The Thread of Evidence

by Bernard Knight

  ‘What about the Morning News now,’ she fretted. ‘You can’t possibly send any more copy to them.’

  It had already struck Peter that he could hardly report the rumours that the remains might belong to the victim of his own uncle’s violence. ‘It’s going to be difficult to get out of,’ he replied. ‘If I tell the editor that I can’t carry on because my family might be involved, he’ll have another chap down here like greased lightning. If I stop writing anything myself and the police give a statement to the other papers, I’ll probably get fired.’

  ‘Well, sweet, if the story has to come out, there’s no point in blocking your own paper – but it’s a difficult position, I’ll admit.’

  Eventually, he rang his office in Cardiff and spun a rather weak story about the police not wanting him to publish anything more, as he had been personally involved at the original finding of the remains. The sub-editor grudgingly accepted this and promised to send another man from Pembroke to see if the police had any further statements to make.

  ‘You’d better get back to your uncle, Peter,’ worried Mary later in the morning. ‘The police are sure to go there sooner or later, and it would be better if you were there as well when they come pestering old Roland.’

  ‘A hell of a fine holiday this is going to be,’ he said despondently as he kissed her goodbye and left Carmel House. He called in a couple of shops on the way home to buy bread and some cigarettes. In the first, he received some odd looks, but none of the usual small talk. In the little tobacconist’s, kept by a cheerful widow, he had a flood of sympathetic chatter, the gist of it being that it was a pity that the old folks hadn’t something better to do than make mountains out of a few silly molehills.

  Peter returned to the cottage in an uneasy mood, which was justified as soon as he entered the kitchen. The table still carried the breakfast dishes and his uncle sat immobile in his chair by the unlit fire. He gave no greeting as Peter came in, but slowly raised his head as his nephew came across to stand over him.

  ‘They’ve been already, boy.’

  Peter stared down at Roland. ‘Who have been?’

  ‘The police, boy – just after you left.’

  Peter dropped down into a chair facing the old man. ‘They seem to know a lot about Mavis already – as good as gave me the tip they know this skeleton is hers.’

  Roland’s voice sounded flat and resigned. Peter tried to reassure him as he had tried with Mary.

  ‘Look, they’re asking questions all around the village about anyone who went missing about that time. Naturally, they’ll come to ask you, as you were her husband. It doesn’t mean to say that they think you had anything to do with her vanishing.’

  Roland ran a hand through his bristly hair.

  ‘They as good as told me it was her, boy. Same height. Same age. She had red hair, as well.’

  Peter was shaken by this, but he tried to cover up his concern. He’d had no idea that the police had discovered that there was that much similarity between Mavis and the remains.

  ‘Nonsense, they were trying the old gag of trying to make you say something incriminating by pretending that they knew it all already,’ he said. ‘That old Pacey is trying on a bit of his detective “gamesmanship”. He wants to confuse and frighten you into saying something to incriminate yourself. But, as you’ve done nothing, he can’t succeed, can he?’

  Although unbeknown to Peter, he was fairly near to the truth, he felt none of the confidence that he tried to put into his words for Roland’s sake.

  ‘What’s going to happen next, boy? I’m worried sick. All the gossip. And now these questions and the proof they say they’ve got. What’s going to happen to me?’

  His voice rose and cracked in a sudden spasm of hysteria. Peter jumped up and laid a comforting hand on the old man’s shoulder.

  ‘Now look, take it easy. I’ll put some tea on and we’ll talk this over, quietly and sensibly. We both know that you had nothing to do with anybody’s death, so nothing at all can happen to you – nothing!’

  Roland sat trembling, his bony hands clenching and unclenching.

  ‘But what if it is Mavis? … I don’t know where she went that last day. It might be her, for all I know.’

  Peter raised a hand.

  ‘All right. All right. Say it is Mavis. I don’t think the police could prove it in a month of Sundays. But if it is – all right! It’s still nothing to do with you. You didn’t kill her, so you’ve got nothing to be afraid of.’ The old man muttered something that his nephew didn’t catch. Peter filled a kettle and put it over the flame of a bottled gas stove in a corner of the kitchen.

  Roland pulled himself together and shuffled over to get some cups and saucers together.

  ‘They scared me, boy,’ he said in a more normal tone. ‘Coming here like that, frightened me, they have. What had I better do? I’ve got a solicitor over in Aber, the chap that did the deeds of this house. Should I call and see him?’

  Peter shook his head. ‘No need, not yet anyway, until the police start bothering you a lot more seriously. They’re not accusing you openly of anything yet, and I don’t suppose they ever will. They know no more than all those gossips in the village. By this time tomorrow, I don’t mind betting that Pacey and his crowd will have found that the bones couldn’t possibly have belonged to Aunt Mavis. It’ll all die down and life will go back to being what it was before.’

  Roland made the tea and slumped back into his chair, hands clasped around his warm cup.

  ‘But what happened to her, boy, what happened to Mavis? She was attractive and bold. She could have been attacked and killed around here and hidden in the mine – but who would do a thing like that? Yet if it isn’t her body, who else could it be? I’ve churned it over in my mind so much that I sometimes think that it could have been me that did it and never remembered nothing about it!’

  Peter glared sternly at his uncle. ‘For goodness’ sake, don’t talk that sort of rubbish! That’s the kind of thing that will get you into trouble.’

  Roland began rocking in his chair again, a sure sign of his agitation.

  ‘But who else can it be, boy, who else?’

  Peter was stumped for an answer and Roland pressed home his point. ‘They must know how long the thing has been there, near enough, or they wouldn’t have come bothering me. And no one – no one at all – disappeared from Tremabon in all the time I can remember, except Mavis. And if it is her, did I put her there? … did I do it, boy?’

  Chapter Eight

  While Peter and his uncle sat worrying, Pacey was again turning the archives of Aberystwyth police station upside down and Willie Rees was on his way to Liverpool. Another part of the drama was being played out in the serene buildings of the University at Swansea.

  In a large first floor room, overlooking the park and the sweep of the bay, the furniture had been pushed back to the wall. Two senior members of the medical school staff squatted on the floor, like boys with a toy train set.

  Instead of miniature rails and trucks, they had a white sheet spread on the parquet floor. This was covered with a bizarre jigsaw of bones.

  Leighton Powell watched his companion put a small piece into position. ‘That’s the last one, Tom. How does it look from up there, Inspector Meadows?’

  The police officer from the Forensic Science laboratory stood against a bench near the window. He was watching the antics of the two on the floor with obvious interest.

  ‘Pretty good, sir. I’d say it looks as near to complete now as makes no difference. Do you want it photographed now, or are you going to do any more to it?’

  Dr Tom Mitchell, the anatomist, whose room this was, climbed to his feet and stood looking critically at his handiwork.

  ‘I’ll have to shuffle them about a bit first, to allow for the cartilage of the joint spaces. That should give us the exact height then. What do you think of it, Leighton?’

  The bald-headed forensic expert hauled himself off the floor and dusted dow
n the knees of his suit as he looked at the grinning skull and loosely arranged bones on the sheet. As Meadows had said, the skeleton looked perfectly complete, the only odd feature being the thick, waxy flesh on the legs.

  ‘Yes, it looks OK,’ he replied. ‘We may as well check our fancy calculations of the height by a direct measurement, I suppose.’

  The tall, thin anatomist began arranging the bones with minute precision. He separated the rusty brown pieces one by one, starting at the neck, where the spinal bones joined the skull. The genial professor explained to Meadows what Mitchell was doing.

  ‘The idea is to allow for the thickness of the gristle between the vertebrae of the spine and the cartilage in the knee and hip joints. We’ve already calculated what her height should be during life, by applying special formulae to individual bones, especially in the leg. But it would be nice to check the answer by putting the bones in their “living” position and then running a tape measure over the whole lot.’

  ‘Wouldn’t that be the best way, in any case?’ asked Meadows.

  Leighton Powell pursed his lips. ‘Not necessarily. It’s difficult to get the bones to lie on a flat surface in the way they do in the body. The spine has three curves, more marked in women. You can’t always reproduce that accurately with a heap of loose bones. But the main use of the calculation method is when only a part of the skeleton, or even only one bone, is available.’

  Tom Mitchell straightened his own back for a moment and added his explanations. ‘More often than not, there are bones missing all over the skeleton. We’re unusually lucky with this one in having nearly all of it to play with. Years ago, some anatomists made accurate measurements of hundreds of bones and made up formulae for each one – so that, now, we can get an estimate of the owner’s size from any limb bone.’

  Powell nodded as Mitchell settled back to his jigsaw.

  ‘Naturally, the more bones there are available, the more accurate we can be – by taking the average of a lot of calculations.’

  Meadows looked curiously at the anatomist as he carefully spaced out each bone from its neighbour.

  ‘I see – he’s allowing for the soft tissue that’s rotted away.’

  ‘That’s it. Each intervertebral disc – the things that “slip” in your back – is about a quarter of an inch thick. So he’s spacing the bones that far apart.’

  Mitchell came slowly upright again, holding his own back with one hand. ‘I think I’ve dislocated one of mine in the process. I’m getting too old for this stooping game. It’s worse than weeding the garden.’

  ‘Let’s have a go. You’ve done it all except the legs.’

  The professor knelt on the edge of the sheet and finished off the lower limbs. He placed the long leg bones in position, including the one that the small boy had found.

  The anatomy lecturer looked thoughtfully at the finished job for a moment, then nodded his approval.

  ‘Right, Leighton, let’s run the tape over her. Will you hold one end level with the top of the skull?’

  They held a metal rule over the skeleton and read off the length.

  ‘About five foot four, I make it,’ said Mitchell. ‘Dead on, eh? That’s what the calculations said.’

  Powell grinned, his pink face boyish in spite of his middle age and morbid profession. ‘Be damned queer if it wasn’t, Tom. Guessing the height of a complete body is as easy as stealing a blind man’s stick.’

  ‘I can get my photographer up now, can I?’ asked Meadows. ‘He should be down in the entrance with his stuff.’

  The police photographer duly arrived, loaded down with bags and a massive tripod. While the skeleton was being put on film, the other three went over to Mitchell’s littered desk to look at some other photographs that Powell had brought with him.

  ‘These were taken yesterday with a low-powered microscope,’ he explained. ‘They show the saw cuts on the arm bone in close-up.’

  The glossy prints were passed between the men. They showed the surface of the humerus of the skeleton, with the area of attempted amputation greatly magnified.

  ‘The main one goes about halfway through the bone,’ explained Powell. ‘And, just below it, there is a smaller slot which I presume was a false start before the main cut.’

  Meadows studied the picture magnified the most.

  ‘You can see the scratches from the saw teeth on the walls of the slot in this one,’ he commented.

  ‘Yes, they seem very close together,’ agreed Mitchell.

  ‘What about this false start – any special significance in that, Professor?’ asked Meadows.

  ‘No, I don’t think so – just a failure to hold the saw in the first cut tightly enough. Once it slipped out, the soft tissues would obscure the hole and stop him putting the saw blade back in the same place.’

  ‘The blade seems to be about a sixteenth of an inch wide – what sort of tool would that be, I wonder?’

  Meadows looked at his own print closely. He felt more at home talking about saw blades than about bare bones. ‘Yes, I noticed this on the bone itself,’ he said. ‘It could well be a hacksaw with fine teeth like this.’

  Powell agreed with the inspector. ‘I think that’s very likely, though it’s a bit thicker than the little hacksaws I’m accustomed to using.’

  ‘You can get many different types, sir; we see them in our burglary cases. The type of cut depends on the number and spread of the teeth, as well as the thickness of the blade.’

  The photographer finished taking his pictures and came across the room to ask if there were any more to be done.

  Mitchell looked at the pathologist questioningly. ‘What about the skull? Shall we have a couple of that for a go at superimposition, if the opportunity ever arises?’

  Powell agreed again. ‘We can have a picture of that hole in the skull and the teeth at the same time.’

  ‘What about that hole, sir – any ideas on what it means?’ asked Meadows.

  Powell looked dubious. ‘I’ll never be able to get up in court and say that it was caused before death. It could just as easily have happened when the roof fell in on her.’

  The pictures were taken and the photographer struggled away with his apparatus.

  ‘That’s about all I can do for you now, I think,’ said Dr Mitchell. ‘I’ll pack this lady up in a box for you to take away.’

  To save tedious rearrangement in the future, he slid the vertebrae onto a length of rubber gas-tubing and secured each end with a safety pin. The big bones he put in separate plastic bags; and the hands and feet also had a bag apiece.

  After thanking the anatomist for his help, Powell and Meadows carried their trophies of the chase downstairs. They drove in Meadows’ car across the college grounds to the pathology institute, which held the Department of Forensic Medicine.

  Here, in Powell’s room, they dumped the bones and concentrated on something else.

  The professor unlocked a drawer in his desk and took out two small polythene envelopes.

  ‘Here’s some of the hair that was found,’ he explained. ‘This lot here is as it was found, and the other has been cleaned. I’ve had them in my possession all the time, just for the record of continuity of evidence. I’m handing them back to you now. All right? We don’t want some smart alec of a defence counsel taking the mickey out of us if it ever gets to court – which God forbid!’

  Meadows held up the two transparent packets to the window. He studied them with interest. The liaison officer was a careful man, whose long experience was made all the more valuable by a great deal of common sense and quiet enthusiasm for his job.

  ‘There’s certainly a marked difference in the colour of the two samples. What did you do to this one?’ He held up the bag of cleaned hair.

  ‘Just got rid of the years accumulation of mud and slime,’ replied Powell. ‘I washed them in an alcohol-ether mixture, and they came up like new – as the TV detergent adverts say! I’ve got a couple of strands mounted on a slide, if you’d l
ike to see them.’

  He went to a bench and switched on the lamp of a binocular microscope which stood there. He fiddled with the controls for a moment before beckoning to Meadows.

  ‘There, have a look at that. A nice auburn colour, though you can see the true tint better in the hand. I always feel that the microscope makes hair look blonder than it really is.’

  As with hacksaws, Meadows felt more at home with hairs than with bones. Fibres of all sorts were frequently sent to the forensic laboratory, being common clues after crimes of violence and robberies. He studied the golden- red strands for a moment.

  ‘No doubt about this being human, I suppose?’

  ‘Looks all right to me,’ answered the professor. ‘The size, cortex and scale pattern are all OK. One odd thing, though. There are no roots at all. Nor remains of hair bulbs.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Every end that I’ve seen has been either a frayed or cut one. Many of the hairs are cut at both ends – so it looks as if the hair was severed from the scalp before burial.’

  Meadows looked puzzled. ‘That’s more than a bit odd, eh?’

  ‘I don’t know. If the killer went so far as to try to cut an arm off, he might have thought of removing the hair as well, to make identification more difficult. Though why he should have put it back with the body is beyond me.’

  ‘Is it cut at the scalp, do you think, or just anywhere?’ Powell waved one of the plastic bags at Meadows.

  ‘Some of this hair is a good eight inches long, so I’d think it was almost the full length. As far as I can remember, women used to have fairly short hair styles in the twenties and early thirties. Didn’t they call it “bobbed” or something?’

  ‘What about the roots in the scalp? Wouldn’t they survive if the actual hair did?’