According to the Evidence

by Bernard Knight

  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.’

  He slid the photograph to one side and displayed a single sheet of typewriting, beneath an official letterhead that bore the logo of a crowned lion over crossed swords.

  Richard and Angela bent over the form with their heads almost touching and read through the somewhat terse report. The pathologist skipped the preliminaries, then read out the significant part aloud.

  ‘“The item submitted was a .45-inch-calibre bullet consisting of a copper jacket over a lead core. It was badly damaged from impact and had a discoloured streak on one side consistent with a glancing impact during its trajectory. Metallurgical analysis of this artefact indicated that it was an alloy of aluminium, containing copper, magnesium and manganese, commonly known as Duralumin.”.’

  Richard looked up at Bannerman and grinned. ‘Looks as if that clinches it, colonel!’ he said.

  Following a good lunch, Angela could not resist another hour’s delay for her to investigate Clifton’s main shopping street, where there were several smart boutiques. Her partner stayed in the hotel lounge, where he treated himself to a leisurely pint of bitter while he read The Times and the Telegraph. After they left Bristol, they were fortunate with the ferry at Aust and arrived back at Garth House before Moira and Siân had left for the day, both anxious to hear what had transpired.

  Deciding that this justified an extra cup of tea, Moira brought a tray into the staffroom and they settled down to listen to Richard’s explanation. He briefly recapped the story for Siân’s benefit, as she had not had Moira’s knowledge of the War Office call.

  ‘It’s all about the family’s claim that this warrant officer’s death out in the Gulf was either due to negligence or even might have been deliberate,’ he began. ‘There’s no doubt that the fatal shot came from his sergeant’s weapon during this practice assault in the fuselage of an old aircraft, but it’s the way he was shot that has given rise to all this controversy.’

  ‘How did the widow come to start this claim?’ asked Siân.

  ‘I suspect she went to a solicitor to see about demanding compensation and he started the hare running. He got a medical opinion but really didn’t understand what sort of expertise was needed. A hospital surgeon may know a lot about treating wounds, but he’s not the best person to decide how they’re caused.’

  Angela nodded her agreement. ‘I’ve seen this in the forensic science business – there are too many instant experts around. They know a bit about everything, but not enough about the issue in question.’

  Siân still looked dubious. ‘But you say that no one is claiming that the sergeant didn’t shoot the poor chap! It was his gun, so what’s the controversy about?’

  Richard took a Marie biscuit from the tea tray. ‘The widow, or rather her lawyer, is claiming that the shooting was deliberate, under cover of the exercise. The alternative is that it was caused by negligence on the part of the sergeant – and perhaps also by the army itself for having faulty procedures.’ As he bit into his biscuit, it was Moira’s turn to question him.

  ‘Why on earth should the sergeant want to kill him?’

  ‘Because it’s admitted that there was bad blood between the warrant officer and the staff sergeant. They had even come to blows not long before, over disputes about how to run the training programme and claims that the senior NCO was bullying the sergeant.’

  ‘So he took the chance to aim one of his shots in the wrong direction?’ summarized Siân. ‘It seems a damned dangerous business to me, firing off guns inside an aeroplane.’

  Richard shrugged. ‘War and fighting terrorists is a dangerous business. You can’t learn it from a book, that’s why the War Office hired these chaps to this place in the Gulf, to train their own fellows.’

  Moira wanted to get down to the denouement. ‘So how did you sort it out, Dr Pryor?’

  She was already proud of him, even though he hadn’t yet explained anything.

  ‘Having studied the original post-mortem report and the poor photographs, the medical expert the family had hired was convinced that the wound on the back of the head came from a direct shot at close quarters. He based this on the large size of the hole, claiming that a more distant discharge would have made a small round hole, but that because it was much bigger it must have been due to the gases from the end of the gun barrel bursting into the tissues.’

  ‘Is that right, doctor?’ asked Siân, determined to see fair play.

  Richard nodded. ‘Up to a point. The gun would have to be very close indeed, so that the hot gas blasts through the skin, hits the hard skull underneath and bounces back, splitting the skin. It can’t happen over soft areas, like the belly.’

  ‘So why do you disagree?’ demanded Siân, determined to be devil’s advocate.

  ‘There was no burning or propellant residue on the hair or skin which you would get with that close a discharge, though I admit straight away that if he had been wearing a bush hat covering that part of his head, it would have filtered off any of those signs.’

  ‘But they didn’t mention a hat in the Al Tallah reports, and no one there thought to keep the clothing, so we don’t know one way or the other,’ explained Angela, determined to get a little forensic science into the discussion.

  ‘So where’s the proof to the contrary?’ demanded Siân, doggedly. Richard thought she would have made as good a lawyer as she was a technician. He held up three fingers and ticked them off with the index finger of his other hand as he spoke.

  ‘First, the scalp wound didn’t look right for a gas burst. It was roughly oblong and the edges weren’t torn badly enough. There was a gouged slope at one end and I felt that the bullet hadn’t penetrated nose first but had hit sideways on. Second, there was no exit wound – the bullet hadn’t gone right through the head and was still resting against the inside of the skull on the left side.’

  He tapped his third finger as he made his last point. ‘And though badly distorted, the bullet had this pale streak down the one side.’ He held up a copy of the photograph that Bannerman had given him at lunchtime.

  ‘Those bullets have a copper jacket, but the laboratory confirmed that this pale stripe is mainly aluminium, with traces of other metals which make up the alloy Duralumin.’

  Siân and Moira looked blankly at their employer. ‘So what does that tell you?’ demanded Siân.

  Richard held up another photograph, a view down the length of the Dakota’s interior, with the foreground slightly out of focus but showing a double row of rather dilapidated seat frames, partly covered with the remains of ragged upholstery.

  ‘Nearly everything you see is made of aluminium alloy. It’s been shot up by repeated previous exercises, but the walls of the fuselage, stripped of their lining, are Duralumin, as are the seat frames. I’m convinced that one of the bullets fired by the staff sergeant must have hit a seat frame with a glancing impact and ricocheted away to hit Bulmer in the head.’

  ‘Why a seat frame and not the walls of the plane?’ asked Moira.

  ‘The skin
of the plane is so thin it would probably have gone straight through. The seats are much more substantial,’ he replied.

  ‘Does that fit with the nature of the wound?’ asked Siân.

  Richard Pryor nodded. ‘It explains it very well. The bullet would have been knocked off its direct trajectory and would probably have started tumbling, perhaps end over end. It hit the scalp sideways on, and even the scuffing at one end of the wound suggests that it was a tangential impact.’

  ‘Anything else?’ asked Moira.

  ‘The bullet didn’t go right through the head, probably because it had lost much of its energy by hitting the seat frame. Even high-velocity missiles like that can get stopped inside the skull if they strike the thick bars of bone in the base, but this one hadn’t done that. It just didn’t have enough momentum to break out at the front of the head.’

  ‘I suppose we should have excluded carbon monoxide in the tissues under the scalp,’ added Angela. ‘Though maybe the embalming would have obscured it if it had been there.’

  Siân pricked up her ears at this, as carbon monoxide estimations were part of her job. ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ she asked.

  ‘Where the gas from a close discharge is blown into the tissues, the carbon monoxide from the explosion in the cartridge combines with the blood and muscle in the tissues,’ explained Angela. ‘It persists a long time. I recall finding it in a case we had in the Met Lab six months after death.’

  Moira looked satisfied that Dr Pryor had proved his case. ‘So the sergeant didn’t deliberately shoot his boss!’

  Richard shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. He fired some rounds past the warrant officer at the dummies down the far end of the plane, but for some reason one bullet hit the top of a seat and went pinging off at an angle, tragically hitting the victim on the back of the head.’

  ‘So the poor widow won’t win her claim?’ said Siân rather truculently. ‘It seems a bit hard. Are you really sure about this?’

  Richard grinned at his technician’s crusading spirit. ‘Hold on. I’m not a judge or a court of law! I was asked to give an opinion on how that wound came about, and I’m quite sure that what I think happened, did happen. It’s not for me to say what is done with my opinion, but I reckon there’s no justification for suggesting that it was a deliberate attempt to kill the warrant officer. No one could arrange a ricochet that just happened to hit the poor guy!’

  ‘So she’ll get no satisfaction at all out of this?’ grunted Siân.

  ‘I didn’t say that, did I? It may well be that she can sue the War Office for employing a faulty, dangerous practice – though I suspect that Crown Indemnity might mean that you can’t sue the government, but I’m not a lawyer.’

  ‘What a stitch-up!’ exclaimed Siân. ‘That’s what we get for electing another Tory government this year!’

  Pryor sought to head off a political argument. ‘Hold on a minute! Bannerman, the chap from the War Office, mentioned to me at lunchtime that they would probably make an ex gratia payment to the widow, as a matter of good public relations. So she wouldn’t have to try to bring any legal action or start campaigning for justice in the Daily Mirror if the army coughed up a reasonable sum in addition to the pension she will get as of right.’

  This seemed to mollify Siân, and she joined in the general self-congratulations that the Garth House forensic consortium had triumphed once again.

  Richard finished his tea and got up. ‘Right, I’d better start writing a full report for the dear old War Office, so that Moira can type it up in the morning and get it off to London. It will mean a few more shillings to keep us all out of the workhouse!’

  TWENTY

  Siân had accompanied Angela and Richard to the inquest in Brecon, so it was tacitly agreed that it was Moira’s turn to have an outing to the Assizes when her employers were warned for the ‘veterinary case’, as it became known in Garth House. As a former clerk in a local lawyer’s office, she was not unaware of the archaic system of solicitors, barristers and Queen’s Counsel, but she had never experienced the almost medieval rituals and costumes of the English legal establishment and looked forward to her day in court with almost adolescent expectation.

  Richard had made another trip to Stow-on-the-Wold for a conference with George Lovesey and his junior counsel, Leonard Atkinson. Their colourful QC, Nathan Prideaux, had not been present as he was busy making a fortune in the London courts, but his junior was an able deputy.

  ‘Nathan will want another “con” with you on the day you go to Gloucester, Dr Pryor,’ he explained. ‘But I’m keeping him abreast of all the details we discuss here.’

  As well as this visit to Stow, where all the evidence was gone through in minute detail yet again, the solicitor was on the telephone several times to Garth House. Richard sensed that he was very anxious about the outcome of the case, as he told the others over a coffee break a few days before the trial was due to start.

  ‘Lovesey says that it will hinge almost totally on the conflict between the medical evidence. Even though it’s admitted that Samuel Parker was having a long-term affair with another lady, virtually all the rest of the evidence is circumstantial and not very convincing.’

  Angela put her cup down in its saucer, looking serious.

  ‘So it’s all down to the cause of death, then,’ she said soberly. ‘It’s a heavy responsibility for you, Richard, challenging the prosecution’s expert.’

  He shrugged. ‘All I can do is tell the truth as I believe it, based on this research about potassium,’ he said. ‘I can only provide the bullets for Nathan Prideaux; it’s up to him to fire them as effectively as he can.’

  The analogy with bullets reminded them all of the recent case in the Gulf, which ended in a sudden death. Another sudden death was a possibility if Richard’s hypothesis was not accepted, this time at the end of a hangman’s rope.

  ‘What will happen if you fail?’ asked Moira almost tremulously.

  ‘Our vet will be found guilty!’ he answered succinctly.

  ‘They won’t hang him, will they?’ asked Siân, a keen opponent of capital punishment.

  Again her boss shrugged. ‘Unless Prideaux could plead for clemency by playing the mercy-killing card, it seems very likely. It couldn’t be an accident and it can’t be manslaughter, so there’s only murder left. Unless some powerful mitigating circumstances can be dredged up, then a death sentence is almost mandatory.’

  ‘The poor man!’ whispered Moira, looking quite upset.

  ‘If he did it, then he should be found guilty,’ said Siân, stubbornly. ‘Though he should be locked up, not thrown down a hole with a rope around his neck!’

  Like the bullet analogy, this again recalled the Brecon farm murder, but Moira was casting around for some less awesome solution.

  ‘But what about manslaughter, doctor?’ she asked. ‘If she was already dying of cancer, surely that’s a factor.’

  ‘I’m not clear what’s murder and what’s manslaughter,’ added Siân.

  Richard looked across at Angela. ‘These ladies certainly ask some difficult questions, don’t they?’ he complained, but he did his best to answer them.

  ‘Look, I’m not a lawyer, but as far as I know, murder is when someone in their right mind unlawfully kills another, with the intention to either kill or seriously injure them. The death must follow within a year and a day of the attack. It’s the intention that’s the crucial factor, because manslaughter is where the first person kills another during some unlawful or negligent act but did not intend that to happen. There are all sorts of caveats about the definitions, but that’s the general idea for simple folk like me!’

  ‘So if he did inject potassium chloride into his wife, there’s no way he could plead manslaughter, unless he was so off his head that he didn’t know what he was doing,’ supplemented Angela.

  Richard was thankful that this explanation seemed to satisfy the two women, but they moved on to the logistics of the forthcoming trial. />
  ‘What will happen when they come to argue over the medical evidence?’ asked Moira. ‘Do you take it in turns to put forward your points of view?’

  Richard nodded. ‘The prosecution get first go, by calling their witnesses one after the other. The defence then cross-examine them and when the prosecution have finished, the defence have their turn.’ He paused and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘At least, that’s the usual batting order, but George Lovesey hinted that, typically, Nathan Prideaux may make an application to the judge to call witnesses out of order. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.’

  Moira looked at her boss with her big eyes. ‘Aren’t you nervous at having to stand up in an Assize Court in front of all those people and argue about things that might mean a man’s life?’

  He smiled at her reassuringly. ‘You get used to it – it happened often enough in Singapore; they get far more murders there than we do. The secret is not to chance your arm, just to stick to what you know without embroidering anything. If you don’t know the answer, just say so – not bluster or wriggle or exaggerate. If you do, the opposing counsel will nail you to the wall!’

  He said this with the slightly uneasy feeling that this particular case would be stretching medical science to the limit. But with Moira looking at him as if he was God’s gift to jurisprudence, he thought that he had better look as confident as possible.

  The following week the newspapers carried detailed accounts of the first day’s evidence from the Assizes in Gloucester, which had even attracted the notice of the national press. Like naughty vicars in the News of the World, a professional man such as a respectable veterinary surgeon became an object of prurient interest, especially when his neck was in jeopardy – particularly with the added bonus of a secret mistress in the background. The Garth House contingent were glad that the lady had not so far been named, as it seemed that both prosecution and defence, once both had admitted that such a woman existed, saw no particular advantage in identifying her.

  The Gloucestershire Herald, which covered the whole county including Stow and nearby Eastbury, quite naturally carried the most detailed account, a blow-by-blow record of almost every word that was said in the courtroom. That Tuesday morning, Siân bought a copy in Chepstow and brought it to the house, where it was pored over at coffee time.