The Thread of Evidence

by Bernard Knight

  ‘How would you describe him, then?’

  The brassy barmaid pondered this a few seconds. ‘Well, I don’t know how to put it in words – how do you describe anyone? He wasn’t good-looking, as I’ve said; not a bad face, a bit thin. Brown hair, I think; just ordinary. Average height. He’d be about twenty-five to thirty, I suppose.’

  Pacey restrained a groan. This was the standard description of the average man. Apart from the guess at the age, the account she had just given would probably have fitted sixty per cent of the males in Great Britain.

  ‘Did you speak to him?’

  ‘Only in passing, a couple of times. Not for want of trying. But Julie was working hard on him, so she didn’t give me much of a chance. I seem to remember that his voice was a bit different, the little I heard of it.’

  Her pencilled brows came closer together as she made an effort to remember.

  ‘What do you mean – “different”?’ asked Pacey.

  ‘He certainly wasn’t a local. I can’t place what he sounded like now, but I’ve got an idea in the back of my mind that he might have been a German.’

  ‘A German!’ exclaimed Pacey, looking across at Willie in disgust.

  ‘Only an idea, that is. I can’t really remember,’ the woman said coldly. ‘I can’t trot out the descriptions of all the men that come into the club. There are thousands of them in a year.’

  ‘How did you manage to remember this one then?’ Pacey demanded suspiciously.

  ‘Don’t suppose I would have, only he seemed to be the current heart-throb at the time Julie pushed off. I wondered whether she’d hopped it for a weekend with him, as I’ve already said.’

  ‘I still don’t see why you didn’t tell the police about her things left behind in the flat, and about this man,’ complained the Cardiff detective.

  ‘I probably did, and your bobbies forgot to put it down in their little books!’ Edna countered sarcastically.

  Pacey broke in on the developing wrangle.

  ‘Thank you very much for your help, Miss Collins. There’s something else you could do for us which might help a lot to clear up the mystery about your friend.’

  ‘What’s that?’ she asked suspiciously.

  ‘I’d like you to take a trip down to West Wales and see if you can identify the man you saw with Julie Gordon during the week before she vanished.’

  The blonde’s eyes widened. ‘West Wales! Where there, for Pete’s sake?’

  ‘Aberystwyth.’

  Either she never read the newspapers or her geography was very poor, for she failed to associate the place with the recently notorious Tremabon.

  ‘That’s a devil of a long way,’ she complained. ‘When d’you want to drag me all the way down there?’

  ‘I’m not quite sure – probably within the next few days. We’ll let you know in plenty of time. And, of course, you’ll get your travelling expenses and a good allowance for your time and trouble.’

  The woman looked doubtful, but the novelty of the idea began to play on her sense of importance.

  ‘Well, if you can fix it with Henry – that’s my employer – I suppose it’s all right with me.’

  A few more minutes settled the details and the blonde swayed her way out of the room.

  Pacey stood up, ready to leave.

  ‘Thanks a lot for your help,’ he said to Austin. ‘We may need some more of it in a day or so, but I’ll have to go back home and do some more spadework first.

  The smooth inspector saw them out with a promise to give them any more assistance that they needed. The Cardiganshire men walked briskly back to their waiting car and set off for home.

  ‘We’ll stop off at Swansea on the way back, Willie. I want to ask the professor a few questions.’ He gave some directions to the driver and settled back in his seat.

  ‘Pardon me for asking,’ said Rees with heavy sarcasm. ‘But what the hell is going on? What are we rushing back to do this time?’

  As they sped along the A48, Pacey relented and unloaded his hunch on to Willie Rees.

  ‘I told you a couple of days ago that I thought this affair reeked of medicine, so to speak. So, just for the hell of it, I set to wondering what doctor could possibly be involved.’

  ‘There’s only the Ellis-Morgans in Tremabon,’ objected Rees.

  ‘Yes. Three of ’em! That’s enough for a start. Now, any one of them could have both the medical know-how, and the local knowledge that this case is stiff with.’

  ‘Sounds bloody daft to me!’ grumbled his assistant.

  ‘Look, just string along with me, Willie,’ pleaded Pacey. ‘Just think of it as a mental exercise, eh? Now, which one of the three would you put your money on?’

  ‘None of them,’ the inspector replied promptly.

  Pacey sighed. ‘All right. Well, which one would you say is the most unlikely to be involved?’

  ‘The old one, of course. I can’t see him knocking off a young bird like this … even if it is her – which I doubt very much. I still fancy the Bristol dame.’

  ‘OK, so it’s one of the younger Ellis-Morgans. Which one?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Rees, irritably. ‘The whole idea is barmy. I’d never met any of them until a couple of days ago, so how would I know which one is a homicidal maniac?’

  His sarcasm was wasted on the thick skin of the superintendent.

  ‘I didn’t know anything about them, either, until the day before yesterday, when I went to the public library.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘I looked them up in the Medical Directory. The old man qualified in nineteen twenty-five and has been in Tremabon since thirty-one. Gerald qualified in London in fifty-three. He did a year there as house surgeon, then came to work with his father. David passed out in Cardiff in fifty-two and did three years pathology there after finishing his house-jobs. That means he lived in Cardiff until fifty-six. Then he packed up pathology and came home to work with his dad.’

  Willie looked suspiciously at Pacey. ‘So what? Just because a bloke lived in Cardiff for a few years, that doesn’t make him a flaming murderer, does it?’

  ‘I agree, but we’ve got to start somewhere. And this seems as good a place as any.’

  ‘And is that the only reason why you’re more interested in the Cardiff girl than the Bristol one – because that doctor lived here until fifty-six?’ Rees asked incredulously. He had a sudden longing for the corpse to be the girl from Bristol, merely to be able to crow over the fat man sitting alongside him.

  ‘That’s it,’ Pacey replied calmly. ‘Now that we’ve started, we may as well follow it to the bitter end before handing in our cards.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘Our dear chief constable – bless him! – is letting us work out this first bunch of missing persons. And, if nothing comes of them, he’s handing the case over to the Yard.’

  ‘And the best of British luck to them!’ growled Rees. Both of them sat thinking for a moment, each knowing what was in the other’s mind. The county forces were still reluctant to give up their big cases to the Central Office; they thought, sometimes with justification, that they could handle them just as well themselves. The Yard’s main advantage was in obtaining the co-operation of all forces when widespread inquiries were needed – as some county constabularies seemed to engage in private vendettas with each other.

  ‘So what do we do next?’ asked Willie Rees.

  ‘Just for fun, let’s say David Ellis-Morgan clobbered this girl Gordon in Cardiff back in fifty-five. What should we look for now?’

  ‘Hell of a long time ago! If he tried to cut her arm off, there might have been bloodstains around somewhere, I suppose.’

  Rees grudgingly allowed himself to humour Pacey by playing his game of make-believe with him.

  ‘Where would you look, Willie?’

  ‘In his house, or wherever he did her in.’

  Pacey grinned. ‘Do you think he carried her th
e eighty-odd miles from Cardiff to Tremabon on his back?’

  ‘Oh, a car. Yes, but he won’t have the same one now, will he?’

  ‘"No, but you’re going to start looking for it this afternoon, boy. And, when you find it, you’re going to get the forensic chaps to go over every square inch of it for blood.’

  ‘After seven years’ hard wear?’ countered Rees in an offended voice.

  ‘Why not? I read the other day that they even grouped the blood of an Egyptian mummy after three thousand years, so I don’t see why seven should strain them too much.’

  ‘And that’s my first job, is it?’

  ‘Your only one for the time being. I’ve already asked the Cardiff CID to find out where Ellis-Morgan was living, and to see if they can get a good look at the premises.’

  Rees sat stonily for a moment. ‘You know, Super, this is all very well,’ he said eventually; ‘but aren’t we mucking about wasting time? I’ll admit that I think your theory is all a lot of tripe. But the quickest way to kill it would surely be to let that Collins woman have a look at the doctor. Her “yes” or “no” would be the finish of it, near enough – especially as I’m damn sure she’ll say “no”.’

  ‘I’m going to do that – but I want a day or so to try to dig up some corroboration, if that’s possible. This attempt at identification will have to be done very tactfully, Willie, to say the least. The colonel would blow a gasket if he thought I was lining up one of the county’s most respected GPs for an identity parade. No, boy, we’ve got to do this subtly and try to get a bit of extra ammunition up our sleeves for our own protection. That’s why I want you to find that car, and why I’m going to call on the pathologist.’

  A couple of hours later, they were standing at the door of the post-mortem room in the medical school in Swansea, watching Leighton Powell as he stood cheerfully in his rubber boots and plastic apron amongst half a dozen gutted corpses in the long chilly room.

  Organized confusion reigned about him, as three attendants bustled about, clanging enamel trays full of organs and noisily dropping instruments into the sinks.

  Pacey stood for a few minutes before attracting the attention of the professor, hypnotized by the macabre scene lit by the harsh fluorescent lights. For all his years of familiarity with violence and sudden death, the sight of the wholesale carnage in a public mortuary still gave him a momentary heave of the stomach.

  Powell caught sight of the two detectives and hurried across to them, pulling off his rubber gloves. He hustled them into a side office and took off his gown and apron.

  ‘I’m sorry to interrupt you, sir,’ began Pacey. ‘But we’ve raised another possible candidate for the Tremabon bones and I’d like to know what you think of it from your angle.’

  Powell struggled with his Wellington boots. ‘Of course. Let me get these togs off, and I’ll take you up to my rooms, away from this blasted smell!’

  A few minutes later, Pacey was showing the doctor the photograph of the club girl from Cardiff.

  ‘This is Julie Gordon, a sort of high-class barmaid. She upped and vanished in fifty-five.’

  The professor studied the photograph. It was a copy of a picture of professional quality and showed the face and shoulders of an attractive girl, with a saucy pair of eyes and a full-lipped mouth.

  ‘Very nice, too,’ he said appreciatively. ‘But what about this hair? It looks a false blonde, if I ever saw one.’

  Pacey explained, ‘It was bleached, when the photo was taken. But her pal, who reported her missing, said that it was dyed black at the time she vanished. The real colour was mousey-brown, apparently.’

  ‘And her age and size?’

  ‘Twenty-seven and five foot four. There’s no record of dental work; they couldn’t trace her before she came to Cardiff, but she had some teeth filled. I don’t know which ones.’

  ‘What exactly do you want me to tell you, Mr Pacey?’

  ‘I just want you to check that there’s nothing in the facts that we have about Julie Gordon here, such as they are, that would rule her out as a candidate for the Tremabon skeleton.’

  Powell looked quizzically at the superintendent.

  ‘Have you got anyone on the hook, then?’

  Pacey grinned evasively. ‘I’m thinking of sticking my neck out if you give me the OK, Professor. Sticking it out so far that I daren’t tell even you what I suspect until I get a bit of confirmation.’

  Powell respected Pacey’s reluctance to let the cat out of his bag, so didn’t press him any further.

  ‘I can’t help you an awful lot, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘The age is right, the height is right and, as we know nothing about the teeth, that doesn’t help one way or the other. The only other thing I can do is to check the skull against this photo here. After the Mavis Hewitt fiasco, though, I’ve got even less faith in that method than I had before.’

  ‘I’d like you to do it, if you would, sir,’ asked Pacey. ‘I’ll have to get this photo copied up to size, then.’ Pacey fished in his breast pocket. ‘If it would save time, I’ve got the negative of that photo here. The Cardiff police copied the original and loaned me the negative as well.’ Powell took the square of black celluloid and held it up to the window.

  ‘Well, it’s almost exactly full-face, so I could do a very rough check here and now. It’d not be at all accurate; but it ought to show up any glaring failure to correspond.’

  He turned to a side bench and began fiddling with a slide projector and a large picture of the Tremabon skull which was mounted on a sheet of cardboard.

  Willie Rees took the opportunity, while the doctor was busy, of looking around and satisfying his curiosity about the inside of a forensic pathologist’s den.

  If he expected glass jars full of mutilated organs and rows of grinning skulls on the shelves, he must have been very disappointed.

  The main feature of the room was paper.

  There were stacks of white forms, piles of large blue forms, and heaps of tattered flimsies. A generous drift of quarto typescript lay like snow on all the available desk and bench space and even overflowed onto the floor. There were bookcases full of books and untidy rows of box files peeped through the avalanche of paper.

  A small sink was embedded in the bench below the window and contained several empty bottles, a dirty cup and saucer, and a potted plant.

  Rees’ now despairing eye, nurtured by newspaper articles about Spilsbury and his colleagues, was slightly revived by the sight of a gleaming microscope, the dramatic effect of which was spoilt by a postcard propped against the twin eyepieces. On it was scrawled the mundane message – “Remember to buy cabbage on way home”!

  On the floor below the sink was a large cardboard box, bearing the emblem of ‘Gusto Baked Beans’. Below this, the detective noticed that the words “Mavis Hewitt” had been written in crayon, followed by a large and significant question mark.

  Now utterly disillusioned, Willie turned to watch the pathologist as he finished erecting his makeshift apparatus.

  ‘I’ve put the negative in the projector,’ he explained as he switched it on. ‘And I’ll shine the image of it onto the skull photo, to see how they coincide.’

  He closed the slatted sunblind to darken the room and then slid the projector back and forth along the benchtop until the face on the negative was the same size as the skull.

  ‘There we are – not bad, is it, for a rough check?’

  Powell moved the cardboard of the skull photograph around until it coincided exactly with the rays from the projector. Pacey and Willie Rees crowded behind him and craned their neck to squint down the line of the bench.

  ‘Looks just as good as the Mavis Hewitt one,’ said Pacey in a self-satisfied tone. ‘Same size jaw and eye sockets.’

  The professor grimaced into the darkened room. ‘And it might be just as much of a red herring, too. Still, there’s nothing here to justify me telling you that you’re wasting your time with this girl. The front teeth – what little
of them show – are the same shape, the width of the cheekbones are the same and the eye sockets are the same shape, and distance apart.’ He dropped the card and went to open the sunblinds.

  ‘And that’s about all I can tell you, I’m afraid.’

  Pacey looked satisfied at even this most cautious of opinions.

  ‘There is one more thing, sir. This woman was reported missing in nineteen fifty-five. Is that all right as far as your date of death is concerned?’

  Powell grinned. ‘I seem to get asked this question about twice a day! Yes, Superintendent, I know it’s being wise after the event, but I’ve said all along that anything more than two or three years will satisfy me. If this one here is the true bill, I’ll admit that I’m a bit surprised that the soft tissue on the bones being so far gone in seven years. Even the membrane around the shaft of the bone, and the last traces of gristle around the joints, have gone.’

  Pacey looked a bit upset at this. ‘But you’re not going to rule out seven years as being possible, are you?’

  ‘No, no. I’d be a fool to say it couldn’t happen. Almost anything can happen in this game. That’s why it’s so foolish to be dogmatic. As I told you before, I’ve seen a body reduced to skeleton in less than a year; but then the bones still had tags of fibre and gristle on them. But seven years is a dickens of a lot longer, isn’t it? And that mine was very damp and not far below the surface – the ground water, which must have been heavily contaminated by sheep, is certain to have been seeping over the body all the time. No, I won’t quibble about seven years. If you can find your other evidence to pin the identity on this girl, I’ll back you up all the way with the medical guff.’

  There was nothing more that Pacey could learn from the professor. Soon he and Rees made their way back to Cardigan, leaving the elusive ‘Miss X’ quietly resting in her baked bean carton under Powell’s bench.

  Chapter Sixteen

  On the following morning, the Tuesday of the week after the skeleton was first discovered, Pacey and Rees managed to get down to the backlog of work on other cases for a few hours.

  Willie had contrived to swing Pacey’s order to find Ellis-Morgan’s old car on to Detective Sergeant Mostyn, while he himself dealt with the welter of paper in his ‘In’ tray.