At this point, Angela came in from the office clutching a sheaf of papers, but she diverted to the window area to hear what was going on.
‘I’m getting taught some biochemistry by Sian here,’ said Richard. ‘Damned good she is, too!’
The young blonde made a face at him, but she flushed with pleasure at his praise.
‘How’s it done, then?’ demanded Angela.
As she joined the audience, he explained. ‘As you said, it can be done now on a microscopic scale using live tissue in frozen sections, but we haven’t got the equipment. The same can be done using the same reagents on big slices like these, but it’s prohibitively expensive to use large volumes of stuff like nitro-BT. However, recently there have been attempts to use cheaper chemicals, which is what I’m going to try.’
Intrigued, Angela wanted to know what they were.
‘According to some chaps in Czechoslovakia and Germany, potassium tellurite and TTC can react with dehydrogenase enzymes and show up deficiencies. I messed about with tellurite a bit just before I left Singapore, but it was too unreliable to be of much use, so I turned to TTC. That’s why we’ve got some here. I brought it back with me.’
‘What’s TTC?’ demanded Sian, determined to be able to show off the next time she went to her biochemistry session.
‘Triphenyl-tetrazolium chloride,’ he replied. ‘A long name, but relatively cheap stuff.’ He reached across the table and picked up a small bottle containing white powder and placed it in front of Sian.
‘If you would be kind enough to make up a one per cent solution in a slightly alkaline phosphate buffer and — if we can borrow space in Angela’s incubator for half an hour — we’ll see what happens.’
As soon as Trevor Hartnell got back to the police headquarters in Aberystwyth, he sat in an empty office offered by Meirion Thomas and did some urgent telephoning. First, he rang his wife to say he wouldn’t be home that night, but would be staying in a bed and breakfast place on the seafront, organized by the local CID. He wanted to be on hand if the forensic report, promised by next morning, added any weight to their enquiries, so it was not worth trekking back to Birmingham, only to have to return. After assuring his wife that he would do all he could to be back home before Christmas Eve, to go shopping for presents for their two kids, he spoke at length to his Chief Inspector in Winson Green. He brought him up to date with the visit to the derelict van and the interview with the former Czech soldier, then asked for some digging into the antecedents of ‘James Brown’.
‘I’ve got a suspicion that he may have been on our patch towards the end of the war,’ he explained. ‘Can you organize a search to see if a Jaroslav Beran shows up anywhere in the records for that time, especially if there’s any connection with Mickey Doyle?’
His DCI promised to get some men on to it straight away, and with nothing more he could do that day, decided to go for a bracing walk along the promenade in the chill December wind.
After Sian had made up a fresh solution of TTC and Richard had submerged a centimetre-thick slice of the heart in it, the shallow glass dish was placed in the body-heat incubator and left in peace for twenty minutes.
‘Leave it too long and there can be a non-specific deposition of the tetrazolium all over the tissue,’ cautioned Richard.
‘What’s the actual basis of the test?’ asked Angela, curious about something outside her usual expertise.
‘The dehydrogenase enzymes in the muscle convert the colourless TTC to a red dye which precipitates out on to the surface. If there’s no enzyme present — or a marked reduction — then nothing happens in that area and the tissue remains unstained.’
They watched the bench timer, bought in a kitchen sundries shop, and when the time was up, there was a feeling of anticipation, as even Moira, aware of something unusual going on, came to watch. Though earlier she had baulked at the fresh heart lying in the tray, the circle of muscle in its glass dish seemed much less repulsive as Richard laid it on the big table.
‘There’s a pale patch there!’ exclaimed Sian, proud that her efforts in making up the solution had contributed to success.
‘Yep, just where it should be,’ agreed Richard, pointing with forceps at one side of the thick circle of ventricle. ‘Blockage of the descending branch of the left coronary artery would cause an infarct of that part of the heart.’
‘So what’s the significance in this case, Doctor Pryor?’ asked Moira.
‘It takes some time for the death of the muscle to become apparent. How long depends on the way you look at it… just naked eye, with no fancy techniques like this would show nothing for many hours, even a day or two after the blockage. Using ordinary histology would shorten that time, but this is the most sensitive, together with the microscopic techniques that we can’t do here yet.’
‘So you feel that this rules out the possibility that the push on the chest caused the death?’ persisted Moira.
Richard shook his head. ‘I can’t go that far. But it shows that the infarct — the dead tissue — must have been present well before the incident at the side of the road. This was a man with severe coronary disease, who had already suffered an infarct, so that he was in danger of dropping dead at any time.’
Angela joined the discussion. ‘But you can’t rule out the possibility that the squabble pushed him over the edge, so to speak?’
‘No, I can’t. I’m pretty sure that the physical act of pushing him in the chest, which has not left any mark whatsoever, is not relevant. But anyone in a dispute gets an adrenalin release — the old “fight or flight” reaction. Their blood pressure goes up, their heart rate increases and this could well trigger an abnormality of its rhythm, which in a damaged heart, could cause it to stop altogether.’
‘So where does that leave the lorry driver — and the family?’ queried Moira, who was more interested in the legal liability than the pathology.
‘That’s a legal matter, not medical. On past experience, I would think that a criminal prosecution would be unlikely, as if it came to trial, the defence would have a field day with the fact that the deceased had already had a recent, potentially fatal myocardial infarct. Still, you never know, there’s another legal axiom, which is that “you have to take your victims as you find them”.’
Moira’s smooth brow wrinkled in puzzlement at this.
‘I don’t really follow that, doctor.’
Richard did his best to illustrate the point.
‘Look, if someone hits another on the head with a blow that normally would not be expected to kill him, but that person has an abnormally thin skull and dies of a brain haemorrhage, it’s not a valid excuse to claim that the attacker did not know of the thin skull. Actually, in practice, it’s a good point for the defence in mitigation, but the principle is the same as someone with a heart condition.’
Angela, also familiar with many legal dilemmas, pointed out to Moira the difference between criminal and civil actions.
‘The standard of proof in a criminal trial has to be “beyond reasonable doubt”, but in a civil action for damages, it only has to be a “balance of probabilities” which means that it only has to be proved that it was more likely than not that the outcome was due to the alleged cause. So if the police don’t take any action, maybe the family will sue the driver.’
Their secretary was looking bemused by now, but found it all fascinating. ‘I’ll have to go away and think about this,’ she said with a sigh. ‘I wish I knew a lot more about these things.’
As she went back to her typewriter, Richard went off to telephone the Hereford coroner to give him much the same opinion as he had offered to Moira.
NINETEEN
On Thursday morning, Trevor Hartnell was sitting in Meirion Thomas’s room when a phone call came through for him from Birmingham. His DCI, a gaunt Scotsman nearing retirement, had news for him about Jaroslav Beran.
‘We’ve turned up something about him from way back in 1944. He’s never actually been convicted
of anything serious up here — just a few drunk and disorderlies and a couple of minor assaults — but he was pulled in a couple of times for questioning on bigger stuff, then released for want of evidence.’
‘What sort of thing was he involved in?’ asked Trevor, giving a thumbs-up sign to the Welsh DI sitting across the desk.
‘He was suspected of being the driver in a smash-and-grab on a jeweller’s in Aston, but the main witness conveniently vanished before trial. Then there was a big black-market meat investigation that he was certainly involved in, but again it all fizzled out for lack of evidence. That one was almost certainly a Mickey Doyle enterprise, as it was known that it was he who had put the frighteners on some of the witnesses. Oddly enough, some of the lamb and mutton involved was known to have been rustled from Wales.’
‘Anything else known about him?’
‘His background was very dodgy. He was virtually kicked out of the Czech Free Forces after deliberately injuring himself, though again they couldn’t prove it. He turned up in Handsworth in forty-three, but after the black-market case, he vanished from the scene altogether.’
Trevor Hartnell shifted the receiver to his other hand, as he made some notes on a pad.
‘Does anybody actually remember him from those days, boss?’
His DCI told him that a couple of older uniformed officers from Handsworth recalled ‘this Czech bastard’, as they called him. ‘A real hard case, they said. Heavy drinker and violent at the drop of a hat, often involved in punch-ups with other toerags. One of them says he used to frequent the Barley Mow pub, which is interesting, as it was one of Doyle’s hang-outs.’
There was nothing more the DCI could pass on, but he promised to keep a couple of men asking around about Jaroslav Beran. When he had rung off, Trevor repeated what he’d heard to Meirion Thomas.
‘Sounds as if he was a low-level crook up in your place,’ was the Welshman’s response. ‘A getaway driver and an enforcer, presumably working for this Doyle character.’
‘Odd that he suddenly disappeared from Birmingham and turned up in Aberystwyth. His convictions for receiving were since he came down here, according to the probation people.’
Meirion leaned back in his chair and looked out at his favourite view, the cold sea now choppy in the winter wind.
‘Maybe things were getting too warm for him in Birmingham — or perhaps this Doyle wanted him as a sort of lookout man down here. A lot of the country house thefts were in Mid-Wales and along the Marches.’
‘You never got a whiff of him in your sheep stealing cases, did you?’ asked Trevor. ‘It seems he was involved in the black-market meat racket up in B’rum.’
The stocky DI shook his head. ‘I never knew he existed until this week. He’s kept his head down pretty well.’
One of the youngest detective constables came in with two cups of tea and a plate of McVitie’s digestive biscuits.
‘I like a proper cup and saucer,’ declared Meirion, lifting a yellow cup with Royal Welsh Show 1927 emblazoned on it. ‘Can’t be doing with this new fad for thick mugs… like drinking with a lot of navvies on a building site.’
Trevor grinned to himself at this unsuspected fad from a policeman who looked as if he could wrestle an ox, but then brought his mind back to the current problem.
‘So what do we do next? Knowing this chap Beran used to be a gangster doesn’t take us any further forward in our murder without more evidence.’
It was Thursday afternoon before some help in that direction arrived. Hartnell and his fellow DI were treated to lunch by David John Jones, going down the promenade to a small hotel which had one of the few restaurants open in the depths of winter. After a couple of pints of Felinfoel bitter, they sat down to a leek soup, which the other two said was cawl. It was followed by a good steak and three veg. A rich bread-and-butter pudding made Trevor suspect that the rigours of a decade of rationing may not have been so severe in Cardiganshire as in Birmingham and by the time he had walked back to the police headquarters and climbed all those stairs, he was glad to be able to drop into a chair in the office he had borrowed.
However, his rest was short-lived, as within minutes, Meirion Thomas appeared at the door.
‘Just had the forensic people on the line from Cardiff,’ he announced. ‘They’ve found human blood in the samples they took from the van! No doubt about it, they said, it certainly wasn’t just animal. Not only that, but it’s Group B, Rhesus negative, whatever that means. Doctor Rees says that B negative is relatively unusual. Only about eight per cent of the population are B, but only two per cent are B-negative.’
‘Are you going to tell me what I hope you’re going to tell me?’ asked Hartnell, rising from his chair.
‘Yes, Philip Rees confirmed that the corpse in the bog was also B-negative! Doesn’t prove it was his blood in the van, but it’s a damn good bet that it was!’
Though after a decade or so, urgency was not really a prime consideration, the looming imminence of Christmas sent the detectives back out to Beran’s cottage that same afternoon. Trevor Hartnell was especially anxious to get home next day, to avoid his wife’s exasperation, though after eight years as a policeman’s wife she was getting used to his inconvenient absences.
Sergeant Parry drove them in a black Wolseley 6/80, the archetypal post-war British police car, and parked it across the front of Gelli Derwen cottage. He sat in the car with a uniformed constable in the front passenger seat, while Meirion and Hartnell went to the door, where once again a dog’s bark turned to a whine after they had banged on the panels. After a delay, James Brown dragged the door open and scowled at them.
‘Now what you want?’ he growled through the crack allowed by the length of security chain on the inside.
‘We want you to come with us to the police station in Aberystwyth to answer some questions,’ announced Meirion Thomas.
‘Go to hell, I done nothing!’ was the response. ‘I told you last time, I know nothing about what you talk.’
‘That was before we found blood soaked into the floor of your old van,’ snapped Thomas.
There was a coarse laugh from behind the door. ‘What the hell you talk about? That damn farmer had my van for years. He carry all sorts of animals in it, plenty of blood.’
‘Not human blood, the same type as the man buried down in the bog there!’ Hartnell gestured over his shoulder at the huge marsh in the distance behind him.
Beran’s response was unexpected. He closed the door, his visitors expecting him to unhook the chain inside, but instead there was a click as the lock engaged.
‘The bugger’s shut it on us!’ snapped Meirion and hammered on the panel. There was a momentary silence, then a muffled whine of pain from the dog inside, but the door remained obstinately closed.
‘He may be doing a runner!’ shouted Trevor. ‘Let’s get around the back.’
As they started to trot around the cracked cement path that went around one side of the cottage, there was the sudden roar of a motorcycle engine starting up. By the time they reached the back corner of the building, they saw Beran flying past them on the other side of a straggling hedge, where a side lane ran out towards the road.
‘He can’t get far, the number of his bike will be on record,’ shouted Meirion.
Beran didn’t get far, for as soon as he heard the engine start up, Gwyn Parry had moved the Wolseley forward so that it blocked the narrow exit to the lane. He reached it just before Beran’s BSA, which skidded in a desperate attempt to squeeze through the closing gap and fell on its side. The sergeant and constable were on him before he could get his leg from under the bike and in seconds, the PC’s handcuffs were snapped around his wrists.
The two detective inspectors hurried up, just as Gwyn hauled the would-be fugitive to his feet.
‘Put him in the car, sergeant, we’ll take him back to Aber.’
Meirion turned to the constable. ‘You’d better stay here and keep an eye on the place until we get back. And look
after that poor dog, will you?’
Jaroslav Beran — neither of the detectives could think of him as James Brown now — stood glowering at them, but was keeping his mouth firmly closed. Dressed in a grubby pair of canvas trousers and a thick navy-blue jumper, he offered no resistance as he was pushed into the back of the police car. Meirion sat alongside him and Trevor went into the front alongside Gwyn Parry as they drove back to Aberystwyth.
‘Where were you thinking of going on that bike?’ asked Meirion, conversationally. ‘Back to Birmingham, was it?’
Beran remained mute, as he did when he was taken to a dismal interview room on the ground floor of the police station on the Esplanade. However, after being given a cup of tea and a cigarette, he unbent enough to complain that he had done nothing wrong and that they had kidnapped him unlawfully.
‘I reckon your parole has gone down the tubes now,’ advised Trevor Hartnell. ‘Obstructing the police in the course of their duties is enough for that. And now we want an explanation of how you happened to have had a van which has traces of human blood in the back.’
Vehemently, Beran argued that he knew nothing about it. ‘The bloody van had many owners before me, you find the log book and see their names,’ he snarled. ‘Then I sold it to a farmer, they all carried black-market meat for years.’
Meirion for once felt the urge to be facetious.
‘I know this is Cardiganshire, but even so, there’s not many cannibals around these parts. This was human blood, of a rare group which was the same as that body found less than half a mile from your cottage.’
Hartnell took up the questioning. ‘Funny you should mention black-market meat. We know you were mixed up with Mickey Doyle in Birmingham years ago. He ran rustling and illegal meat rackets, didn’t he? Is this all to do with that?’
For the first time, Jaroslav failed to deny anything. He sat staring down at the table, his cigarette burning down unheeded between his fingers.
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