According to the Evidence

by Bernard Knight

  The lad shuffled uneasily. ‘I’m not a proper apprentice,’ he mumbled. ‘Just working here, while I’m waiting to be called up for National Service.’

  For the next five minutes the detective inspector dragged what little information he could from the four men about their scanty knowledge of ‘the occurrence’, before going towards the barn to look at the scene. Billy Brown and his sergeant walked each side of him as they went up to the big Fordson, where the coroner’s officer carefully removed the tarpaulin and put it to one side.

  ‘They shouldn’t really have put this on,’ he said. ‘But I suppose they didn’t want to leave him exposed until we came.’

  Arthur Crippen stood for a long moment looking at the scene.

  The tractor was on an almost even keel, its offside back wheel resting squarely on the neck of the corpse, the head hidden by the massive tyre. A few spanners lay scattered around, amid the rough wooden blocks, which appeared to be sections sawn from a railway sleeper.

  ‘Why shouldn’t it be an obvious accident, guv?’ murmured Sergeant Nichols.

  ‘Bloody daft thing to do if you’re a proper mechanic, putting your head under a jacked-up wheel!’ objected Billy Brown, who felt obliged to justify his calling out the CID.

  Crippen continued to stare at the inert body lying on the stained concrete floor. He slowly rubbed his face, pushing his sallow cheeks into even deeper wrinkles as he tried to make up his mind.

  ‘Shall I get the tractor jacked up again, so that we can get the poor sod out?’ asked John Nichols. The sergeant was quite young, a slim, fair man with a narrow Clark Gable moustache.

  Crippen came to a decision and slowly shook his head from side to side. ‘I don’t think we will, John,’ he grunted. ‘Like Billy here, I feel we need to be cautious about this one.’

  Aubrey Evans broke away from the group still standing in the yard and came up to the policemen. ‘Are you going to leave him there much longer? It doesn’t seem very respectful.’

  The senior detective didn’t answer him directly but countered with another question. ‘What was he doing, to be under there like that?’

  ‘I’m not sure. It’s Jeff who mostly looks after the repair side – I do the farming.’ He turned and called across to his cousin, who ambled over to join them.

  ‘What was Tom doing with this Major?’ he demanded.

  ‘Fitting new brake shoes,’ replied Jeff Morton. ‘He should have finished them yesterday morning, but the idle bugger didn’t turn up until midday.’

  Crippen ignored the lack of respect for the dead but filed the comment away for later enquiry. ‘So he had to have the tractor jacked up for that?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, one side at a time. Get the wheels off, then open the drums to change the shoes.’

  ‘But the wheels are on now?’ objected Crippen.

  ‘Yes, but the shoe clearance would have to be set by using a spanner on the adjusters behind the drums. Each side would have to be jacked up again for that.’

  ‘Is putting a pile of wooden blocks under the axle a safe way of doing that?’ demanded the sergeant.

  Morton shrugged. ‘We’ve always done it – and so does every other farm repairer. Never had trouble before.’

  ‘Can’t you use a proper trolley jack?’ asked the coroner’s officer.

  ‘We do, to get it off the ground. Then we stick the blocks underneath and take the jack away. It’s always being needed for other jobs.’ He swept his hand around the barn, where half a dozen other vehicles were in various states of disorder, some up on their own blocks.

  Crippen returned to staring at the man lying dead at his feet.

  ‘Would any sensible mechanic trust his head underneath more than a ton of tractor?’ he asked.

  ‘Tom Littleman wasn’t what you’d call sensible, officer,’ said a deeper voice, as Mostyn Evans had walked up to stand behind them. ‘He was a lousy mechanic, if the truth be told. I told the lads that when they employed him – and I was dead against them taking him into partnership with the repair business.’

  ‘What was wrong with him?’

  ‘He was far too fond of the booze, for one thing,’ growled the older man. ‘Lost a lot of working time, and when he was here he was often half-cut. I’m not all that surprised that the stupid sod ended up like this.’

  Aubrey murmured something to his father in Welsh, but Mostyn Evans shook his head. ‘No, it’s got to be said, son! Tom was a liability and a disaster waiting to happen. Now it has happened.’

  The detective inspector seemed to have made up his mind. He turned to Billy Brown. ‘Has a doctor been here to look at him?’ he asked.

  The coroner’s officer shook his head. ‘I left a message with Dr Prosser, the local police surgeon. He was out on his rounds, but I left a message for him to come here as soon as he gets back for his morning surgery. I doubt he’ll do more than certify death,’ he added rather caustically.

  Crippen did some more face-rubbing, which seemed to aid his decision-making. ‘I want a pathologist to have a look at this, before we write it off. Any chance of getting one up here this side of Christmas? I suppose we’ll have to go through the forensic lab in Cardiff.’

  His sergeant shook his head. ‘There was a circular from headquarters last week. The Cardiff man is away, so a new Home Office chap from the Wye Valley is standing in for him.’

  Crippen shrugged. ‘I don’t care if he’s from Timbuktu as long as he clears this up for us. Get hold of him, then shut that barn door and leave the PC here on watch.’

  He loped back to the waiting police car and ordered the driver to take him back to Brecon. ‘I’ll come back when the pathologist is due,’ he called through the window.

  TWO

  When the call came through, Dr Richard Glanville Pryor was drinking a mug of Nescafé in the staffroom of Garth House. This was an Edwardian villa perched above the road that meandered through the Wye Valley, one of Wales’s prime beauty spots along the border with England. ‘Staffroom’ was rather a pretentious title, as there were only three other people in the house and the room was his late uncle’s old study, situated between the kitchen at the back and his partner’s office at the front.

  He sat in an armchair with sagging springs, part of the furniture left in his aunt’s house when he had inherited it almost a year earlier. Opposite, his secretary-cum-cook, Moira Davison, shared a more modern settee with Siân Lloyd, a lively little blonde who was their laboratory technician. On his right, Dr Angela Bray, his partner – solely in the professional sense – occupied a new Parker-Knoll easy chair, as she had declared that if she had to spend most of her life perched on a laboratory stool, at least she intended to be comfortable at other times.

  When the phone rang in the corridor outside, they were talking about the news on the wireless that the first independent television channel was to open later that week, but as they had no television set the discussion was rather academic.

  ‘I’ll get it, I’ve got to go to the kitchen anyway,’ offered Moira, taking her empty cup and saucer with her. A moment later she put her head around the door and beckoned to her boss.

  ‘It’s the police in Brecon, doctor. Sounds as if they’re calling you out.’

  ‘Your fame is spreading quickly, Richard!’ chaffed Angela.

  It was only a few weeks since Pryor had been put on the Home Office list of forensic pathologists, primarily to stand in for other areas when the designated doctor was not available.

  He uncoiled his lean body from the deep chair and went out into the passage, which ran from the front hall to the kitchen at the back. Though Post Office Telephones had recently installed extensions in their office opposite, as well as in Richard’s room, the original instrument was still on a small table in the passage, an old Bakelite model with a tarnished dial.

  Moira had vanished into the kitchen with her cup and saucer and left the receiver on the table. Picking it up, he soon found that a detective sergeant from Brecon was asking him to
turn out to visit a scene.

  ‘Probably an accident, doctor, or possibly even a suicide. But my DI wants to make sure that there’s nothing fishy about the death.’

  Something in Nichols’ tone suggested to Richard Pryor that he felt that there might well be something fishy, but he did not want to pursue it on the telephone. Taking directions to Ty Croes Farm, which was between Brecon and Sennybridge in the next county, he promised to be there within a couple of hours.

  As he put the phone down, Angela Bray and Siân came out of the staffroom.

  ‘Do you want a trip out into the jungle, Angela?’ he asked flippantly. ‘There’s a body lying under a tractor about forty miles away.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound very forensic to me,’ said Siân in a disappointed tone. She marched off to the laboratory, where she had several alcohol analyses waiting. Angela grinned at Richard.

  ‘She wants every call to be a serial murder, poor girl!’ she said. ‘Do you really want me to come with you?’

  ‘I thought it might be a change for you. You’ve been stuck here for days with those paternity tests. And you never know, the keen eye of a forensic scientist might be vital!’

  The handsome biologist smiled at him. ‘It would be nice to have a ride in the country on such a nice day. You’re off straight away, I suppose?’

  She went off to her room at the front of the house to get a coat and the ‘murder bag’, a leather case which contained their tools of the trade. Ten minutes later they were rolling down the steep drive in his black Humber Hawk, turning left on to the main road and setting off up the valley towards Monmouth. As she had said, it was a nice autumn day, with the dense woods on the steep sides of the gorge beginning to glow with a spectrum of colours, from green through gold to orange. The River Wye meandered down below them, its meadows bright green on either side.

  ‘We’re lucky to work in such a lovely place,’ said Angela. ‘This beats Scotland Yard, even if I could just see the Thames if I leaned out of the window!’

  Five months ago Angela, a scientist with a PhD in genetics, had given up her job in London’s Metropolitan Police Laboratory and joined Richard Pryor in this risky venture in South Wales.

  Though the Met Lab was a prestigious place, she had become disenchanted with a repetitive workload and the poor chance of further promotion. That, together with a traumatic broken engagement, had persuaded her to join Richard when he proposed setting up a private consultancy after returning from years in the Far East. He had been given a generous ‘golden handshake’ from his university appointment in Singapore, where he had been Professor of Forensic Medicine. This coincided with his aunt’s bequest of Garth House, and he had decided to take the plunge and go private, persuading Angela to become his partner. He had met her months earlier at a forensic congress and they had hatched this plot to go it alone.

  As they drove, he related what little the sergeant had told him about the death they were attending. Angela wondered what could be so odd that the CID wanted a Home Office pathologist at the scene of what sounded like an industrial accident.

  ‘Ours not to wonder why, just prepared to do or die!’ sang Richard. Angela smiled to herself at his happy mood, brought on by this first call in his new role for the police. He was a nice chap, she thought to herself, never snappy or unpleasant. He had these moods of elation but was sometimes anxious at the gamble they had taken at giving up salaried jobs for the uncertain nature of private practice. After months of living in the same house, their relationship was still strictly professional, but she liked him a lot.

  The black Humber, which he had bought second-hand on returning to Britain, was a spacious, comfortable car, and the forty miles through Abergavenny and Brecon passed quickly. Richard had a set of Ordnance Survey maps for all the counties along the Welsh Marches, and with Angela as pilot they easily found the secondary road off the A40 that led to Cwmcamlais, the nearest hamlet to the farm that the detective sergeant had described.

  Beyond the empty rolling farmland, the profile of the Brecon Beacons lay on the skyline, and to the west the high ridges of Carmarthen Van and the Black Mountain could be seen from the higher points of the road. A little further on, a police constable was waiting at a small junction and, after the pathologist had identified himself, the officer climbed into the back of the car and directed them down the side lane.

  ‘Past the farmhouse, sir, then on for a bit and you’ll see the yard and buildings on your left.’

  A few moments later the Humber pulled in to the cluttered yard, where a police Wolseley, a blue Vauxhall and a small white Morris van were parked. A small group of men were standing smoking near the van but came across as soon as they arrived. Introductions were made all around before Arthur Crippen launched into an account of the incident.

  ‘Behind that big door, doctor, there’s a fellow lying dead with his neck under the back wheel of a tractor.’ He jabbed a finger towards the barn. ‘No doubt about who he is – it’s the mechanic who does most of the repair work. In fact, he’s a partner of the other two men.’

  ‘This is not just a farm, then?’ asked Richard Pryor.

  The DI shook his head. ‘They’ve got this business repairing agricultural machinery and implements. I suspect it’s paying better than actual farming these days, though they’ve got a fair-sized dairy herd.’

  He returned to his main story. ‘This chap, Thomas Littleman, was a bit of a boozer, it seems. Not the best of workers and, from what I gather, the other two from the farm, who are cousins, were not too keen on continuing the partnership. Anyway, last evening Aubrey Evans had a bit of a barney with him, as he was well behind in finishing a job on a tractor that had been promised for yesterday.’

  ‘Who exactly is Aubrey Evans?’ asked Angela.

  ‘He’s the senior partner; lives in the house and does most of the farm work,’ explained the sergeant. ‘The other one is his cousin, Jeff Morton, who lives in a cottage at Ty Croes and does some of the mechanical work as well.’

  Crippen picked up the thread of his tale once again.

  ‘Aubrey told Littleman that he had to finish the job last evening and that’s the last anyone saw him alive. They have a young chap as a sort of apprentice, who opens up the barn every morning. That’s him over there, name of Shane Williams.’ He jerked a head towards the youth, who was sitting on the tailboard of a Land Rover at the other side of the yard, aimlessly swinging his legs.

  ‘He opened up at seven today and found the body under the tractor. He raced up to the farm and raised the alarm. Bit of a shock for him, no doubt.’ Crippen’s long face looked even more mournful, and Richard sensed that he was sorry for the boy.

  They began walking across to the big corrugated door, which a constable began to push wide open for them.

  ‘Why are you concerned that it might be anything other than an accident?’ asked Richard Pryor.

  The detective shrugged. ‘Just covering all the options, doctor. It’s bloody odd that an experienced mechanic would stick his head under a jacked-up vehicle, unless it’s a weird sort of suicide.’

  With the door wide open and hooked back against the barn wall, full daylight now illuminated the scene. Richard and Angela stood a few yards away and looked at the inert body sticking out from under the big blue tractor.

  ‘We’ve taken photos, but if there are any others you want, just tell Jim.’ Crippen indicated one of the detective constables from the van, who had a large camera slung from his neck.

  Angela stood back, holding their case-bag while Richard Pryor crouched down alongside the corpse.

  ‘It’s safe enough. The tractor can’t drop any further,’ said DS Nichols, reassuringly.

  ‘When you’re ready, we’ll jack it up and get him out,’ added Crippen as the pathologist began feeling the dead man’s arms and legs for warmth and rigor mortis.

  ‘Has the police surgeon been?’ asked Richard.

  ‘Yes, he certified death. Said he was stiff then, so he must have died some
time ago.’

  Pryor examined the hands, then pushed up one of the loose trouser legs of the mechanic’s stained dungarees to look at his shin. This seemed to interest him, and he did the same on the other leg, taking a few minutes to repeatedly press his thumb into the purpled skin. Then he stood up and looked at the expectant faces of the small group gathered around.

  ‘I can’t do any more until we get him out, Mr Crippen. Are you ready to do that now?’

  The detective inspector nodded. ‘I’ve sent the cousins back to the farm. Best not to have them around if they’re possible witnesses for the coroner. Our chaps here can pull him out.’

  With a coroner’s officer, three detective constables acting as photographer, exhibits officer and a dogsbody, as well as a uniformed PC, there was no lack of muscle power. Within minutes one DC had dragged a trolley jack from the back of the barn and, pushing several of the fallen blocks out of the way, set it under the right-hand side of the back axle.

  ‘This will lift three tons, so no problem with an E27N like this,’ promised the DC, who was something of a tractor enthusiast.

  He pumped away at the long handle, and the hydraulic jack smoothly lifted the back end of the Fordson.

  ‘That’ll do it!’ shouted Crippen from the doorway once the big tyre had risen about nine inches from the floor. ‘Pull him well clear, lads. We don’t want any more accidents.’

  Richard gave Angela a look that, combined with the raising of his eyebrows, suggested to her that something was not quite right. However, he did not elaborate and watched as the policemen carefully lifted the body by its arms and legs and laid it gently on the tarpaulin a few yards from the tractor. Beneath the wheel where the head had been lying, the concrete floor was stained with blood, but there was not sufficient to leave a pool.

  The senior detective became aware that Shane Williams was still across the yard, staring fixedly at what the police were doing. He motioned to the only officer in uniform.