Grounds for Appeal drp-3

by Bernard Knight

  ‘It’s an MG-TC,’ he exclaimed, looking out at a small low-slung sports car. It was bright red, with a black fabric hood hoisted against the blustery weather. ‘Who do we know who has one of those?’

  He was soon given the answer, as a shapely leg emerged from the driver’s door, followed by the rest of Priscilla Chambers’ shapely body, swathed in a heavy car coat, her auburn hair half-hidden by a colourful Hermes silk scarf.

  By now they had all seen her. ‘It’s Pris, what on earth is she doing here in a car?’ exclaimed Angela, as they all moved towards the back door to greet her.

  She hugged them all and gave Richard a full-blown kiss on the lips that made his toes tingle.

  ‘I’m frozen,’ she cried gaily. ‘That car’s great, but I need a new hood, there’s a gale blowing through it!’

  After she had been plied with hot tea and biscuits, she told them her news.

  ‘Thank God for your dismembered body, Richard,’ she began. ‘I’ve got a job already, thanks to digging in that blasted bog!’

  She explained that having hit it off so well with the Hungarian archaeologist, Doctor Boross had phoned her a week ago and asked if she would be interested in a temporary lectureship in her department at the university in Aberystwyth.

  ‘It’s for a year in the first instance and has cropped up as they’ve got a rescue dig on an old abbey,’ she explained. They all pressed their congratulations on her and wanted more details.

  ‘Have you got the job actually in the bag?’ asked the more cautious Angela.

  ‘Eva Boross was quite definite about it, said my experience was just right for the post,’ answered Priscilla happily. ‘I’m on my way down there now for a formal interview tomorrow afternoon.’

  ‘What’s with the car, then?’ enquired Richard, looking out of the window again at the MG, which was one of the first models manufactured after the end of the war and which was looking its age a little.

  ‘I decided I couldn’t survive down in the wilds without transport,’ replied the ebullient redhead. ‘It’s a bit of a banger at seven years old, but it was cheap and it goes well.’

  ‘You can’t drive down to Cardiganshire tonight,’ protested Moira. ‘It’ll be dark in an hour or so. You must stay with me tonight and set off first thing in the morning.’

  After some token protestations, Priscilla gladly accepted and then Richard stepped in to trump Moira.

  ‘We need to celebrate this, folks,’ he said amiably. ‘I’ll treat you all to a meal down in the village.’

  Work was abandoned for the rest of the afternoon, as Priscilla was brought up to date on happenings in Garth House, especially the news that the head of her bog body had been found in Birmingham.

  Richard went out for a good look at her ‘new’ car, admiring what was under the bonnet and assuring Priscilla that a good garage in Aberystwyth could work wonders on its rather shabby appearance.

  That evening, they went again to the hotel in Tintern Parva, though Jimmy was not with them this time as he had gone off on one of his mysterious absences, which Richard suspected was some form of organized poaching.

  The meal was excellent and they all talked about the delights of leaving rationing and shortages behind.

  ‘It only seems yesterday that we were living on dried egg powder and Spam,’ said Angela.

  ‘And the kids had concentrated orange juice and cod-liver oil and malt shoved down their throats every day,’ laughed Sian.

  ‘You were all healthier for it, though,’ claimed Richard, until he was shouted down for spending much of the war in Ceylon, where he was accused of living on the fat of the land in an officer’s mess.

  Over coffee, they wanted to know more about Priscilla’s new job. ‘What’s this abbey business?’ asked Moira.

  ‘Apparently, approval has just come through for the flooding of a valley up in the hills, for a new reservoir to supply the Midlands. The ruins of a Cistercian abbey will be submerged, along with a large monastic cemetery, so there’s a rush to exhume the burials and record anything of historical interest.’

  ‘That won’t be popular with the locals,’ prophesied Richard. ‘You’d better get yourself a steel helmet in case there’s a riot!’

  ‘It’s a year’s appointment, you said?’ asked Angela.

  ‘Yes, it also carries a temporary lectureship, and if I’m a good girl and don’t offend too many people, Doctor Boross says it may well be extended.’

  Everyone was happy for Priscilla, including Richard. As he looked at her across the table, he saw a beautiful, extrovert woman, warm-natured and, as far as he knew, unattached. It occurred to him that Aberystwyth was only a few hours’ drive away, easily accessible for a weekend trip. Then his eyes moved to Angela, cool, elegant and highly intelligent, with so much in common with him professionally — and living under the same roof. As he picked up his cup to drain the last of the coffee, he saw Moira looking at him and felt that she was well aware of his appraisal of the two other women. He winked at her, wondering what was going through her mind and received a conspiratorial smile in return.

  The Birmingham coroner telephoned Richard the following day, to let him know that he had arranged for the head to be X-rayed in one of the hospitals and that the radiologist had confirmed that the skull did indeed show the presence of Albers-Schonberg disease.

  ‘He says it was not very severe, but definite enough,’ said Doctor Priestly. ‘Sometimes the head can be enlarged or deformed, but the density was markedly increased, so I’m happy to accept that the head came from your body down in Cardiganshire.’

  ‘But we still have no idea who he was?’ observed Richard.

  ‘The police here are “pursuing their enquiries”, as they like to call it,’ said the coroner wryly. ‘They’ve promised to keep me informed and I’ll let you know when I have any more news. Meanwhile, I’ve arranged with the coroner in Aberystwyth to take over jurisdiction and have the body sent up here, as it seems obvious that Birmingham must hold the key to his murder.’

  Barely ten minutes after Richard had rung off, Moira came into his office to say that Meirion Thomas was on the phone and when he spoke to the detective inspector, he had much the same news as he had had from the coroner, but with a small addition.

  ‘My contact in the Birmingham CID also told me that they had been interviewing some thug in prison there and it seems apparent that the mystery man was mixed up in the gangs and rackets during and soon after the war. Some arch-villain called Doyle kept the head as a warning to other gangsters not to step out of line and try to rip him off!’

  Having lived and worked in Singapore for almost a decade, such a bloodthirsty situation was not all that strange to Richard, as the antics of the underworld Chinese and the Triad wars were more than capable of such excesses. He thanked Meirion for ringing and said that presumably this was pretty much the end of the matter, as far as they were concerned.

  ‘What’s left of the body is going back to Birmingham, so I suppose you’ll be closing down your end of the investigation?’ he suggested.

  ‘Nothing more we can do — in fact, there was virtually nothing we could do before, as we’ve not had a whisper of information this end,’ said the DI. ‘At least the Yard isn’t coming back here. I doubt a big force like B’rum will need them, either.’

  Richard was glad to hear that, for he didn’t want Angela upset by the unexpected arrival of Paul Vickers, as had happened some months ago.

  After he had told Meirion about Doctor Chambers’ good fortune in getting a job in Aberystwyth — perhaps the one good thing to come out of the bog body discovery — he wished him well with his sheep-rustling investigations and rung off. Almost immediately, it rang again, Moira having left it switched through from her office.

  This time, rather to Richard’s surprise, it was Louis Dumas, from the Vale of Glamorgan. After a few conventional greetings, the vineyard owner rather diffidently wondered whether he could call to see the doctor.

  ‘I�
��d be very interested to see the ground you are using and to look at that new vine stock you said you had recently planted,’ he said. ‘But I must admit that I have another reason for wishing to meet you again.’

  He cleared his throat nervously. ‘I have a private, family matter which concerns me and after hearing what kind of investigations you and your associates are involved in, I wondered if I might have your advice. It is possible that I might need your professional services.’

  Richard was intrigued and made encouraging noises, hoping to hear the nature of Monsieur Dumas’s problem.

  However, the Frenchman was rather reticent. ‘It is difficult to explain over the telephone, doctor. Would it be at all possible for me to come up to see you, perhaps this weekend, if you are not going away?’

  Richard, conscious of the kindness and hospitality they had shown him at St Mary Church, readily agreed and they arranged that Louis would call at Garth House on the coming Saturday afternoon, two days away.

  Richard reported all this to Angela and she was as intrigued as he about the nature of Dumas’s problem.

  ‘Either he’s being sued for fathering an illegitimate child and wants a paternity test — or he wants his wine analysed to see how much alcohol is in it,’ she suggested, with a rare show of facetiousness that she might have caught from Richard.

  Her partner shook his head solemnly. ‘No, I reckon he’s murdered someone, buried him under his vines and wants to know how he can dispose of the body!’

  If they had but known it, something near the truth was in one of those light-hearted suggestions.

  The Assistant Commissioner (Crime) of Birmingham City Police had pulled out all the necessary stops when, after discussions with other senior officers, he had considered the news delivered by the CID from Winson Green. He instructed his Detective Chief Superintendent to use whatever resources were needed to follow up this bizarre homicide and a number of Headquarters staff were immediately set to research the background of the wartime gangs and Michael Doyle in particular. Some records from wartime had been destroyed in the blitzes and others seem to have vanished, but there was enough information to put together an overview of the situation ten to twelve years ago, added to by personal recollections of some older officers who had been around at the time. Due to retirements and transfer to other divisions or even other forces, these were not numerous, but overall, when the Head of CID had a meeting with a few divisional detectives later that day, they had a general picture of the villainy that had abounded a decade earlier. Trevor Hartnell was one of those present and though only an inspector, his central position in the case so far caused the others to defer to his more immediate knowledge.

  ‘Do you reckon that this chap Blair has anything else to tell us?’ asked the chief.

  ‘Yes, he’s holding out on something, sir,’ said Hartnell.

  ‘But probably he’s trying to distance himself from having been one of Doyle’s outfit. I don’t think he knows who the dead man was or what happened to him. He says it was before his time and I suspect he’s telling the truth there.’

  ‘No chance of getting Doyle back, I suppose?’ asked one of the DCIs from an adjacent division.

  The chief superintendent shook his large head. ‘Not a hope! We’ve been down that route before and it’s a dead end. No extradition with Spain, that’s why all these damned crooks make a beeline for it.’

  ‘What was it that sent him scooting down there?’ asked another chief inspector, who was relatively new to the city.

  ‘It had been building up; we were gunning for him,’ said the chief. ‘The final thing was when one of his men decided to save his own skin by squealing about a series of big house robberies in Worcestershire and the Welsh border. For the first time, we had a chance to hang them on Doyle, but he got wind of it and scarpered to Malaga.’

  The DCI scratched his chin thoughtfully.

  ‘He operated down in Wales as well? Any possible connection with the body being found down there?’

  The Chief was dubious. ‘A possibility, I suppose. But the crooks from our fair city have always had long arms and the big houses and sparse population down there have always been a happy hunting ground for them. Burglary was the main occupation, though in the days of food shortages, they fed their black-market rackets with a lot of rustled sheep and even cattle from Mid-Wales.’

  The discussion went on for a time, but no definite plan of action was drawn up, apart from the exhortation to find and grill as many former members of Doyle’s nefarious outfit as possible. In the meanwhile, the ACC decided on issuing a press release which would give all the details they had, including the Batman tattoo, with the hope that someone in or around the huge city might turn in some information that would help identify their mysterious corpse.

  In expectation of the visit of the Dumas pair on Saturday, Moira had made a jam-and-cream sponge for them, one of her specialities. She was an excellent cook, mainly because she enjoyed the kitchen so much. Richard and Angela had talked about her talents many times, deciding that her late husband must have been a lucky man for the short time he was married to Moira, before the tragic accident.

  Their visitors arrived on time, Louis driving an MK VII Jaguar, which confirmed Richard’s conviction that his income was derived from far more than the profit from a small vineyard. Angela entertained Emily Dumas in her pleasant lounge overlooking the valley, while Richard took her husband on a tour of his ‘estate’ to proudly show off his two rows of recently-planted vines. While Louis Dumas politely admired them and commented on the excellent south-east-facing site, the two women chatted quietly, avoiding the mysterious subject which had brought them to Garth House that day. Angela found her companion a gentle and charming woman, but as Richard had sensed, she felt that there was an underlying sadness in the French woman.

  When the two men returned from the hillside, Richard’s head full of wise advice on the arcane mysteries of viniculture, Angela went off to make tea and returned with a trolley complete with their best — and only — tea service, of Noritake china brought back from Singapore by Richard. Sandwiches were made with local salmon from the Wye, covertly produced by Jimmy with a meaningful wink, followed by Moira’s classic sponge.

  When the ritual hospitality had been completed, with every sign of genuine appreciation on the part of the pair from St Mary Church, Angela stood up to push the tea trolley towards the door.

  ‘If you have something confidential to discuss with Richard, perhaps I should leave you in peace?’ she offered. Immediately, Louis jumped to his feet and raised his hands in a Gallic gesture.

  ‘No, please stay, Doctor Bray!’ he pleaded. ‘From what I understand of your expertise here, you may well be able to advise and perhaps assist.’

  Quite happy to hear what all this was about, Angela abandoned her trolley and sat down again in one of the armchairs, the two visitors occupying the settee, with Richard in the remaining part of his late aunt’s three-piece suite. Louis sat forward, his hands clasped between his knees as he broached the sensitive reason for his visit.

  ‘I am afraid we have a family problem. It goes back a long way — in fact, about twenty-five years!’

  His story was quite long and Angela found it very sad, certainly explaining the unhappiness that both Richard and she had sensed in the pair opposite.

  Louis described how he had been commissioned into the French army in the mid-1920s. Soon afterwards, he married Emily and she accompanied him when in 1928 he was posted to Indo-China, which was part of the then extensive French colonial empire. They were sent to the relatively remote garrison town of Yen Bai in the north of Vietnam where Emily, a teacher by profession, taught part-time in the small garrison school. She soon became pregnant and rather than having her live in the bleak garrison quarters, Louis rented a pleasant bungalow a couple of miles outside the town. There was no lack of servants to look after them and when their son Maurice was born, he had a devoted baby amah, a Siamese woman named Sukhon.r />
  Unfortunately for the Dumas family, they came to Yen Bai when political trouble was brewing, an upsurge of feeling against the French colonialists. On the tenth of February 1930, about fifty soldiers from the locally-recruited regiment revolted and joined an equal number of nationalist party members in a sudden attack on the French officers and troops.

  On the day of the uprising, Captain Dumas was already on duty in the town, his wife being in her school. All officers and men were recalled into the garrison, where they had to organize a defence, then a counter-attack. Unfortunately, in spite of desperate concern for their nine-month-old son at home, they were besieged for most of the day and quite unable to leave to bring him into the safety of the garrison. When the short-lived revolt was crushed, apparently with great ferocity, Louis with a troop of his men, rushed back to his home to find it completely destroyed, along with several other nearby residences.

  ‘It was burnt to the ground, just a heap of smouldering ashes!’ he said, with a bleak resignation still in his voice, a quarter of a century after the awful event. ‘One of our servants was lying dead nearby, beaten to death as he presumably attempted to escape into the trees. There was no trace of the other three servants, including the amah — nor of our baby son, Maurice!’

  There was a sob from the settee as Emily Dumas put a handkerchief to her eyes. Angela laid a compassionate hand on her shoulder. ‘What a terrible thing to have happened,’ she said softly.

  Louis nodded. ‘We were naturally utterly distraught,’ he continued, in his rather formal English. ‘Emily was so ill that the doctors soon sent her back to France to live with her parents in Paris. I stayed behind in Yen Bai to make all the enquiries I possibly could, before also being repatriated to France on compassionate grounds.’