The Thread of Evidence

by Bernard Knight

  ‘Oh, it would be impossible to find the roots once the flesh of the scalp disintegrated. They would be a tiny fraction of an inch long and would vanish in all that muck and rubble around the body.’

  Meadows collected the packets of hair and prepared to leave.

  ‘So we’re definitely looking for a red-haired woman, five foot four in height, between twenty-two and thirty years of age, sir?’ He asked this as he was going through the door of the professor’s room into the corridor.

  Powell walked slowly with him to the lift. ‘Yes, I think that’s a fair description. As near as we can get it without being misleadingly accurate, anyway.’

  ‘How can you be so definite about the age range, just from looking at the bones?’

  ‘Well, a person grows by adding calcium compounds – chalky stuff – along a line of gristle, called the “epiphysis”, which lies near the ends of the bones. When the bone reaches its maximum size and stops growing, this line vanishes. We call this the “fusion” time. Each particular bone in the body has its own set time for fusion, which is fairly constant, within a year or two. For example, the lower end of that bone the boy found would fuse at eighteen, give or take a year each way. The last ones to go are at about twenty-two to twenty-five years, usually the earlier age in women. We X-rayed all the bones in this case – that’s the best way to see the epiphyses – and found that they had all fused, so that she must be at least twenty-two. In kids, we can tell the age almost exactly. But, as age increases, it gets harder and harder.’

  Meadows was still full of curiosity. ‘Why do you put the upper age at thirty?’

  ‘That’s a bit less definite, I admit. But, as a rule, the plates of bone forming the skullcap begin to fuse at about that age, starting on the inside first. There was no sign of this in “Flossie” here, so obviously she is less than thirty. Another thing is the fusion of the spheno-occipital joint.’

  Meadows looked blankly at Powell and the doctor grinned.

  ‘That’s just a fancy name for one of the fusion lines in the floor of the skull. It seizes up at about twenty-five, and this girl’s is just in the process of doing that.’

  ‘So she’s twenty-five,’ suggested Meadows.

  ‘Ah, these things are a bit chancy – a few years either way has to be allowed. It’s the sum total of a lot of facts that adds up to the most probable age. She’s got changes in other sutures in her skull, and in the front joint of her pelvis, which suggests that she is in the middle twenties. But, in all honesty, I can’t be more definite than twenty-two to thirty.’

  The pair halted outside the lift and the professor thumbed the call button for the policeman.

  ‘I know you keep calling it “she”, sir; is that a dead certainty, or another strong probability, like the age?’

  Powell laughed. ‘You’re a regular doubting Thomas, Inspector. No, as far as the sex goes, I’ll stick my neck out all the way. The chances of saying whether a collection of bones is male or female increases proportionately to the number of bones available for examination. When, as in this case, the whole skeleton is present, the chances reach a hundred per cent.’

  ‘What’s so different in the bones, then?’

  ‘Oh, the general appearance to start with. The woman’s are lighter and smoother; they haven’t got the strong ridges where a man’s bigger muscles are attached, for one thing. Then again, the pelvic bones are different; the female’s are flatter and more open – connected with childbirth, I suppose. There are umpteen other differences, too. The eye sockets are square in the man, round in the woman. The pelvis is the main thing to go for, but all the bones have some sex difference.’

  The lift appeared. Meadows, having had his fill of technicalities, left the pathologist to carry on with the day’s bag of post-mortem examinations for the local coroner.

  Chapter Nine

  The police car crept slowly down the street like a great black beetle, the drizzle turning the windows into frosted glass. Detective Inspector Rees and a plain-clothes man from the Liverpool CID peered out through the rain, trying to glimpse the street numbers on the houses. Through the windscreen, rows of dismal terraced houses could be seen stretching ahead of them, dockside cranes rearing up beyond them and factory chimneys belching smoke in the distance.

  ‘That was eighteen, driver,’ called out the local constable, ‘Here’s twenty-two coming up – twenty-four – hold it!’ The car stopped outside a house identical with hundreds of its neighbours. Number 24 Glebe Terrace. It had grimy green paint on the window frames, and the front door had been varnished in the long distant past. Rees opened the car door and jumped out into the rain.

  ‘Will you want me?’ asked the local detective, hopefully.

  ‘No, thanks. This shouldn’t take long,’ replied Rees.

  He slammed the door and ran for shelter to the porch which overhung the pavement, there being no front garden. He banged the cast-iron knocker vigorously.

  The door was opened by a grey-haired woman wearing an apron over a drab dress. She was in her sixties, Rees estimated, which should be about right for Mavis’s elder sister. She had a thickset, flabby body and a massive pair of legs. Her feet were squeezed into a down-at-heel pair of bedroom slippers.

  A miserable face, with deep furrows and pouchy eyes, glared at him across the threshold.

  ‘Mrs Randall?’ he asked, and got a curt nod in reply.

  ‘I’m a police officer, Detective Inspector Rees, from …’

  She cut him short. ‘You’re the chap from Wales, I suppose. They told me yesterday that you’d be coming.’ She stood aside and grudgingly motioned him to come into the passage.

  ‘You’d better come in, I suppose. In there.’ She pointed to the door of the parlour facing the street.

  Rees went in and stood in the centre of the worn carpet. The room was full of unused furniture and ugly knick-knacks. It smelt strongly of damp.

  ‘Took you long enough to get here, didn’t it?’ growled Jessie Randall, following him in.

  Rees stared at her in surprise. ‘Long enough? We only had the message last night, and I’ve come straight up here this morning.’

  Her lacklustre eyes stared stonily at him.

  ‘It took you over thirty years to get here, to my way of thinking,’ she said sarcastically. ‘What’s the use of raking all the past up now? It was then that the old devil should have been caught.’

  Willie Rees sighed to himself. He could see that this interview was going to be an uphill struggle.

  ‘Well, we don’t know yet that this body does belong to your sister, Mrs Randall. That’s one reason why I’ve come to see you. Your evidence may be the most important of the lot in deciding whether this is Mavis Hewitt.’ He had tried this appeal to her vanity as a lubricant to the questioning process. Her expression remained as unfriendly as ever.

  ‘You’d better sit down,’ was all she said. Rees perched himself on the edge of a creaking armchair and the woman lowered herself onto a piano stool near the door.

  ‘What d’you want to know about my poor sister?’

  ‘When was the last time you saw her alive?’ asked Rees. He produced a few sheets of paper and laid them on the packet of photographs that he took from his raincoat pocket.

  The woman’s pouchy eyes looked steadily at him.

  ‘I can’t give you exact dates, but it was about six weeks before I had the first of the letters.’

  This was news to Rees. ‘What letters are these?’

  Jessie Randall looked at him with impatience.

  ‘Don’t you coppers know anything? It’s all in the statement I made at the time.’

  Rees avoided telling her that the file of the case had vanished as completely as had Mavis Hewitt herself.

  He tried to ‘soft-soap’ her again. ‘Yes, but I’d like to hear about it again from you yourself. There’s nothing like going back to the actual witness for the best account. It’s better than reading all the second-hand stories we get.’

>   She sniffed at the dubious compliment and began to speak of the events of the late nineteen twenties.

  ‘Mavis came up to stay with me about the June or July of that year – twenty-nine, that would be, of course. I had a few letters, as usual, after she went back – she used to write about every fortnight. The last two letters were the ones I kept, as they had the bits in them about old Hewitt. Then the letters stopped, and I never saw her again.’

  Willie was horrified to see the wrinkled face suddenly crack into a sob. She hauled a grubby handkerchief from the pocket of her even grubbier apron and dabbed it around her eyes. He hurried on with his questions.

  ‘What did these particular letters say?’

  The tears vanished as quickly as they had come, and her face took up its old sour look once more.

  ‘You’d know if you took the trouble to read what I said to the police all them years ago. They said how she was being ill-treated by that swine of a husband of hers. My poor little girl, she had a terrible time with him. It isn’t right that he should have got away with it for all these years. What’s the use of punishing him now, an old man like he is?’

  For the first time, her voice showed some animation and lifted out of its usual dull monotone.

  ‘Have you still got these letters, Mrs Randall?’

  ‘Perhaps I have; perhaps I haven’t,’ she said unhelpfully.

  ‘We’d very much like to see them, if you could manage to find them,’ Rees almost pleaded.

  ‘I’ll have a look presently,’ she conceded, with another loud sniff.

  ‘What was the next thing after the letters?’

  ‘Nothing – that was the trouble,’ she snapped. ‘I didn’t get my usual regular letters after these two. I wrote a couple of times myself, but there was no reply. In the end, I went down to the damned place to see what was going on.’

  ‘What did you think might have been going on?’

  ‘I don’t know. It struck me that Roland Hewitt was either stopping her from writing, or tearing up my letters before Mavis got them. He always hated me, did that man. He knew that I could see him for what he really was. A scandal, him marrying a bit of a thing like her. I did my best to stop it, but Mavis was too headstrong, as usual. Him ten years or more older than her – disgusting, I called it. And he was as mean and nasty as they make them.’

  ‘So you didn’t get on with Mr Hewitt?’

  ‘Get on with him! I hated the sight of him. I always did, even before he started injuring my poor sister – poor little Mavis.’

  For another awful moment, Willie thought she was going to dissolve into tears again at the memory of her obviously hard-boiled sister; but, after a brief quiver, her mouth hardened again.

  ‘Jealous, that was his trouble. He wanted to hold her for himself; he wasn’t willing for her to have any life of her own. I know she was a bit of a little madam sometimes, but she always went back to him, poor thing. That summer, though, things came to head down there.’

  ‘What makes you so sure that he did do anything violent to her?’

  Mrs Randall looked scornfully at the detective.

  ‘Well, where is she now, may I ask? Vanished into the blue, she did; never come near me, nor wrote to me since – her own sister. Of course Hewitt did away with her – him and his jealous temper! – he threatened to do it, and do it, he did! And you coppers are so damn stupid that it takes you thirty-odd years to come around to seeing something that I was trying to knock into your thick heads within a few weeks of it happening.’

  Rees opened the envelope on his lap and took out the pack of half-plate photographs.

  ‘I’d like you to look at these, if you will, and tell me if you recognize any of them. They are pictures of some things we found with the body. They’re badly knocked about. So, before I show them to you, can you give me some idea of the sort of clothes and jewellery that Mavis used to wear?’

  The woman looked at him suspiciously. ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Well, what was she wearing when you last saw her, for a start?’

  Jessie considered this for a moment. ‘I told all this to the police at the time,’ she repeated. ‘I can’t remember now. I think it was a green linen two-piece and a white blouse.’

  ‘What sort of ornaments did she wear?’

  Again the old woman looked at him warily, afraid that he was trying to catch her out.

  ‘She had all sorts of things – everything that was in fashion in those days. A very smart girl, my poor Mavis was.’ She dabbed her eyes, again with the soiled handkerchief.

  ‘What kind of wedding ring did she have?’

  ‘Just ordinary gold,’ replied the sister evasively. ‘A good one, mind you.’

  ‘Do you know where it was bought?’

  ‘No – down in Wales, I suppose. Hewitt must have got it from somewhere.’

  ‘Did she normally carry a purse with her?’

  Jessie looked scornfully at him. ‘Of course she did. What woman doesn’t?’

  Rees selected a photograph and handed to her.

  ‘Those are some glass beads we found. Did your sister have any like that?’

  Jessie Randall fumbled in her apron again for her glasses and put them on. She looked at the photo for a brief moment and then handed it back. ‘They’re hers all right!’ she announced smugly.

  Rees looked at her with doubt plain on his face.

  ‘Well, let’s say that they are like some beads she had. Is that right?’

  ‘Of course it’s right! It’s her poor body you found, so those are bound to be her beads. Stands to reason, doesn’t it?’

  Rees sighed. He had a sudden vision of defending counsel making mincemeat of her evidence in court, if it was all going to be on this level of inverted logic.

  He handed her another picture. ‘Those are some wooden beads. Do you recognize the type?’

  Mrs Randall was more cautious this time. ‘She had all sorts of things, did Mavis, bless her. I know she had wooden beads like this. They were very fashionable about that time.’

  Willie passed over another print. ‘And these – what about bits of chain like that?’

  The old sister nodded energetically. ‘Oh, yes, she used to wear a chain around her neck quite often, with a locket on it – very popular they were, too. Had a picture of our dear mother in it – passed away when Mavis was fifteen. A mercy that she was spared seeing what happened to her daughter.’

  With a feeling of increasing frustration, the detective went through all the bits and pieces found in the mine shaft and discovered that Jessie was willing to swear to all of them as being actually, or potentially, her sister’s property. He came to the last one, that of the purse clasp. ‘What about that.’ He handed the photo over.

  The woman sniffed scornfully. ‘Just a purse fastener, isn’t it – one’s the same as the next.’

  Rees gave up and put his pictures away.

  ‘Have you got a photograph of Mavis that we could borrow for a short time?’ he asked.

  ‘I suppose I have,’ the sister answered ungraciously.

  ‘And do you think you could find those letters for us, as well. They would be most important and helpful to us, you see.’

  She got up and slouched to the door. ‘If it helps to put that old devil where he belongs, you’re welcome to them. It’s only a pity that you didn’t get around to it years ago.’

  She went off into the depths of the house and Rees heard drawers being opened and slammed shut.

  Jessie Randall came back clutching a faded chocolate box, bulging with tattered letters and old birthday cards. After a lot of searching, she produced an old envelope and handed it to Willie.

  ‘There you are. I kept them as the last thing I ever heard of my poor little sister.’

  Rees took the envelope and removed several sheets of brittle notepaper from it. He quickly scanned through them and picked out some of the sentences, written in a large, childish hand. Satisfied with the importance of th
e find, he carefully put the envelope into his breast pocket.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Randall. I’ll give you a receipt for this and the photograph.’

  She passed him a frayed but quite clear snap of an attractive young woman, in a hat and hairstyle strange to the modern eye. This was Mavis Hewitt, and Willie Rees at once saw that it was a much better picture than the one in the Aberystwyth newspaper.

  He smoothed out the sheets of paper on his knee. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to take down what you’ve told me as a proper statement.’

  Willie Rees’ voice, and the grumbling of Jessie at repeating the same thing at thirty-year intervals, droned through the room while the rain beat ceaselessly at the windows.

  The thread of evidence was being woven slowly around Roland Hewitt.

  Chapter Ten

  Extra chairs had been brought into the chief constable’s office for the conference on the Wednesday morning. A half-circle of men sat around his wide desk, which was brightly lit by a shaft of sunshine coming through one of the windows overlooking the main shopping street of Cardigan town.

  Colonel Barton shuffled his papers into order as the others waited in expectant silence.

  For someone who only wants to be an observer, thought Charles Pacey, he’s doing a pretty heavy job of organizing. The colonel finished fiddling with his notes and cleared his throat to command their already-undivided attention.

  ‘Right, gentlemen, it’s three days now since the first bone was found. I think we should be quite pleased at the progress so far, eh? Of course, as I’ve told Mr Pacey here, I’m only holding a watching brief on all this …’

  ‘Oh, Gawd, here he goes again!’ muttered the superintendent.

  ‘… but I thought it might be as well if we all met here today to recapitulate the results and see how we stand. I’d like to thank Professor Powell and Inspector Meadows for coming up from Swansea at such short notice.’

  The pathologist smiled blandly in acknowledgement. He and Pacey sat directly in front of the chief constable and ranged on either side were Inspectors Meadows, Rees, and Morris from Aberystwyth, Sergeant Mostyn and the detective constable who did the photography. Also present on the end of the row was an old man with a poker-straight back and a white walrus moustache.