Grounds for Appeal drp-3

by Bernard Knight

  ‘What happens now?’ asked his detective inspector.

  ‘Birmingham suggest, quite sensibly, that Doctor Pryor goes up there to examine it, so can you ring him and fix a time. You’d better be there yourself, I think, to keep up to date on our behalf. The head is being taken to the central mortuary behind the coroner’s court in Newton Street, so they said.’

  This sparked a question in Meirion’s mind. ‘Which coroner will have to deal with the death, I wonder?’

  The DCC turned up his hands in doubt. ‘Beats me! We’ve got the biggest bit — that’s assuming they belong together. I still can’t understand how they came to be a hundred miles apart!’

  Meirion Thomas made for the door, going back to his office to start phoning around. Then he stopped for a last question.

  ‘What about the Yard? Do we have to tell them?’

  David Jones growled something under his breath, then sighed. ‘Have to, I suppose. Maybe they won’t bother to come back here, if a big force like Birmingham is involved.’

  When his DI had gone out, he swung round in his chair and glowered through his window at the inoffensive Irish Sea outside.

  ‘Why the hell should the damned English use our bog as a cemetery?’ he muttered.

  In the police station in Winson Green, DI Hartnell and his sergeant were hard at it, trying to prise information out of Olly Franklin. A night in the cells had done little to soften his stubborn truculence, but Trevor Hartnell had been flattered by the trust his seniors had shown in his abilities and was determined to get something out of the ex-publican, even if it meant reaching down his throat.

  They sat in a dismal interview room, with damp-stained green walls looking down on a bare table and chairs.

  Tom Rickman sat alongside his ‘guv’nor’, notebook and pencil on the table before him, as Hartnell began all over again.

  ‘Look, Olly, whatever happens, you’re in the shit over this. But if you come clean, it’ll be in your favour, right?’

  ‘You don’t want an accessory-to-murder charge slapped on you, do you?’ contributed the sergeant. ‘So far, you’re up for concealing a death and obstructing the coroner, but they’re not exactly hanging offences. Why don’t you keep it that way?’

  ‘I don’t know nothing — well, hardly nothing,’ growled the red-faced man opposite. ‘There was just this old drum in the pub cellar and I got stuck with it.’

  ‘You could have gone round the nick next day and reported it,’ snapped Hartnell.

  Franklin sneered at this. ‘Oh yes, I’m likely to have done that, after Mickey Doyle told me to hang on to it. That would earn a beating or even a shiv across my face.’

  ‘Well, you’re here in the nick now, so you may as well cough for us,’ snapped Hartnell. ‘Why did Doyle want you to keep the thing?’

  Olly stared down at the scarred table-top for a long moment, then sighed and leaned back in his chair.

  ‘OK, I’ll tell you what I know, but it ain’t much, honest. And it was years ago now.’

  Rickman opened his notebook and poised his pencil in anticipation, as the other man began to speak.

  ‘Look, you know as well as I do that Mickey Doyle was a villain — and he ran a gang of villains. You knocked off a few of them now and then, but others just popped up in their place.’

  The DI nodded. ‘We know that, what’s your point?’

  ‘He was into all sorts of things — theft, protection rackets, running tarts, illegal gambling — though I never heard he was into drugs. Then until things eased off after the war, black market was the big earner and Doyle was a big player in that.’

  ‘Thanks for the lecture, Olly,’ said the sergeant sarcastically. ‘Now tell us something we don’t know!’

  The chippie scowled at him. ‘I’m getting to that, ain’t I? There was one thing about Mickey, he was a stickler for discipline among those who worked for him. He was a big bugger and I’ve seen him punch a guy to the floor in the pub, just for some fault in working the rackets. I even heard he had some guy’s legs broken years ago, for holding back some of the loot in a black-market scam.’

  The two detectives waited, as Olly seemed to be painfully approaching something of use to them.

  ‘So where does this head come into it?’ demanded Hartnell.

  ‘It was before my time at the Barley Mow, but I heard that one of his thugs was actually topped for trying to rip Mickey off, big time! I don’t know how, nor who, nor if it was Mickey himself that did it, but he ended up dead.’

  ‘When was this?’ rasped Rickman, lifting his pencil.

  ‘Must have been when the war was still on, but towards the end. Anyway, what I heard from gossip between the villains in my bar was that part of this fellow’s job was to go round the illegal gambling joints run by Doyle and collect the takings. Turned out that he had a fiddle going on with some of the guys who ran the dens, so that they creamed off a part of the collection for themselves.’

  ‘And Doyle eventually found out?’ said Hartnell.

  ‘Yes, so the story goes. Mickey had him done away with, but as a warning to the rest of his foot soldiers, he had the head kept and used to display it now and then to keep them in line.’

  The sergeant threw down his pencil. ‘Sounds a bloody far-fetched yarn to me!’ he growled. ‘Like something out of a Mickey Spillane novel.’

  The former licensee shrugged. ‘You asked me, mate, so I’m telling you what I heard. Doyle wouldn’t let me get rid of the thing in case he wanted to use it again.’

  Trevor Hartnell fixed Franklin with his hard blue eyes.

  ‘And you say he used to parade this horrible thing in front of his men in your pub?’

  Olly nodded his ponderous head. ‘A few times, when I first went to the Barley Mow after the war. He used the function room upstairs for a booze-up now and then. It was usually after they made a good haul after some big heist. I remember one was after they had nicked a couple of lorry-loads of sheep from somewhere down in the country — couldn’t get much good meat during rationing.’

  ‘Did you see him showing off this head?’

  ‘No, he didn’t let anyone in the room. I had to leave a barrel of beer and a stack of food and spirits in there for them.’

  ‘And you claim you’ve no idea who this bloke was that he had topped?’ demanded Hartnell.

  Olly shook his head and replied vehemently. ‘Not a clue — and I damned well didn’t want to know, either! Keep a tight mouth anywhere around Mickey Doyle, that was the golden rule.’

  ‘So who would know, Olly?’

  The burly publican toyed nervously with the lid of a cocoa tin that served as an ashtray on the table in front of him.

  ‘Well, Doyle himself, I suppose. I don’t know who’s in his gang these days, I keep well clear.’

  ‘Mickey did a bunk to the Costa del Sol last year, Olly, things were getting a bit hot for him here. And there’s no extradition from Spain. So who else can we ask, eh?’

  Franklin looked furtively around the room, as if some criminal eavesdropper might be lurking in a corner.

  ‘The only bloke from the old days still around is Billy Blair,’ he confided.

  Tom Rickman threw down his pencil with a clatter.

  ‘Billy Blair! Well, at least we know where to find that bastard! He’s a quarter of a mile away, inside Winson Green Prison.’

  FOURTEEN

  Richard Pryor took the call from Aberystwyth in his room and, after listening for a few moments, called out to Moira in the office next door. They had no intercom, but a good shout seemed to work equally well. When her neat, dark head appeared around the door, he asked if there were any local cases for him the next day.

  ‘There’s a sudden death at Chepstow, doctor, that’s all.’

  ‘I can leave that until Wednesday, can’t I?’ he reassured himself and, speaking into the phone again, arranged with Meirion Thomas to meet him in Birmingham the next day. The DI had already confirmed that noon would be a convenient ti
me for them to descend on the mortuary there and after some amiable banter in Welsh, Richard put the phone down and followed Moira back to the laboratory, where the three women in his life were regaled with the news he had just had from the Midlands.

  ‘They’ve found the missing head!’ he told them. ‘In some chap’s shed in Birmingham, of all places.’ When he had repeated the sparse information that he had heard on the phone, he asked Angela if she would like to come with him in the morning when he went to examine it, but she gracefully declined.

  ‘No thanks, Richard. I’ve seen many horrid things, but unless you really need me, I think I’ll pass on looking at a ten-year-old head in a bucket!’

  Later, he wondered if his astute partner had realized that it was possible that her former fiance, Paul Vickers, might also be present, as he was also involved in the investigation of the bog body.

  Richard retired to his room to look at a road atlas to see the best way to get to Birmingham, as this was a part of the country which was unfamiliar to him. It was a good excuse for him to have a few minutes with one of his favourite books but he soon exhausted his quest, as the route from the Wye Valley was all too obvious.

  ‘Up to Ross, then Malvern, Worcester, Bromsgrove and then into B’rum,’ he murmured to himself.

  When they assembled in the staff room for their afternoon tea and biscuits, Jimmy Jenkins came in from the vineyard where he had been hoeing the last of the weeds from around the roots before winter set in. When he heard that ‘the doctor’ was off to Birmingham next day, he immediately volunteered his services as a chauffeur and Richard could find no reason to disappoint him. Jimmy had acted as his driver from time to time, usually on long journeys and, despite being such a laid-back character, was actually very alert on the road.

  They both agreed that it would be best to allow at least three hours for the journey and so at half-past eight next morning they set out, stopping in Monmouth to fill the Humber’s tank with National Benzole. Jimmy was incensed by the recent price increase, which took a gallon up to four shillings and threepence.

  The going was easy on such a fine but chilly morning and the climb up over the Malvern Hills gave a superb view over the Midland Plain, which stretched away to the horizon.

  ‘First hills that way are the Urals, Jimmy!’ said Richard in a euphoric mood, but the geographic allusion was lost on his handyman. They stopped at a roadside cafe near Droitwich for a cup of tea, where Jimmy demolished a doorstep ham sandwich while Richard bought a copy of the Daily Telegraph. He scanned the news while his driver champed his way through his snack. Clement Attlee’s resignation from his chairmanship of the Labour Party, a black boycott of buses in Alabama, a patent taken out for something called a ‘hovercraft’ and sixteen new member countries admitted to the United Nations. None of it thrilling stuff, Richard decided and as soon as Jimmy had finished, they were back on the road again.

  The last few miles into Birmingham itself were more difficult than the previous hundred, but using a street plan in the back of his atlas and then asking a police constable, they arrived in Newton Street with a few minutes to spare. The coroner’s court and mortuary were in this narrow side-street, near the centre of the city, not far from the main railway station and very close to the large children’s hospital. Courts, police stations and other civic buildings crowded the area, but to Jimmy’s satisfaction there were also several pubs within sight.

  They cruised slowly down the short street until they saw the red-brick coroner’s court. It had a gate to a narrow lane at the side, from which a hearse appeared, marking it as the entrance to the mortuary.

  There was no room to park in the lane, but Jimmy found a space further down the street. He declared his intention of finding the nearest boozer and promised to be back at the car in two hours’ time, happy to wait for his boss for as long as necessary.

  Richard hauled his black bag out of the Humber’s boot and made his way back to the entrance of the court. Here a coroner’s officer showed him into a waiting room where DI Thomas from Cardiganshire was standing with several other plain-clothes officers from Birmingham.

  Meirion Thomas introduced him to the Winson Green detectives, Trevor Hartnell and Tom Rickman. They brought him up to date with the finding of the head and the meagre information they had prised from the former publican of the Barley Mow.

  ‘We’re seeing another villain later this afternoon,’ explained Hartnell. ‘He’s banged up in prison, but we hope he can tell us a bit more, possibly even give us an identity.’

  After a little more chat, the coroner’s officer, a middle-aged constable whose developing arthritis made him unfit to pound a beat, asked Richard if he would have a word with the coroner. He took him through into an inner sanctum, where he met Doctor Theobald Priestly, a dapper man in his fifties, who had qualified as a barrister at Lincoln’s Inn some years after becoming a medical practitioner. Richard knew that in some of the larger cities, such as London and Birmingham, doubly qualified men were preferred as coroners.

  Doctor Priestly had greying ginger hair with a matching Van Dyke beard and Richard felt that with a lace collar and a rapier on his belt, he could have walked straight out of a Restoration portrait. He came around his desk and shook hands, motioning his visitor to a chair.

  ‘Damned odd affair this, doctor!’ he remarked, in what Richard’s mother would call a cut-glass accent. ‘Two coroners each with part of a body in two different countries!’

  ‘Well, we’re not yet sure that they are parts of the same body, but I’ll do my best to find out,’ replied Richard. ‘If it seems likely, which way will the parts go?’

  The coroner gave his beard a brief massage.

  ‘I’ll have to discuss this with my counterpart at your end, but if what our CID fellows suggest may be true, then the cause of his death sounds as if it’s more a matter for this city than Aberystwyth. No hope of deciding where he died, I suppose?’

  Richard shook his head. ‘I don’t see how that could be established, given the length of time that’s elapsed. With no known scene of death to examine, it seems impossible, unless some solid new evidence comes to light. But that’s a matter for the police, rather than me.’

  A few minutes of chat established that they had several mutual acquaintances in the Royal Army Medical Corps, as Doctor Priestly had spent most of the war in a Field Ambulance, ending up commanding one in the Italian campaign. When Richard left his office, he felt pleased with this new contact, as the coroner had promised to keep him in mind whenever he need someone to stand in for one of his regular pathologists.

  Outside, the coroner’s officer led him and the detectives down a passage and out into the body store of the mortuary, a busy place with a large throughput of bodies from the central part of the huge city. The outer area was where the hearses and plain vans loaded and unloaded coffins into a hall lined on one side by a bank of refrigerators. Beyond this was the mortuary assistants’ office, which housed the registers and the inevitable electric kettle and tray of chipped mugs and cups.

  An amiable senior technician welcomed them and promised tea and biscuits as soon as they had finished.

  ‘A bit out of the usual run of “pee-ems”, doctor!’ he observed. ‘A body in a bucket, almost! I thought we could do the necessary on one of the tables, if that suits you.’

  They trooped into the main post-mortem room, a large, bare chamber with a partial glass roof and half a dozen porcelain autopsy tables in a row down the centre. Waiting there was a police photographer with a large camera and flashgun.

  Three of the slabs had corpses on them, one being in the process of being sewn up and made presentable by another mortuary attendant. On one of the empty tables stood a metal container with a police exhibits label tied to its handle with string. The photographer began by taking a few shots of it, the flashes from the bulbs illuminating the whole room.

  ‘What do you need, doctor?’ asked the senior technician solicitously. ‘Will just an apron and glov
es do, or do you want a gown as well?

  Richard settled for a green rubber apron and some rubber gloves and approached the table with the canister. Close behind came the two CID men, Trevor Hartnell already lighting up a cigarette. ‘Can’t stand the stink in these places,’ he said apologetically. ‘Blood and Lysol, I reckon!’

  His detective sergeant seemed immune to smells and stood impassively on the opposite side of the white table, still wearing his belted mackintosh and wide-brimmed trilby.

  ‘Right, sir, I’d better identify this properly to you.’ Hartnell, who wore a heavy grey overcoat, tapped the label on the handle. ‘This is the container we recovered yesterday from a shed at 183 Markby Road, Handsworth. It’s been dusted for prints, not that I think that will help after it’s been knocking about for all these years.’

  Richard took a stainless-steel T-bar from the assortment of mortuary tools left on the table. This was like a short, wide screwdriver with a crossbar, used for levering off skullcaps after they had been sawn through. He used it now to pop off the lid, which he laid to one side, allowing a pungent aroma to arise from the interior of the drum.

  ‘That’s mainly methylated spirit, by its smell,’ he remarked. Peering inside, he saw strands of hair floating under the surface, but resisted the temptation to use them to lift out the head, in case they detached from the scalp. Sliding both gloved hands down the sides, he carefully hoisted it out and laid it on the table.

  The head was covered in shrivelled skin of a pale greyish colour, with a wizened caricature of a face. It seemed to have collapsed in on itself, the cheeks hollow and the eyelids lying back in sunken sockets. There was no sign of decomposition and the hair, which was still black, lay in wisps across the scalp. The lips had contracted back in a bizarre grin, showing irregular teeth in grey gums.

  Richard stood back to allow the photographer to take a series of pictures from various angles.

  ‘Why the pale colour, Doc?’ asked Tom Rickman, who seemed unmoved by the gruesome object.