Then he left her to go up to her room upstairs and listen to her radio, while he put together a draft report for George Lovesey, the solicitor in Stow-on-the-Wold.
NINE
Next morning, a rather damp Friday, he went off early to deal with the post-mortems at Monmouth and Chepstow, each a few miles away at either end of the Wye Valley. All were straightforward natural deaths, but because of their sudden nature the family doctors were unable to sign a death certificate and they had to be referred to the coroner. Richard was back at Garth House by late morning and decided to phone George Lovesey to arrange a meeting, as time seemed pressing.
‘I’m glad you rang, doctor,’ said the lawyer. ‘I was going to contact you to see if you could attend a pretrial conference with our counsel tomorrow morning. I know it’s a Saturday, but Nathan Prideaux is at the Old Bailey every weekday.’
On the principle that the customer is always right, Richard Pryor readily agreed, especially as he discovered that the meeting would be in Gloucester, much nearer than Stow.
‘Our junior counsel has his chambers in Gloucester, so it would be a convenient place to meet,’ went on Lovesey. ‘We had to change our QC only a few weeks ago, as the original one will be tied up in another trial in Winchester. Nathan Prideaux is very well spoken of as a defence counsel, so I hope we can find him some ammunition to use.’
Richard had been going to see his parents on Saturday morning, but it was only an hour’s drive to Merthyr Tydfil, so he could go later in the day. His father was a retired family doctor in that historical industrial town and it was where Richard had been born and went to school. He liked to spend a weekend there fairly often, to be fed by his mother’s massive meals and to make up for the long years during the war and afterwards in Singapore, when he had hardly seen them at all.
Angela was also going off that afternoon to see her family in rural Berkshire, where she could relax in what Siân covertly called her ‘hunting, shooting and fishing’ lifestyle.
Richard decided that in the morning, he would leave a message and his father’s telephone number with the forensic laboratory in Cardiff in case there was a call-out. To the best of his knowledge, none of the other pathologists on the Home Office list were away, so he thought it unlikely that he would be needed anywhere over the weekend.
Such thoughts are only a temptation for fate to confound them.
That same morning Detective Inspector Crippen and his sergeant were back in the caravan at Ty Croes. The hold-up at the building society the previous day had been solved within an hour, when a Brecon constable had grabbed the youth as he came out of a nearby betting shop after placing his stolen thirty pounds on a no-hoper horse.
Now they got back to their interviews, and Aubrey Evans was the first to be called. One look at his face told Crippen that his wife had made her confession. His first words made this abundantly clear.
‘I wish to God that bloody man had never set foot in this place!’ he growled bitterly. ‘He’s brought nothing but trouble on us.’
‘I gather that your wife has told you what happened, Mr Evans,’ said Arthur, quite softly. ‘You must realize that it puts a different complexion on this death, with a possible motive now on the cards.’
Like Rhian the day before, Evans was truculent rather than apprehensive. ‘Listen, inspector, my main concern is what happened between Betsan and that bastard. I don’t really care about your motives, though I can’t see what our personal problems have to do with anything.’
‘I’ve only your word that you didn’t know about it before this,’ retorted Crippen. ‘You might have revenged yourself on him and got rid of a drunken partner at the same time.’
‘Nonsense! Prove it, that’s what I say. You can’t, because it didn’t happen like that.’
‘Then how did it happen, Mr Evans?’ asked John Nichols.
Aubrey rounded on him. ‘You’re the detectives – that’s up to you to find out. I don’t give a bugger what you do or say. I’ve got too many troubles of my own, thanks to you for meddling in my family affairs.’
‘I think it was Tom Littleman who did the meddling, Mr Evans,’ snapped Crippen. ‘Now let’s go through the whole matter again.’
Minutely, but uselessly, he was grilled as to his movements on the relevant day and the following night and morning, but the farmer admitted nothing and stuck to the story he had given days earlier. At the end of it, Crippen told him he could go but that he would probably be interviewed again, next time at the police station in Brecon.
‘I’ll not say another word without my solicitor being present – nor will my wife,’ growled Aubrey. ‘You’ve got it all wrong, Inspector. Yes, I hate that man’s guts now a hundred times more than I disliked him before, but that’s as far as it goes!’
He stomped out and left the two CID men time for another Player’s Navy Cut while their constable went to find Jeff Morton.
‘Do you fancy him for it, John?’ asked Crippen ruminatively.
The sergeant shrugged. ‘He makes no bones about his dislike of Littleman, even before this revelation about his wife. I think he’s a hard man. He could have attacked the victim in a temper, maybe after a flaming row, then thought up this elaborate scheme to conceal it.’
‘But that surely would happen only after he’d found out that Littleman was having it off with his wife – and he denies that pretty strongly, as does Betsan.’
Nichols grimaced. ‘They could both be lying. It’s not something anyone wants to own up to.’
Crippen stubbed out his cigarette in the tin lid that served as an ashtray. ‘Here’s the other one coming. Let’s see what he’s got to say about it.’
Sitting in the chair opposite Crippen, Jeff Morton presented a very different picture from the cousin who had just left. He was subdued and frightened, the pallor of his face making the livid birthmark on his face all the more prominent in contrast.
‘I need a smoke!’ were the first words he uttered. His trembling hands pulled out a small tin box, from which he rolled his own cigarette. The inspector waited patiently until the man had lit it with a brass lighter, then started his questions.
‘Do I gather that you have had a certain discussion with your wife over a personal matter?’
Morton looked at the police officer as if Arthur was a poisonous snake about to strike. ‘Yes, and I can’t really believe it,’ he muttered.
‘Are you sure you didn’t know before this? Or even suspect it?’
The man hunched down even further into his stained mechanic’s overall. ‘Of course I didn’t. I still can’t believe this is happening.’
‘Have you spoken to your cousin about what’s happened?’
The inspector put the question in that way, as he wasn’t quite sure if telling a man that his cousin’s wife had been unfaithful might be some breach of confidence, murder investigation or not. However, Jeff’s reaction removed any possible problem.
‘I can’t believe that, either. Betsan, of all people!’ Then he seemed to realize that his own wife was even further beyond his belief.
‘Perhaps you discussed it with him a long time ago!’ cut in John Nichols, performing his bad cop role. ‘Perhaps you both knew and decided to settle scores with Tom Littleman?’
This accusation seemed to restore some mettle into Morton’s backbone. He sat up and agitatedly crushed his wrinkled cigarette into the tin lid.
‘What are you trying to say?’ he said in a strangled voice. ‘For Christ’s sake, you can’t think that Aubrey or I had anything to do with it!’
‘You had good motives, both of you,’ accused Crippen. ‘The man seduces your wives, you already disliked him for being a drunk and an unreliable worker – and you wanted to get rid of him as a partner, which he refused. People have been murdered for far less than that!’
‘And two of you would make this elaborate killing a lot easier,’ added the sergeant remorselessly. ‘Though I suppose at a pinch either of you could have done it alone. He
wasn’t much of a match for strong fellows like you.’
Morton stared at the two officers as if they had suddenly taken leave of their senses. ‘This is madness! Of course we didn’t kill the bastard, much as I’d have liked to more than once.’
Then he again rallied and, as if he had been coached by his more resolute wife, he repeated his cousin’s declaration that he refused to answer any more questions unless his solicitor was present.
The DI ignored this, and in a more matter-of-fact tone went on to rehearse with him all the details of Morton’s movements on that fateful day and night.
The answers were the same as before, and with some frustration Arthur Crippen let him go after a further quarter of an hour’s fruitless interrogation.
As Morton stumbled out of the caravan, they saw Aubrey Evans and his father waiting for him across the yard at the door of the farm. Aubrey put an arm around Jeff’s shoulder to lead him inside, but the sergeant called across to the older man.
‘Mr Evans! Mr Mostyn Evans, could we have a word with you now, please?’
The older man looked across. As his son and nephew vanished into the house, he began to walk slowly across to the caravan. Crippen watched him coming through the window and saw that in spite of his big frame he looked much more gaunt than when he was interviewed a few days earlier. When he came in and sat down, Arthur saw sadness and despair on his face.
‘This is a terrible business – terrible!’ were his first words. ‘I can hardly credit what’s happened to Ty Croes. Seventy-six years I’ve lived here and this is the saddest day of my life.’
The lids below his blue eyes had a red rim, and his cheeks seemed more sunken than before. He blew his nose on a large red handkerchief and sighed. ‘So what d’you want with me, officer?’ he asked resignedly.
‘I assume you’ve been talking to your son and nephew about certain personal matters?’ said Crippen.
‘If you mean hearing that that evil little swine Littleman had been having his way with Betsan and Rhian, yes, I’ve heard about it,’ he said with sudden savagery.
‘Are you sure you had no inkling of this before they told you?’ persisted the inspector.
‘Of course not! If I had, I’d have kicked the sod’s arse all around the farm before throwing him out into the road – partner or no partner!’
‘You never approved of him, I gather?’ asked the sergeant.
‘At first, I had no reason to think one way or the other. He seemed to know his stuff with vehicles and machinery. It was a great mistake later to let him have part of the business, but we didn’t realize then that he was fast becoming a drunken sot. And how could we know that he was going to turn into a seducer?’
‘You never saw him with either of the wives?’
Mostyn Evans shook his head. ‘He must have been damned careful, the bastard! Only played away when the girls were well off the farm.’
He shook his head as if to fling off images in his mind. ‘They had a day off now and then, to go to Brecon or even down to Swansea. There was the car, the Land Rover or the pickup they could use. That’s when it must have happened.’
‘You live with your son and daughter-in-law in the farmhouse?’ asked Nichols.
‘Yes. I was born there and will probably die there. I don’t get under their feet, I’ve got a couple of rooms upstairs at the back.’
‘You didn’t see much of Littleman, then?’ asked Crippen.
Mostyn shook his head, wiping his face again with the red handkerchief. ‘No occasion to, thank God. He knew I didn’t like him, and the feeling was likewise. I help out a bit at the farming, mostly driving our new Fergie T-20, an old man’s privilege. But I rarely had cause to go down to that damned barn where Littleman was.’
There was a silence while the sergeant caught up with his writing and Arthur Crippen gathered his thoughts.
‘You realize that this was a murder, Mr Evans,’ he said at last. ‘The most serious of offences, one, as the law stands now, with a capital penalty at the end of it?’
The old man stared at the detective as if he failed to understand his meaning.
‘We are almost convinced that it was committed by someone living at Ty Croes,’ went on Crippen. ‘If you have any reason to think it was an outsider, for your family’s sake say so.’
John Nichols picked up the questioning. ‘Did you ever see any strangers hanging around the farm – or even nearby on the roads? Anyone who came to talk to Littleman, for instance?’
Mostyn looked from one officer to the other. ‘I told you, I hardly ever went down to the workshop, so I wouldn’t know who talked to that bastard. As for strangers, I don’t recall any, apart from some delivery men, though we know most of those. And, of course, our farming friends came, plenty of those – and customers having mechanical jobs done, they’d come up here to pay Aubrey or Jeff. Sure there were plenty of visitors, but we know almost all of them in a rural place like this!’
His shrewd eyes seemed to lose their former worried vagueness, and he fixed Arthur with a penetrating stare.
‘You’re trying to tell me that you think one of the boys did it, aren’t you?’ he growled. ‘That either my son or my nephew is a murderer and that they might be arrested and might end up on the gallows! Is that it?’
Crippen held up his hands, palm up in an almost French gesture. ‘A murder has been committed. Someone did it, and they will eventually be caught and arrested. I can tell you now that a decision will be made in the next day or two whether to call in Scotland Yard. If they come, then I can promise that this place will be turned upside down again and that the level of questioning will be a lot harder than ours.’
He stood up and looked down at the father figure of the farm.
‘If you have any influence with the others here, please use it to suggest that if they have anything else they want to tell us, now is the time to do it. If there are any circumstances that might excuse what happened to Tom Littleman, this is the last chance.’
Mostyn Evans hauled himself to his feet and straightened his back, giving him an extra inch over Crippen.
‘I’ll do whatever I can, officer. You can depend on it.’
He went out into the yard and walked with a new determination across to his house.
TEN
After Angela left for Berkshire in the late afternoon, Richard found himself alone in Garth House. He spent a hour in his study, looking at some of the microscope sections that Siân had prepared for him from post-mortems during the past week, then went outside to ‘walk his broad acres’, as he liked to think of it. He had never owned any land before or even a house, having spent his life either in hospital accommodation, an officers’ mess or, in Singapore, in a rented apartment. Though the house and four acres was technically the property of the partnership, he still had a proprietorial feeling towards it and enjoyed ‘potching about’ on the sloping ground behind the house. At the end of September, though the evenings were starting to draw in, there was still broad daylight for him to examine the two long rows that Jimmy Jenkins had prepared for those elusive vines, which still had not arrived from the nursery in Sussex.
Jimmy had hacked off the coarse turf with a spade, then turned the soil with a small motor cultivator, a gadget like a lawnmower with rotating blades on either side. As he walked the length of the two rows of churned soil, he heard the roar of a motorcycle coming up the steep drive. A few moments later Jimmy appeared lugging a sprayer which he kept in a shed alongside the coach house.
As usual, half a cigarette dangled from his lip as he approached.
‘You’re working late, Jimmy. What are you going to do?’
The gardener-handyman put down the yellow tank and started pumping the handle on top to raise the pressure.
‘Got an hour before the darts match down at the Swan, doctor,’ he informed Richard. ‘Thought I’d give that patch a dose of weedkiller before you puts in them vine plants – if they ever come.’
They talked for a fe
w minutes about the weeds and couch grass that were already appearing in the tilled soil. ‘They’ll choke your bleeding grapes unless you keep them down,’ he warned.
Richard was pleased that Jimmy was at last reconciled to a vineyard and had given up his campaign for strawberries.
‘Where did you learn that about vines?’ he asked curiously.
The other man looked a little sheepish. ‘I saw that book you had in the kitchen, when I was in having a cup of tea with Moira the other day. Quite a few good tips, there was!’
Pryor suspected that this was the first time Jimmy had ever read a word about horticulture of any sort, having learned all his lore from half a century as a countryman – but he was pleased that he was now taking an interest in Richard’s pet project.
He watched as Jimmy slung the spray tank on his shoulder and began walking alongside the long ribbon of bare earth, spraying it from the nozzle on the end of the hose. He stopped at intervals to pump up the pressure, needing a couple of passes to cover the width, before taking the device back to the shed.
‘There’s a bottle of beer in the pantry, if you want to wet your whistle,’ offered Richard. There was an old bench outside the back door, and the pair of them sat comfortably in the evening light to empty a flagon of Rhymney bitter between them.
‘Must be a bit different here to Singapore,’ said Jimmy.
‘Damned sight cooler, though you get used to the heat,’ replied the pathologist. ‘I had three years in Ceylon and that was much the same, hot and damp.’
The gardener reached across to top up Richard’s glass. ‘In the army, was you? See any action out there?’
Pryor grinned. ‘Not the military sort, no. I was in an army hospital there, and when we took back Singapore I was posted there to help get theirs up and running again. The Japs had played hell with it, including a massacre of patients and staff.’
He took a long satisfying drink. ‘Were you ever in the forces, Jimmy?’
According to the Evidence Page 10