the case that he had brought from Bristol. The main issue was medical, but there was the matter of the blood stains to consider and, in any case, he valued the general forensic acumen of the two women, who between them had a good many years’ experience.

  Though Priscilla said she would be leaving them at the end of the month to return to London and look for a job, she was happy to join in the discussion. Her digs in Tintern Parva were comfortable enough but she didn’t particularly fancy spending a wet Saturday afternoon alone there. Richard had talked about getting a television set for Garth House, but so far nothing had materialized. They had agreed to go up to Monmouth that evening for a meal in one of the hotels, but for now, kicking around a forensic problem seemed the best option.

  ‘I’ve read through all that file,’ he said, pointing at the thick cardboard folder that lay on the low table in front of them. ‘Most of it is circumstantial stuff and umpteen witness statements, all of no real interest to us, apart from timings. You’re welcome to dredge though it, but the only two aspects that seem relevant to us are the time of death and these blood spots on Millie’s sleeve.’

  ‘Were the convicted woman and the dead man of different blood groups?’ asked Angela.

  ‘Yes, she was A-Rhesus positive, Shaw was O-positive, both very common groups. The Home Office lab in Bristol did the tests, so I doubt we can fault them.’

  ‘How good is the prosecution medical evidence on the time of death?’ asked Priscilla, cutting to the core of the matter.

  ‘In one word, lousy! It’s the old story of doctors who think they are Sherlock Holmes, instead of sticking to what can be proven. Their pathologist gives the time of death to within limits of one hour – which conveniently is the same hour in which Millicent Shaw’s alibi fails.’

  ‘Who was he, this doctor?’ queried Angela, snug on the settee with her elegant legs curled under her.

  ‘Anthony Claridge, a hospital pathologist from Gloucester. He was standing in for the regular chap in Bristol, who was on holiday.’

  ‘Never heard of him,’ said Angela. ‘Do you know him, Richard?’

  ‘I’ve met him in passing at a meeting of the Forensic Medicine Society. An old chap, must be about retiring age, I would think. Seemed a bit full of his own importance.’

  He opened the file and took out a couple of pages covered in his own writing, notes he had made while reading through all the evidence.

  ‘Doctor Claridge wheels out all the old traditional stuff about estimating the time since death, most of which is incapable of proof. But with little better to put in its place, lawyers and judges are happy to go along with what’s in the old textbooks, most of which just copy from other books and previous editions, without any critical evaluation of its accuracy.’

  Angela smiled at him, rather fondly.

  ‘You always get hot under the collar over this, don’t you, Richard?’ she teased. ‘I’ve heard you thumping the table before. Next, I suppose, you’ll be blaming Spilsbury and the other old fossils in your profession!’

  Her partner had the grace to look a little sheepish.

  ‘Sorry, but it riles me to hear these chaps pontificate as if what they are claiming is the gospel truth, when it’s really only speculation. My motto is, if you can’t prove it, don’t claim it, especially when someone’s neck is at risk!’

  ‘So what have we got as a baseline of fact?’ asked Priscilla, still firmly identifying herself as a member of the team even though she was only with them for a short time. Richard tapped his papers with a forefinger.

  ‘Millie Wilson had one of her frequent quarrels with Shaw in the early evening of a Saturday in June last year. Then she cleared off to the pictures with a woman friend at about seven o’clock. Plenty of other witnesses, as well as the friend, to prove where she was until ten thirty, when she arrived back home.’

  ‘Presumably, Arthur Shaw was known to be alive during that time?’ asked Angela.

  ‘Absolutely! He was gambling in the kitchen all evening with three others who lived in the house. They all saw her come home at half-past ten. She came into the back room where they were playing poker and said something insulting to Shaw, about the bruising he had earlier caused to her face. They had a short slanging match and she went upstairs to their so-called flat.’

  ‘What happened to the poor woman then?�
� demanded Priscilla, who, like Sian, was quick to sympathize with another female who was being ill-treated by some aggressive lout.

  ‘Shaw, who had been drinking as usual, became angry and left the game to go upstairs, saying that she needed to be taught a lesson. There was a devil of a rumpus for a time, but as usual, the residents took little notice. Then Millicent came down with a swollen eye and a bleeding cut on her lip. She screamed some abuse back up the stairs and shouted that she was going to her sister’s and was never coming back, then ran out of the house. This was at about eleven o’clock, give or take a few minutes, as the other occupants were also probably half-drunk and not too bothered about noticing the exact time.’

  ‘And he was found dead in the morning?’ concluded Angela.

  ‘Yes, at seven thirty, by one of the other men in the house, Don O’Leary. He and Arthur both worked in a car-breaker’s yard a few streets away. When Shaw didn’t appear at their usual time to go to work, O’Leary went up to wake him, as he knew that Millie wasn’t there. He got no answer, but found the door unlocked and Arthur Shaw lying dead on the floor, with a knife wound in his chest. So the times are pretty well established to within minutes.’

  ‘Are there any photographs?’ said Priscilla.

  Richard went to the back of the file and pulled out two police albums, containing half-plate black and white glossy prints stapled between cardboard covers.

  ‘One is of the scene, the other the post-mortem. Not the greatest pictures, but they give the general idea.’

  The two women took an album each, then swapped when they had looked at each photograph.

  ‘Stabbed almost in the middle of the chest,’ observed Angela. Richard nodded. ‘Got him straight through the right ventricle of the heart.’

  ‘Not much blood about,’ said Priscilla, holding up a picture of the victim lying on the floor of an untidy living room.

  ‘It’s often the case with a single chest wound, especially if the body lies on its back afterwards. He bled internally, filling the bag around the heart so that it couldn’t fill properly.’

  ‘That’s what you call a cardiac tamponade, isn’t it?’ said Angela, showing off some of the knowledge she’d accumulated from many years’ experience in London.

  ‘Yes, it wouldn’t cause immediate death, but he would have been rapidly disabled and could die within a few minutes.’

  ‘What about this blood on her sleeve?’ asked Angela. ‘Is this the picture?’ She held up the last photograph in the scene album. It was of a pale bolero type jacket, laid out on a table.

  ‘Yes, you can see a few small spots on the outside of the right sleeve, just above the cuff.

  The two biologists looked at the photographs again, spending most time on the pictures of the scene, especially ones of the dead man lying on his back on the linoleum in the rather squalid living room, whose sagging furniture was decorated with empty beer bottles and overflowing ashtrays.

  ‘Any blood elsewhere in the flat?’ queried Angela.

  ‘Nothing mentioned in the statements. It looks as if he was stabbed at or near the point where he fell. The only other room is the adjacent bedroom and there was nothing of interest found in there. The police searched the rest of the house, but again nothing significant turned up.’

  ‘So how did the pathologist arrive at such a tight estimate of the time of death?’ demanded Priscilla.

  Richard shrugged. ‘Using the old routine – temperature of the body, rigor mortis, post-mortem lividity, amount and state of the stomach contents . . . the same old mumbo-jumbo. Pick some figures from the air, then take away the number you first thought of!’

  Angela smiled to herself at his forceful tone. She had heard this particular tirade several times, as time of death was one of Richard’s hobby horses.

  ‘So you think you can challenge that for the Appeal?’ asked Priscilla.

  ‘Damn right I can – and I will, given the chance!’

  The Borth Bog investigation had run completely out of steam by the middle of the following week. There were only a few days left before the December page appeared on Detective Inspector Meirion Thomas’s calender, a rather racy one from a local garage, depicting a fluffy blonde wearing more eyeshadow than clothes, sitting provocatively on the bonnet of the new Ford Zephyr Zodiac.

  He looked at the dates glumly, thinking that his only murder investigation for the last five years had run into the sand and that its pathetically thin file would soon end up at the back of the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet.

  Though he knew it was traditional in detective novels for senior officers and the Chief Constable to come breathing fire down the neck of the failing investigating officer, he had to admit that the two men above him in their small police force had accepted the dead-end philosophically. They had seemed relieved that the two rather supercilious men from Scotland Yard had gone home and that the Press, after a brief frenzy, seemed to have forgotten all about the case. But being a conscientious man, Meirion would have liked to have nailed someone for such a nasty crime. Failing that, it would have at least been satisfying to have identified the body.

  With a sigh, he pulled a wad of papers towards him and settled down to devising night-observation rotas for the painfully few men he had available. Sheep rustling had become fashionable again and several irate farmers near Tregaron were demanding some action from the police, backed up by their insurance companies. This issue was of far greater concern to the inhabitants of Cardiganshire than one solitary, if bizarre death that probably occurred long ago.

  Yet as he pulled out his Parker 51 pen, the previous year’s Christmas present from his wife, the strange force of serendipity was working on someone he knew well, a hundred miles away in Birmingham.

  ‘Not a bad pint, this!’ said Gwyn Parry, studying the amber liquid in his glass, pulled from a barrel of Atkinson’s Bitter. He was sitting in the snug of the Red Lion in Moseley, a southern suburb of Birmingham. He had been taken there for a pre-lunch drink by his wife’s brother-in-law, Tony Cooper. The detective sergeant from Aberystwyth was spending two days’ leave in the Midlands, bringing his wife to stay with her sister, who had just come out of hospital after an operation on some obscure part of her female anatomy. He was leaving Bethan there for a couple of weeks to help look after her, as Tony had to work shifts, being a sergeant in the Birmingham City Police. He was not in the CID like Gwyn, but was a custody officer in one of the central police stations.

  Their talk was the usual mix of topics always voiced by off-duty policemen – complaints about pay, pensions and conditions of service, mixed with anecdotes of unusual cases they had encountered. They had been joined in the pub by an elderly friend of Tony’s who lived nearby, a chain-smoking man in his late sixties with horn-rimmed glasses with lenses like bottle bottoms. Oscar Stanton was a retired journalist from a city newspaper and had a large fund of stories, ranging from the hilarious to the horrific.

  Gwyn looked at the bar clock and reckoned that they had time for another round before going back home, where Bethan was making a meal. After that, he was driving back to Wales, to join in the fight against the sheep rustlers. When the drinks were in, their conversation continued and the detective got around to telling them of the curious case of the body in the bog, which seemed to have come to a dead end.

  ‘So we haven’t a clue who the fellow is,’ he concluded. ‘All we’ve got is a tattoo and a vague guess that he died sometime around ten years ago.’

  ‘Strangled and his head taken off?’ said his brother-in-law, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘So certainly not some domestic squabble. It sounds like some gangster execution, but you couldn’t get one of those in peaceful West Wales, surely!’

  Oscar Stanton was looking thoughtful, slowly rubbing his bristly chin. ‘Rings a bell, this does,’ he said ruminatively. ‘I’ve got this dim recollection of some rumour going around amongst the lads on the paper, way back around the time the war ended.’

  The two policemen sta
red at him. ‘What rumour?’ asked Tony.

  ‘I can’t remember any details. It was a long time ago. But one of the older reporters who covered crime in those days had this yarn about a pub somewhere, where the landlord claimed to have a pickled head in his beer cellar.’

  Gwyn Parry looked dubious. ‘It could be a wind-up – or maybe some practical joke. I remember hearing about a shrivelled hand being found on the upper deck of a Cardiff bus. Turned out that a medical student had taken it from the college dissecting room.’

  Tony was not so sceptical. Maybe after twenty years of policing a big, bad city, he was ready to believe anything. ‘Have you any idea if the chap who was telling the story is still around, Oscar?’

  ‘He died a couple of years ago, I’m afraid. But I still have a drink now and then with some of my old mates from the paper. I could ask around and see if anyone remembers the story.’

  The Aberystwyth sergeant nodded his thanks. ‘We’ve got damn all to go on at present, so any lead is better than none. Could you let Tony here know if you dig up anything?’

  With this appropriate plea, they moved on to Aston Villa’s chances at the coming weekend.

  Richard Pryor, after a few hours poring over his collection of textbooks and journals, had written a considered appreciation of the possible forensic medical avenues that might assist Millie Wilson’s lawyers. He was used to calling them ‘the defence’, but this was not strictly accurate in this instance, as she was ‘the appellant’. The time for defending her was in the past, at the trial held at Bristol Assizes more than a year ago.