The Thread of Evidence

by Bernard Knight

  ‘No, hang on a bit, we’d better get a photo first, before we shift them.’

  Whilst the photographer was doing contortions in order to get a record of the gruesome discovery, Pacey discussed its significance with the inspectors.

  ‘It’s getting to look nasty, isn’t it? What do you think about it, Morris?’

  ‘Must be murder, surely – no other reason for such an elaborate hiding place, and that’s apart from that saw cut.’

  Pacey rubbed his bristly chin.

  ‘Looks like it, I’ll admit. Certainly can’t be accident or suicide. And I can’t see anyone going to all this trouble just to get rid of a body that died of natural causes. The only point now is: when did all this happen? If this is some flaming Roman, or even mid-Victorian, corpse, it’s no concern of ours. The coroner can amuse himself with it, if he likes, but there’s no possibility of charging anyone if it’s older than, say, fifty years.’

  His train of thought was broken by an exclamation from one of the constables who was clearing the rubble beneath the ledge.

  ‘Something here, Super!’

  As the others bent down and focused their torches, the PC carefully removed a tarnished piece of metal from the pile of debris.

  ‘Looks like brass – yes, it’s the clasp of an old purse, sir.’ He displayed it on the palm of his hand, a bent strip of metal, hinged at each end, covered with a green coating of verdigris.

  ‘Watch how you handle it,’ ordered Pacey. ‘Sergeant, have you got another plastic bag?’

  While the find was being carefully wrapped, Morris moved some more small stones from the same area of floor.

  ‘Here we are, some more. Looks like finger bones. And here’s a ring, by damn!’

  Pacey watched him fish out a wide gold band. Immediately, his eyes were caught by more metal lower down in the hole that Morris had made.

  ‘And there are some coins, too. We’ve struck it rich this time!’

  He reached into the cavity and delicately picked out a coin, holding it by its edges.

  Pacey gazed at the corroded brown surface for a moment. Then he looked up at the faces of the other policemen, who were staring at him expectantly.

  ‘Well, we can forget our Romans – and our Victorians! This penny has the head of George V on it!’

  Chapter Four

  ‘This stuff is called “adipocere”. It’s near enough to being soap as makes little difference.’

  The speaker prodded the pallid fat of a disintegrating leg which was lying before him on an enamel tray.

  Professor Powell seemed to be enjoying himself. Apart from the rubber gloves on his hands, he looked more like a successful stockbroker having a chat at his club than a coroner’s pathologist at work.

  ‘What exactly does that mean?’ asked Charles Pacey, who was seated on the other side of John Ellis-Morgan’s consulting room desk. The little doctor had offered them the use of his surgery for the afternoon, so that the Home Office man could study the remains in comparative comfort. Leighton Powell began to explain:

  ‘It forms when the body is exposed to a lot of damp – the fats are changed to a kind of soap. This change is permanent, as far as I know. It lasts for many years, anyway – unless rats come and eat it, which is quite common.’

  Pacey looked a little disappointed.

  ‘So it doesn’t help to time the date of death?’

  ‘No, only that it must be at least a few months since death, it doesn’t happen in a shorter time than that.’

  Pacey looked with revulsion at the two decaying legs lying on the white tray.

  ‘I was hoping that the persistence of flesh meant that death couldn’t have taken place more than a short time ago.’

  ‘It isn’t really flesh,’ explained the pathologist. ‘It’s only the fat – the actual flesh has gone long ago.’

  The detective abandoned the subject and started on another.

  ‘Well, Professor, you’ve seen all the stuff we’ve got – and you’ve been up to the mine yourself. Everything we’ve found is on those trays.’

  He waved at another pair of white surgical trays belonging to the surgery, on which were heaped the polythene bags full of trophies from the shaft.

  ‘So if we could have a quick recap, I can get some sort of preliminary story ready for my chief constable. He’s expecting me to ring him at about four o’clock, to tell him what the situation is.’

  Pacey’s mind was flying ahead to this telephone call. He knew from experience that the chief, an ex-infantry colonel, would expect a detailed account of the day’s findings presented to him with military precision. In arriving at this summary for the police chief, Pacey was glad that he had such a sensible man as Powell to work with. He had known other pathologists who were either misleadingly dogmatic, or so woolly-headed that they could not be pinned down to any opinion, even if it was a firm ‘I don’t know’.

  ‘What do you want to know first?’ asked the professor cheerfully, polishing his glasses with a flourish of a dazzling white handkerchief.

  ‘All about that lot,’ requested Pacey, with a sweep of his great hand towards the heap of debris on the trays.

  ‘Right-oh. One body, as far as I can tell now. I’ll have to get the anatomy people to check on the small and broken stuff, but I don’t think there’s any duplication at all.’

  ‘How much is missing?’

  Powell pursed his lips. ‘Mmm, very little, really. All the limb bones are there, though some are broken. The skull, pelvis and most of the spine are there. Probably some ribs and toe and finger bones are missing. But that’s about all.’

  Pacey nodded and scribbled on a piece of paper for the benefit of Colonel Barton. Then he looked up.

  ‘The next thing is sex, Professor.’

  Leighton Powell almost giggled. ‘Yes; it usually is, Mr Pacey – even at my age. But seriously, that’s easy here. Definitely a woman. I’ll get the anatomy boys in Swansea to make dead sure. But there’s almost no doubt at all; it’s female all right.’

  ‘And what about her age, sir?’

  The doctor’s eyes twinkled above his chubby pink cheeks. He had a round, almost babyish face, with a shiny, scrubbed look about it, which extended up to his polished pink bald head.

  ‘Yes, Superintendent, that’s an Eleven-plus question, isn’t it! I can give you a definite age bracket now, but to narrow it down within that range will take a day or two. I’ll have to get X-ray and other things to get as near as I can to the actual year.’

  ‘And what’s your bracket, Professor?’

  ‘Definitely more than eighteen, and probably less than thirty-three.’

  Pacey’s face registered his disappointment. ‘That’s a pretty wide range, isn’t it?’

  Powell grinned at him. ‘We can do a lot better than that eventually, but I don’t want to mislead you at this stage. With X-rays and other dodges, we can get much closer than that. As it is, I’d put a couple of bob on her being somewhere in the middle or late twenties.’

  ‘That’s better,’ Pacey said grudgingly. ‘Now, what about her height and that sort of thing?’

  The Home Office man held up a thigh bone, the one found by the boys on the previous day.

  ‘She was five foot four, give or take an inch either way.’

  ‘How can you tell from just a leg bone?’ Willie Rees asked curiously. He sat on the examination couch, along with Inspector Meadows, the liaison officer from the Forensic Science laboratory in Swansea.

  ‘There are special calculations for it, worked out years ago from hundreds of bodies – one of these “double it and take away the number you first thought of” efforts! Again, I’ll have it checked by the anatomy department when I get back to the University. But five foot four will be pretty near her true height, I’m sure.’

  Pacey scribbled away on his pad before shooting the next question.

  ‘Now, sir, how long would you say that the body has been in the shaft?’

  Powell chuckled. �
�If you’d asked me that before you showed me those pennies, I’d have said that I hadn’t the faintest idea. But, as I’ve seen them, I’ll say thirty years!’

  Pacey grinned sheepishly in his turn. ‘I suppose I should have kept those up my sleeve, shouldn’t I? But seriously, what’s the medical angle on the time of death?’

  ‘Anything from two years to two hundred. I was going to say two thousand – but I think, on second thoughts, that they are too well-preserved for that. There is still a lot of organic matrix in the bones. They would be dry and crumbly if they were really ancient.’

  ‘Two years!’ echoed Inspector Meadows incredulously. ‘Can they get that bad in such a short time?’

  Powell nodded. ‘I’ve seen a body converted completely to a skeleton – clean as a whistle – in eight months. That was out in the open, I’ll admit, with bugs and birds and mice after it. But, even in a cave like this, I’d say it could happen in a couple of years. It was very wet there, remember, and there would be a lot of contaminated surface water seeping through from the ground not far overhead.’

  Pacey spread his hands out in an almost French gesture. ‘Well, as it happens, it doesn’t matter much – we’ve got all this other evidence. But can you say, Professor, that the state of the body is consistent with thirty years’ burial?’

  ‘Yes, quite definitely,’ Powell said firmly.

  ‘Any clue as to the cause of death?’ asked the superintendent.

  ‘Not a chance, Mr Pacey. All the organs and soft tissues have gone, except these bits of leg. No skin left – nothing. Unless there was a bullet hole in one of the bones, no form of violence would leave any signs on a heap of junk like this.’

  Pacey leaned forward and picked up the brown skull. ‘What about these holes in the top.’

  Powell brushed a speck of dirt from his city suit and smiled sadly.

  ‘Sorry, nothing doing. There’s nothing about those fractures that could tell me they were done before death. In fact, from the size and shape of them, I’d be inclined to say that they were due to a load of rock falling down on the head.’

  Pacey sighed and put the skull down.

  ‘Anything else you can tell me at present, sir?’

  Powell rubbed a palm over his bald head as though he were polishing it.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he said with studied care. ‘Even what I’ve said now is provisional, most of it. I’ll need a long session with the anatomy boys, and some time to myself back at the department, to clinch the facts.’

  ‘You’re taking all this stuff back with you this afternoon, then?’

  ‘Yes, all the bits of body, anyway. The other stuff is Inspector Meadows’ pigeon.’

  Pacey turned to the man from the Home Office laboratory, an oldish inspector with slicked-back white hair. His function was to act as the link between the scene of crimes and the actual scientific work. ‘I’d better get my story word-perfect for the chief,’ Pacey said wryly. ‘Otherwise, he’ll have me doing fatigues as if he was still running his damn battalion. Now, Meadows, what have we got there altogether?’

  The liaison officer went through his list and checked it against the collection of plastic bags, cellophane envelopes and glass jars, all of which were neatly labelled.

  ‘Clasp of an old-fashioned purse, no fabric left on it. Five coins – a florin, shilling and three pennies – all dated from nineteen twelve to nineteen twenty-seven. A narrow, plain gold wedding ring, with hallmarks.’

  Meadows paused while he peered through some of the bags to see what was inside.

  ‘Oh, yes, this is hair – in a devil of a mess, mixed up with mud and slime. But it looks brownish-red in colour.’

  ‘I’d like to have a look at a bit of that, if I can,’ asked the pathologist.

  Meadows handed him a small polythene packet.

  ‘You can have this, sir. I divided the hair into three lots.’

  ‘What else have you got?’ persevered the superintendent, being intent upon finishing his aide-mémoire.

  ‘This big bag has got parts of the skirt – looks like a skirt to me – linen, I would say. This one is the remains of a blouse. There are a couple of pearl buttons on it and a few lines of embroidered stitching.’

  Pacey scratched away in his notebook.

  ‘A couple of pieces of shoe in here,’ went on Meadows. ‘Pointed toe and a strap over the instep. No soles left, but they’d do all right for the styles of the Roaring Twenties, from what I remember of them.’

  Leighton Powell reached out for the bag and inspected the pathetic remnants of shoe.

  ‘Looks exactly like the blasted things my teenage daughter wears now – “winkle-pickers” they call ’em, don’t they?’

  ‘What’s in those little bags there?’ demanded Pacey. ‘I’ve lost track of where half the stuff was put.’

  ‘This one is a broken necklace; gilt-on-brass chain, by the looks of it. This one is a hair-clip, with another bit of hair still stuck in it – a definite reddish colour this time.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Um, just these. Three big wooden beads, pretty rotten, and half a dozen glass ones.’

  ‘And that’s the lot?’'

  ‘Yes – unless the boys up on the cliff have found any more by sieving the last of the muck on the floor.’

  Pacey looked at his watch.

  ‘Morris should be down soon. He said they would finish by half two, or three. Oh, I forgot one thing, Professor. What about the teeth? I seem to remember that they have been important in many identification problems in the past.’

  Powell looked ruefully at the detective.

  ‘They certainly are important – but this girl’s are a wash-out. Though if you ever get a possible candidate for this body, even the negative evidence might help.’

  ‘Why is it such a dead loss here?’

  ‘All the teeth that are left in the jaws are perfectly healthy – no fillings or extractions – so that it’s unlikely that any dental records exist anywhere to give a clue as to the owner.’

  ‘You said “the teeth that are left”. Where are the others?’

  The doctor shrugged.

  ‘God only knows – they’re missing from the sockets. They tend to come loose after death and fall out. Perhaps your men will find a few in their sieves, if we’re lucky – not that it will help much, unless there’s some dental work done on them.’

  Pacey looked at his watch again.

  ‘I’d better ring the Old Man, I suppose. I expect Miss Ellis-Morgan would let me use her phone to save me from going all the way over to the police house.’

  The burly policeman got up and went to the door. He turned and made a last appeal to the pathologist and laboratory man.

  ‘So there’s no more you can tell me? This is the skeleton of a woman in her middle, or late, twenties. No cause of death apparent, but one arm partly sawn through. The clothing, ornaments and coins suggest that she died in the nineteen twenties or early thirties. Is that right?’

  There was a murmur of assent and Pacey left the surgery to telephone the chief constable – who insisted upon being informed personally of any serious crimes in the county.

  Colonel Barton seemed to be quite impressed by the results of the first few hours’ investigation. Pacey was pleasantly surprised at the lack of searching questions which the ‘Old Man’ usually fired at him on these occasions.

  He went back to the surgery and helped Powell and Meadows to load the remains into the professor’s Jaguar, which stood outside the front door of Carmel House. The pathologist was taking Meadows back to Swansea and Pacey waited on the drive to see them leave.

  ‘I’ll let you know as soon as I get any more gen,’ Powell called through the window as he let in the clutch. ‘Probably be tomorrow afternoon.’

  The car moved off, the boot stuffed with the last mortal remains of the unknown young woman.

  Morris had not yet come down from the cliff with his digging team and Pacey decided to go up a
nd meet him. He looked up from the garden at the steep cliff path opposite and wished that he were a few stone lighter.

  With a sigh, he set off; but, as he reached the gate, a blue-uniformed figure came down the lane from the village, perched on a tall bicycle.

  PC Griffith squeaked to a halt in front of the detective, hopped off and saluted.

  ‘Excuse me, Super, I hope I’m not speaking out of turn. But, living in the village, like, I thought I’d better let you know.’

  Pacey stared at him. He had never met Griffith before that day, but had sized him up as a sensible, reliable man.

  ‘That’s all right. What’s on your mind?’

  Wynne looked a little embarrassed.

  ‘Well, it’s only village gossip, see, but the place is buzzing with it today. I should have known earlier, but I was up on the cliff all night.’

  Pacey nodded his understanding and waited for the police constable to come to the point. He knew only too well that no outside detective could know the feeling of the district as well as the bobby on the spot.

  ‘It’s the old people, sir. They’re putting the poison about. First I’ve ever heard of it, see – I was in my cradle when this happened.’

  Griffith leant over his handlebars towards the superintendent and spoke earnestly for five minutes.

  There was some discussion. Then he jumped back on to his ponderous machine and rode back towards the village, leaving a very thoughtful detective staring after him.

  Chapter Five

  In spite of Peter Adams being involved right at the outset of the affair, it was his uncle who heard the first accusing whispers from the village.

  Peter had stayed to lunch at Carmel House. If any of the doctors had picked up any scandal on their morning rounds, they kept it to themselves.

  By the time he got back to the cottage at teatime, he found that his uncle had had two callers, both of whom were assuming that Roland already knew of the gossip.

  The first was the postman, who went up with the late delivery. He was too young to have remembered the thirty-year-old scandal, but he had made up for it on his early round that morning.