Grounds for Appeal

by Bernard Knight

  ‘They say the law’s an ass and now I quite believe them,’ said their fiery technician, her socialist hackles rising. ‘All those old judges, with their Eton and Oxford backgrounds, should be sacked and some younger ones appointed, who know what ordinary life is really like.’

  Moira was more thoughtful about the debacle and got Richard to explain what had gone wrong. He repeated what the Queen’s Counsel had said to them.

  ‘What did he mean by “natural justice”?’ she asked, her growing interest in the law evident once again.

  ‘I’m not all that clear, but I think the general thrust is that, notwithstanding all the conventional rules of legal procedure, if a situation seems a flagrant disregard of common sense and fair play, then the rules should be circumvented . . . but you’ll be able to tell me more about it in a year or two’s time, when you’re a legal expert yourself!’

  Their forensic debate was interrupted by the phone ringing in the office and Moira went off to answer it. She came back to tell Richard that the police in Aberystwyth wanted to speak to him and when he picked up the receiver, he found it was Meirion Thomas on the other end. They spoke for about ten minutes and when Richard went back to his cold cup of coffee, he had more news to tell his colleagues.

  ‘It sounds as if our Body in the Bog case has been wrapped up as far as it can go,’ he announced.

  The others clamoured for the details, all having had a stake in the unusual case. Angela had done the original serology on the tissue from the borehole, Sian had prepared histology sections of the skin and the bone disease, while Moira had typed all the reports.

  ‘So who was he? And have they got the chap who killed him?’ demanded Sian.

  Richard retold the chain of events which Meirion had described to him.

  ‘Some antique dealer recalled seeing a man with a Batman tattoo years ago. They traced his van back to Cardiganshire and found old blood stains in the back, of the same group as our corpse. The van belonged to a former Czech soldier, who was in a gang in Birmingham, then got moved to Borth to act as a fence for stolen goods and a lookout for sheep rustling.’

  ‘Extraordinary story!’ said Angela. ‘You wouldn’t believe it if you read it in a novel. They did pretty well to get a blood group from a van after a decade.’

  ‘You haven’t told us yet who he was!’ persisted Sian.

  ‘Some American seaman called Josh Andersen, who decided he didn’t want to be torpedoed in 1942 and ran off to become a gangster in the Midlands. It seems that he started pinching money from the gang boss, who had him rubbed out, as they say in Chicago.’

  He went on to relate what DI Thomas had told him, about the Czech’s confession that he had been lumbered with a headless corpse for disposal.

  ‘A pretty tall story, that!’ observed Moira. ‘Have they charged him with the murder?’

  ‘Apparently not, though they’re holding him as an accessory for the time being. No doubt the Director of Public Prosecutions will have to sort it out. Meirion thinks that probably either the gang leader, Mickey Doyle, or one of his henchmen actually did the deed. But Doyle legged it to Spain several years ago and they can’t get him out.’

  ‘So why cut his head off?’ queried Sian with a little shudder of horror, even though she had known about it for weeks.

  ‘Retribution for trying to fleece his boss, apparently. This Doyle villain seemed to have taken grave exception to this Josh skimming part of the profits from his protection rackets, brothels and casinos, so he had him killed and then exhibited his head on festive occasions as a warning to the rest of his gang.’

  They kicked the topic around for a time, squeezing every last bit of information from Richard, who only knew what Meirion had told him.

  ‘We must tell Priscilla about this, unless it’s already all over the local papers down in Cardiganshire,’ said Angela. ‘She was in on it from the very beginning. In fact, she owes her new university post to this beheaded gangster, as otherwise she would never have met Doctor Boross!’

  ‘Well, it certainly beats going down the Labour Exchange as a means of looking for a job!’ giggled Sian.

  It was one of those cold, fine days that occur in winter, with a thin blue sky looking down on frosted fields, as Angela and Richard drove to Cardiff on their way to the vineyard in St Mary Church. They had decided to make a day of it, as it was the first time that Angela had been to the city, declared the capital of Wales only a few months before. After an early lunch in the Angel Hotel, the place where Louis Dumas had met his alleged son, Richard walked her around the centre of the city, which he knew well from six years there as a medical student. She dutifully admired the huge castle and the superb buildings of the civic centre, although secretly she would have preferred spending the time in the three large department stores.

  Then a forty-minute drive through the Vale of Glamorgan brought them to ‘Chateau Dumas’, as her partner insisted on calling it, where a rather apprehensive Louis and Emily received them courteously. They ushered them into the sitting room, where a tall young man rose to greet them. Black-haired and serious of face, the two doctors saw nothing of either of his presumed parents in his features – but Richard recalled that the younger son Victor also bore no particular resemblance to them. The father introduced him as Pierre Fouret and the soft-spoken Canadian replied in an accent which was more French than North American.

  ‘I understand that we all have to undergo this ordeal of the needle!’ he said, in a tone intended to lighten the rather tense atmosphere. Angela, who was rather taken by this good-looking man, went along with his ploy.

  ‘Just a small prick in the arm, Monsieur Fouret. I guarantee that you’ll survive!’

  The bloodletting was performed swiftly and discreetly in Louis’s study across the hall, Angela’s experienced hands taking the three samples into her labelled tubes with the minimum of drama or disturbance. When she had repacked her bag and washed her hands, they went back to the sitting room for the inevitable tea and biscuits. They made rather strained small talk for a while, keeping off the subject of the Dumas family problems. Pierre told them of his life as a tractor salesman and the travelling it entailed.

  ‘I’m off back to Quebec next week and will probably be in the States and Mexico for a few months,’ he explained. ‘I doubt I’ll be sent back to Europe until the autumn.’

  Richard wondered if this was a coded message that he would not be hanging around the family, seeking to ingratiate himself with them. The time soon came for them to leave and as they rose to go, Richard learned that Louis intended driving Pierre back to Cardiff to catch the train for London.

  Richard and Angela made their way to the Humber, parked on the gravel area outside, as the Dumas clan said their goodbyes. Angela got into the front seat and as Richard was putting her case in the boot, he saw another car turning into the driveway from the road outside. It was a new yellow Triumph TR2, a two-seater sports car with the hood down, in spite of the winter weather. It drew up nearby and Victor Dumas got out, muffled in a heavy car coat and a scarf. He looked rather surprised to see Richard, but greeted him affably.

  ‘Hello, doctor! I didn’t expect to see you back here in this cold weather. I’m afraid the vines are all fast asleep for the next few months.’

  Feeling rather uncomfortable, Richard saw no alternative but to say why he was there.

  ‘Just called in to take some blood samples. We were just leaving, actually.’

  Victor’s face changed in an instant as he realized the implications. His smile vanished and his face reddened in anger.

  ‘Is that bloody crook here?’ he snarled. ‘I’ll not have him pestering my parents, they’ve suffered enough!’

  As if on cue, the trio from the house appeared at the front door and stopped dead as soon as they saw Victor outside. As he marched angrily towards them, his father stepped forward and attempted to act as peacemaker.

  ‘Victor, come and meet Pierre Fouret. He’s just come to have a blood sampl
e taken . . .’

  He got no further, as Victor began ranting at the older man, who stood impassively under a barrage of invective and abuse, the thrust of which was that he was a scheming charlatan, out to make trouble and wheedle his way into his parents’ affections.

  Emily began to weep, Louis tried ineffectually to restrain his younger son and Richard wished the ground would open up under him, so that he could avoid witnessing this highly embarrassing family feud. He was glad that Angela was already in the car, hunkering down and pretending that she was unaware of what was going on.

  The row escalated rapidly, as Victor closed with Pierre and tried to drag him away from his mother and father. Although the visitor had kept silent until now, he resisted Victor’s physical force and told him to behave himself.

  This further inflamed the aggressor, who began shouting at him to go and continued to pull at his arm. Pierre shook him off, his self-control obviously weakening under the provocation. The climax came when Victor swung a punch at the other man, catching him on the shoulder. Pierre pushed him away, in a last attempt to distance himself, but this made things worse, as Victor followed up with a heavy blow in the stomach, which made Pierre grunt with pain. This was too much for his self-restraint and he landed a fist squarely on Victor’s nose, which immediately began to bleed profusely. He staggered back and almost fell into Richard’s arms, as the pathologist had decided that he had better try to dampen down the rumpus.

  His first reaction was to pull out his handkerchief and offer it to Victor, who automatically clapped it to his nose, then thrust it back as he pulled out his own.

  ‘I’m going and I’ll not be back while that impostor is here,’ he screamed emotionally, though it was somewhat muffled as he staunched the dribble from his bruised nose. Without another word, he almost ran to his car and sped away in a shower of gravel.

  Angela was about to get out of the Humber, her better nature overcoming her reluctance to becoming embroiled in a family fracas. She thought she had better see if there was any female comfort she could offer the distressed Emily Dumas, but Richard, after a quick word with her husband, came back to the car and slipped into the driving seat.

  ‘Louis says it would be best if we left them to cope with their embarrassment alone,’ he explained and with some half-hearted waves from the group at the door, they left the unhappy house with a rather guilty sense of relief.

  It took Angela almost the whole of the next day to put the samples through a wide battery of grouping tests and Sian and Moira had left by the time she went into Richard’s room with a sheaf of papers in her hand. He looked up from his microscope, where he was going through some slides prepared by Sian that day.

  ‘Have you worked your magic to a satisfactory conclusion, Doctor Bray?’ he asked, being in one of his frequent whimsical moods.

  Angela sat on a stool alongside him and waved the forms at him. ‘I don’t suppose you want all the details, as I know you have never grasped the beautiful logic of genetics.’

  He grinned back at her. ‘It’s a blind spot in my otherwise powerful intellect! Could never fathom all these blood groups with fancy names – Rhesus, MNS, Lutheran and all the rest of them. Just give me the answer, lady!’

  She dropped the papers on the desk in front of him.

  ‘Right, if that’s what you want. Firstly, Pierre Fouret or Maurice, or whatever you want to call him, is certainly not eliminated as being the biological offspring of Emily and Louis Dumas. In fact, in terms of probability, there’s about an eighty-five per cent likelihood that he is their son, given the congruity of various subgroups.’

  Richard gave a thin whistle. ‘Well, well! I wonder what Victor will say when he learns that? Point out that there’s still a fifteen per cent chance that Maurice is not his older brother?’

  He stopped, as he saw that Angela was looking at him with an odd expression on her handsome face.

  ‘Remember that handkerchief you gave him yesterday, when Victor had the punch on the nose? Well, I took it from the dirty-clothes basket this morning and ran a few simple ABO tests on the bloodstains.’

  He stared at her, wide-eyed. ‘You’re not going to tell me what I think you’re going to tell me, are you?’

  She nodded slowly. ‘I am indeed, Richard! There’s no reason why Victor’s mother can’t be Emily Dumas – but Louis Dumas certainly isn’t his father!’

  Richard reached out and laid a hand on her reports as he spoke. ‘Louis hinted that their marriage had a rough patch when they came back to Paris from Indo-China. Are we going to tell them?’

  Angela looked at him sternly. ‘No way! We were hired to determine whether Maurice was their son, not Victor.’

  She slid the top report from under his fingers and carefully ripped it into a dozen pieces and then dropped them into the waste-paper basket.

  ‘That’s the best place for surprises like that, Doctor Pryor!’

  It was another month before the next big surprise came their way, this time a much more welcome one.

  Moira brought in the day’s mail when they were sitting in the staff room for their elevenses and amongst the few envelopes for Richard was one with a Bristol postmark. Embossed on the back flap was the familiar name of a solicitor’s firm.

  ‘Let’s hope this is a cheque for our fees and expenses,’ he said hopefully. ‘Though it usually takes months, even after umpteen reminders.’

  He opened it and as he studied the few typed paragraphs on the single sheet of headed paper, his eyebrows seemed to climb up his forehead.

  ‘Good God! I can hardly believe it!’

  ‘So it’s not a cheque, unless they’ve given us a couple of thousand,’ said Angela drily.

  ‘No, but it’s from Douglas Bailey. Just a preliminary note to let us know that someone else has confessed to killing Arthur Shaw – and that it’s expected that Millie Wilson will be released in the near future!’

  The three women were agog with surprised excitement, as they had all been outraged by the rejection of Millie’s Appeal in January. Even the usually reticent Angela demanded more details.

  ‘How did that come about? Bailey must surely say who did it?’

  ‘He says it was one of the other lodgers in that house, a layabout called Roscoe Toms, who was one of those in the poker game that night.’

  ‘Not the man who found the body next morning, was it?’ asked Sian excitedly. ‘In detective stories, it’s usually the finder who did it!’

  Richard shook his head and told them the rest of what the solicitor had written.

  ‘At least this fellow Toms won’t hang . . . because he’s already dead! That’s how it came to light a few days ago. He was in a drunken fight in some other back-street poker game in St Paul’s and got his neck slashed in a knife fight. He bled to death at the scene, but made a dying declaration in the presence of a local doctor and a police officer, in which he confessed to killing Arthur Shaw. It happened at two o’clock in the morning during a row over an accusation of cheating in the poker game, in which Roscoe lost a lot of money to Shaw.’

  ‘Will that be enough to exonerate Millie Wilson?’ asked Moira. ‘What’s this “dying declaration” business?’

  ‘I’m a bit hazy myself,’ admitted Richard. ‘It’s a rare event, but as far as I recall, a person must be dying and know that he has no hope of survival, when it’s assumed that he would have no motive for not telling the truth. In those circumstances, any statement he makes in the presence of more than one witness is admissible in evidence.’

  ‘At least that’s more than ours was at the High Court!’ remarked Angela, rather bitterly.

  Moira nodded sagely. ‘And it gives a new twist to the meaning of “natural justice” that we were talking about last month!’

 

 

 
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