According to the Evidence

by Bernard Knight

  Moira’s brow wrinkled in puzzlement. ‘I don’t understand this defence business. If they get a first post-mortem in a murder, then that doctor’s opinion is accepted, surely?’

  Richard Pryor put his mug of tea on the table, ready to lecture.

  ‘Don’t you believe it! There are almost as many different opinions as there are pathologists. Some of them have very strange ideas and some are just plain inexperienced in forensic work, being basically clinical pathologists in hospitals.’

  ‘Few forensic pathologists are free from strange ideas,’ commented Angela drily. ‘Present company excepted, of course!’ she added mischievously.

  He made a face at her and carried on with his explanation.

  ‘In most murders, either the defence gets an opinion from another independent pathologist who has read the first chap’s report or who has done another examination of the body himself, as I did a few months ago in that Swansea case.’

  ‘They had three PMs on that poor woman,’ observed Siân, critically.

  Now Moira entered the discussion. ‘In this Stow case, you said the defence already had a second opinion and they didn’t like it. Presumably, they’re hoping you will come up with a different view?’

  ‘That’s obviously the idea – but I may also agree completely with the first pathologist,’ replied Pryor. ‘It often happens that way, but at least it means that the accused has had a fair crack of the whip. Doesn’t always happen abroad; they have a different system on the Continent.’

  ‘So what have you arranged?’ asked the ever-practical Angela.

  ‘I’m going to see the solicitor tomorrow afternoon. Perhaps you’d like to come, Angela? There may be some forensic science angle to it.’

  The handsome brunette nodded. ‘I’ve never been to Stow-on-the-Wold. Here’s a chance for me, even if it is a homicidal visit, so to speak!’

  FIVE

  When Arthur Crippen and Sergeant Nichols drove down to the vehicle barn, they found two men talking to the constable left there on guard duty. They had met both of them before, as one was the liaison officer and the other a forensic scientist from the Cardiff laboratory.

  The first was Larry McCoughlin, a detective inspector seconded from the Carmarthenshire Constabulary who acted as a go-between when any police force needed technical help.

  The scientific officer was a short, rotund man named Philip Rees. ‘I hear Dr Bray was up here yesterday,’ he said. ‘She’s a well-known name in our business. We were all surprised when she resigned from the Met Lab.’

  Crippen explained that she had come up with the pathologist. ‘She was a bit embarrassed at being involved, but we were afraid of losing evidence if we delayed,’ he said.

  ‘No harm done. Your motorcyclist brought the samples down last night,’ said McCoughlin. He looked across at the barn, where the big door was now closed. ‘We’d better have a look around, I suppose.’

  As they went to the small side door, Arthur Crippen explained the circumstances and what the pathologist had found on the body. ‘Dr Bray suggested that the fibres she found on the neck may have come from a hemp or sisal rope. We sent the lengths that were knocking around the barn down to you last evening.’

  As the new arrivals surveyed the inside of the building, Dr Rees asked the detectives if they had all they wanted from the place.

  ‘Yes, we’ve got all the photographs we need, and the fingerprint boys were here earlier,’ said John Nichols. ‘We’ve bagged up all the clothes the four men were wearing that day, ready for you to take.’

  ‘That’s probably a waste of time, but I suppose you’ll have to look for some bloodstains and try to match those fibres,’ observed Crippen. ‘Though as those ropes have been knocking about here for years, I doubt they’re of much evidential value. Anyway, the place is all yours now.’ He waved a hand at the barn.

  The two men from the laboratory unpacked their kit and started on the scene, concentrating on the chain hoist and the area around the Fordson tractor. After watching for a few moments, Arthur Crippen decided that he and his sergeant would be better employed back at the farmhouse and left them to carry on.

  Seated once again at the parlour table, they called in Mostyn, the elder of the Evans family. He was a large man, but Crippen felt that he must have lost weight lately, as his wrinkled neck seemed too narrow for the collar of his flannel shirt. A thick thatch of iron-grey hair surmounted a big, craggy face, from which a pair of watery blue eyes looked out with disconcerting directness.

  ‘You farmed Ty Croes for many years, I understand?’ asked the DI, rather deferentially in the presence of this chief of the clan.

  ‘I was born in the room above this one and worked on the land here since I was about four years old, feeding fowls and herding sheep,’ he said proudly in a voice that would have earned him a place in the bass section of any choir.

  ‘And then you handed it on to your son and your brother’s lad?’

  Mostyn nodded, folding his large, veined hands placidly in his lap. ‘I lost interest when my wife died five years ago. The boys will get it all when I die, and they can work it until then. I still lend a hand when necessary, but after seventy-six years I reckon I deserve a bit of a rest.’

  Crippen gave an almost imperceptible nod to his sergeant, and Nichols took up the questioning. ‘I gather you weren’t all that keen on Tom Littleman becoming a partner in the machinery business?’

  Mostyn shook his leonine head. ‘It was alright for him to come here as a mechanic on a wage. I grant you, he knew his stuff where engines were concerned, but he started going downhill as a worker. The boys were daft to cut him into a share of the business. I warned them against him, but they would have their way.’

  ‘Why were you so against him, Mr Evans?’

  The old farmer considered this slowly. He rubbed his hands together and then stroked his bristly chin. ‘There was something about him from the first. He was an outsider, see, from up in England somewhere. Never fitted in here, always seemed to hold himself apart from us.’

  ‘I don’t quite follow you, Mr Evans,’ said Crippen. ‘Did he cause any trouble?’

  Again there was a pause, but shorter this time.

  ‘Only when his boozing started to interfere with his work. By then, it was none of my business – I’d given the place over to Aubrey and Jeff – but I warned them! We lost some customers over it, and we’ve got plenty of competitors. Not delivering on time is a serious business. These days since the horses went, a farmer without a tractor is worse than losing the use of his legs!’

  John Nichols was busy writing in his notebook, though more formal statements would have to be taken from everyone later.

  The detective inspector brought the questioning around to more immediate matters. ‘You know, of course, that Littleman was strangled and then an attempt made to cover it up?’

  The older man nodded. ‘Must have been somebody from his past – or his present! God knows what he was up to in Brecon after he left here every day.’

  ‘And you’ve no idea what that might have been? Did he ever let drop anything to you about his private life?’

  ‘Naw, did he hell!’ exclaimed Mostyn contemptuously. ‘Tight-mouthed bugger, he was!’

  The rest of the interview was barren of anything useful, and soon the father went back to the kitchen for another cup of tea and to discuss his interrogation with Aubrey and the others.

  Arthur Crippen stared out of the small parlour window across the muddy yard to the large milking parlour and the cow pen alongside it.

  ‘Like the woman, I reckon our Mostyn could tell us a bit more if he had a mind to,’ he said ruminatively.

  Nichols nodded. ‘I got the same impression. Think this Littleman was making a nuisance of himself with the two wives?’

  His superior shrugged. ‘It bears keeping in mind. We’ll be having another go at them later on. Now where’s that damned kid Shane. He’s the last one, until we start visiting the neighbours, wherever t
hey are.’

  As if in answer to his question, he saw a red David Brown Cropmaster drive into the yard, pulling a filthy muck spreader. The tractor itself was not much better, caked in mud and manure. It stopped near the cattle pen and the driver vaulted off, a lanky youth in soiled dungarees with a woollen bob-cap on his head.

  ‘Here he is. Better late than never,’ grunted Crippen.

  There was a short delay, obviously caused by Betsan forbidding the boy to enter the parlour in such a state. When he put his head around the door and hesitantly entered, he was in a check shirt and brown trousers, with only socks on his feet, his muddy boots having been confiscated.

  He sat nervously on the chair between the two police officers, his narrow, wary face regarding them suspiciously. He had an untidy shock of mousy hair hanging over his ears and neck. John Nichols, a former military policeman, grinned to himself when he thought of the National Service haircut that Shane would soon have to endure.

  ‘You’re waiting for your call-up papers, I hear?’ he said easily.

  The young man shook his head. ‘I’ve had me papers already. Got to go to Brecon Barracks at the end of the month.’

  This was where the regimental headquarters of the South Wales Borderers was situated.

  ‘Now then, lad, you were the one who found Tom’s body?’

  The DI made it more of a question than a statement of fact.

  Shane scowled. He had seen plenty of police films where the finder was always the main suspect.

  ‘That don’t mean I had anything to do with it,’ he muttered.

  ‘Not saying it was, Shane. I just want to get things straight for the record. Now the body was just as we saw it when we came later, was it? You didn’t touch anything?’

  ‘No bloody fear! I took one look and ran like hell to me bike!’

  ‘You worked with him every day,’ said the sergeant. ‘How did you get on with him?’

  Shane Williams suddenly became animated. ‘He was a bastard! I hated his guts!’ he snarled.

  Nichols raised an eyebrow at his inspector, but Crippen seemed unmoved.

  ‘Why do you say that, Shane?’ he asked softly.

  ‘He was always at me, complaining and shouting. Sometimes he pushed me around, when he’d had a few too many.’

  ‘Drunk, you mean? Was he incapable, sometimes?’

  ‘Not incapable enough not to clout me across the earhole if I didn’t fetch him something quick enough!’ whined the youth.

  ‘You were a sort of apprentice. Didn’t he teach you anything?’

  ‘Only how to keep out of his reach whenever I could,’ answered the boy cynically. ‘I learned bugger all about machinery from him. All I was was a gofer – go for this, go for that!’

  ‘What about when Jeff Morton was there? He did a lot of the mechanical work, didn’t he?’

  The young man sneered. ‘Tom was clever. He never had a go at me when Jeff was there. He could cover up his boozing, too, when either Aubrey or Jeff was around. They don’t know the half of it.’

  ‘Why did you stick it, then? Didn’t you complain to the others?’

  Shane seemed to pull himself more upright from his usual slouch. ‘Nah, I’m not a sneak! Anyway, I’m leaving the bloody place in a few weeks.’ He suddenly realized the changed circumstances. ‘That’s if I’ve still got a job here now – and that sod’s gone anyway.’

  Crippen fixed him with a steely eye. ‘Are you glad he’s dead, Shane?’ he demanded.

  The lad slumped again. ‘I hated his guts, but I never wanted him croaked,’ he mumbled.

  Sergeant Nichols changed direction once again.

  ‘You were with Littleman every day. Did you ever learn anything about his life away from the farm? Anything that might have a bearing on his death?’

  Shane stared suspiciously at the detective. ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Do you know what interests he had outside work, apart from drinking? Did he mention women, or gambling or anything like that?’

  An almost lecherous grin appeared on the youth’s face. ‘He was fond of the dames, I reckon. I saw him eyeing Betsan and Rhian when they happened to come down to the barn. That wasn’t often, but sometimes they were in the pickup or Land Rover with Aubrey or Jeff.’

  ‘Is that all? Just looking at them?’ snapped Crippen, but Shane just shrugged. Then he added another snippet.

  ‘I saw him in Brecon a few times, on the weekend, like. I used to go for a few pints with my pals sometimes and I saw him twice in one of the pubs, with women.’

  ‘Anything odd about that, then?’ asked Nichols.

  ‘It was a different girl each time, half his age and pretty tarty, both of them.’

  ‘What about gambling?’ asked the inspector, not too concerned with accounts of sitting in pubs with loose women.

  ‘He was mad on the pools, spent an hour every week filling them in. And he was always reading the racing news in the paper and marking things with a pencil, so I suppose he was having a flutter on the gee-gees or the dogs.’

  As they had with the other witnesses, the two officers got virtually nothing more out of him and Shane slouched off to his muck-spreading, as there was no work in the barn until the forensic team and the police had finished with the place.

  After yet another cup of tea and a slice of fruit cake supplied by Betsan Evans, the two detectives thanked the family for their hospitality but warned them that they would have to have their statements taken down and signed later that day.

  Back in their black Wolseley, Nichols drove down to the barn in time to see the two from the forensic laboratory before they left for Cardiff.

  ‘Not a lot to find, Mr Crippen,’ admitted the liaison officer. ‘We’ve taped all the parts that might be involved and found a few fibres on the hook of that hoist.’

  Dr Rees looked up from signing exhibit labels on the brown envelopes containing their samples and waved a hand at the interior of the barn, now exposed through the open door. ‘There’s so much junk in here, we can’t possibly cover everything. I suspect you’ll have a similar problem with your fingerprints. Probably everyone for miles around has left their dabs here.’

  When the laboratory men had packed up and left, Arthur Crippen sat with his sergeant in the car in the yard outside the barn, each having a quiet smoke.

  ‘Not much further forward, are we?’ complained John Nichols.

  ‘It’s got to be one of these on the farm,’ muttered the DI. ‘They’re not telling us everything – yet.’ He emphasized the last word in a menacing way.

  ‘So what do we do next?’ asked Nichols. ‘I can’t see the lab telling us anything we don’t know already.’

  Crippen flicked his cigarette end out through the window to join the others that were already squashed into the mud.

  ‘You’d better organize a house-to-house, I suppose. More like a farm-to-farm out here. Get a couple of DCs on to it, ask about any strangers knocking about, the usual routine – though I suspect it will be a waste of time.’

  The sergeant started the car and they began making their way back to Brecon.

  ‘I have to go and bring the DCI up to date,’ grunted Crippen. ‘Then have a look at Littleman’s lodgings.’

  ‘We sent DC Lewis around there last night. The address was in the dead man’s wallet and a key was in his pocket. He rented two rooms above that chip shop near the market.’

  The inspector sighed as he looked at the green countryside passing the windows. ‘This is a bugger of a case! It should be so simple, but I bet it’ll be hell to sort out.’

  ‘We’ve only got the pathologist’s word that it is a murder,’ observed Nichols. ‘I hope we’re barking up the right tree, so to speak!’

  ‘Pryor seems to know what he’s talking about,’ replied Crippen. ‘What else could it be? The guy couldn’t have strangled himself, then failed with a hanging, so then he laid down under a tractor and kicked the blocks away!’

  Grudgingly, the sergeant had
to agree.

  SIX

  Stow-on-the-Wold was an ancient town in the north-east corner of Gloucestershire. Filled with old buildings of Cotswold stone, it was redolent with history. Its churches, hostelries and public buildings owed their existence to its position at the junction of ancient roads and the prosperity brought by the wool trade, the backbone of English commerce through the Middle Ages. It claimed to have the oldest pub in England, going back to the tenth century.

  None of this was in Richard Pryor’s mind as he parked his Humber in Market Square. It was about sixty miles from Tintern, taking almost two hours to drive through Gloucester and Cheltenham, and he could kill for a cup of tea.

  ‘Time for refreshment, Angela,’ he announced, looking at his watch. ‘We’ve got half an hour before we see this chap.’

  They walked through the picturesque streets, between the old buildings of yellow-brown stone, and found a cafe of the ‘olde tea shoppe’ variety. He held the door open for his partner, who today was looking even more elegant than usual in a tailored grey suit with a narrow waist and a long pencil skirt. High heels and a small jaunty hat completed the picture, and he wondered if the solicitor would believe that she was a senior scientist of considerable experience.

  Angela saw him looking at her and correctly guessed what he was thinking. ‘Too dressy for the occasion, Richard?’ she said sweetly. ‘A girl’s got to put on the style now and then, after sitting for weeks at a bench squirting sera into tubes!’

  He grinned and, as they found a table in the window, pulled out a chair for her. ‘You look bloody gorgeous, partner!’

  Richard knew she was very keen on fashion and spent a lot of money when she had a shopping spree in Bath or London. He suspected that her well-off parents subsidized this, as certainly the income from Garth House in their first six months wouldn’t run to the outfit she had on today.

  ‘You don’t look too bad yourself,’ she countered, looking at the double-breasted charcoal suit that he used to attend court. ‘Since we ladies took you in hand and weaned you out of those awful safari suits you’re so fond of!’