According to the Evidence

by Bernard Knight

  ‘That chain hoist looks a likely candidate,’ said Richard, pointing at the device.

  Crippen nodded his agreement. ‘I thought that, too. How’s it work?’

  The DC with the passion for tractors enlightened him. ‘You keep pulling on that loop of chain, which lowers the hook down. To lift it up, you just reverse the direction of pull. It’s geared so you can lift a hell of a weight, though it’s slow.’

  ‘What’s it for?’ asked Angela.

  ‘Lifting anything heavy – here it would be for hoisting an engine out of its chassis, things like that.’

  The DI contemplated the device hanging up in the air. ‘It’s the obvious place, but that was a rope mark around the neck, not a chain.’

  ‘The surface of the hook should be taped for fibres,’ said Angela. ‘If there are any, they might match those I took from the victim’s neck.’

  ‘Better leave that for the lab chap tomorrow,’ growled Crippen. ‘We’ll get all the fingerprints first, just in case. Not that that rusty chain will be much use for prints.’

  ‘Where’s this rope, I wonder,’ asked Richard, peering around the barn, which apart from the tractors, a couple of Land Rovers and an old car, had all sorts of junk lying around. There were parts of engines, oil drums, dismantled farm machinery and numerous shapeless pieces of rusty metal. Among all this there were several lengths of rope of various lengths and sizes.

  ‘Those fibres were coarse and looked like hemp or sisal,’ said Angela. ‘And the mark on the skin suggests it was about half an inch wide.’

  ‘Some of that coil over there would fit the bill,’ said John Nichols, pointing at a hank thrown over a drum of Duckhams lubricating oil standing alongside a grey Ferguson tractor.

  ‘All the rope will have to be packed up and taken back to Cardiff tomorrow,’ said the biologist. ‘Those fibres from the neck will have to be matched against them.’

  Richard Pryor was staring up at the chain hoist hanging innocently above their heads. ‘Apart from the other evidence, it certainly rules out a suicide,’ he commented.

  ‘How d’you mean, doc?’ asked Crippen.

  ‘Well, he would hardly sling a rope over the hook, put the noose around his neck and then start hauling himself up by pulling hand over hand on the chain. He’d pass out before he got his feet off the ground!’

  The detective inspector agreed. ‘No doubt someone did it for him, after strangling him. Then he must have spotted those fingermarks on the neck and realized that they gave the game away. So he decided to have him down again and squash him under the Fordson.’

  Richard rubbed his chin, now bristly after a long day. ‘He must have been left hanging for some time, otherwise that lividity wouldn’t have had a chance to settle in his legs.’

  ‘How long, doctor?’ queried the sergeant. ‘The killer must have either hung about here all that time or come back later.’

  ‘Can’t put an exact time on it; it’s very variable,’ said Pryor. ‘But I suspect it must have been at least a couple of hours to get that intense.’

  Crippen mulled this over. ‘So unless he waited here for a hell of a long time, he must have come back to the barn. Sounds like a local job, not just some passing thug.’

  His sergeant snorted. ‘One of those buggers up at the farm, sir! Got to be. Who else would want to croak a boozy mechanic?’

  Richard Pryor decided that he didn’t want to get involved in any police business, so he prepared to leave them to it.

  ‘Dr Bray and I will get back home, if we can’t do any more for you. It’s been a long day.’

  The DI was sincere in his gratitude when he walked them to the Humber.

  ‘You’ve done a damned good job for us – and you, ma’am!’ he added. ‘I’ll keep you informed of what’s going on here. Perhaps you could have a word tomorrow on the phone with the forensic people in Cardiff, to tell them what specimens you took and that sort of thing.’

  Angela promised to liaise with her old colleagues, as she knew all the case officers in Cardiff. ‘We’ve collected blood and urine samples for alcohol, especially as he’s got this history of drinking. Maybe that’s at the bottom of all this?’

  As Crippen opened the car door for Angela, he gave a grim promise.

  ‘You may be right. Tomorrow, I’ll be squeezing all I can from those folk up at the farm.’

  It was dark before they got back to Tintern Parva, the village nearest to Garth House at the lower end of the Wye Valley.

  As Richard was putting the car away in the coach house at the back, Angela was surprised to see a light in the kitchen window. She had expected Moira Davison, the young widow who looked after them, to have left something cold for their supper in the old fridge, maybe sliced ham and salad. But when she opened the back door and went into the kitchen, she found Moira there, pulling something out of the Aga stove.

  ‘I thought you could do with a hot meal after such a long day,’ she announced, her gloved hands placing a large cottage pie on top of the big cooker.

  ‘Moira, you’re a wonder!’ Richard sniffed the aroma appreciatively as he came into the room.

  ‘You’ve not been waiting here for us all evening, have you?’ asked Angela, pulling off her coat and dropping thankfully into one of the chairs at the table, which was already set with two places.

  ‘No, but I’ve been back and forth, keeping an eye on the oven,’ said the trim, attractive woman. Slim and petite, she had an oval face framed by jet-black hair cut in a bob, a straight fringe across her forehead. Moira lived a few hundred yards away down the main road to the village. When the partners had started up the forensic consultancy six months earlier, they were virtually camping out in the dusty old house, living out of packets and tins. Also, their laboratory technician, Siân Lloyd, couldn’t keep up with the typing of reports as well as doing her technical work, so it was a godsend when they found an efficient lady almost on their doorstep who could not only do some cooking and cleaning but keep on top of the office work.

  Moira put her pie on a cork mat on the big table, another legacy from Richard’s aunt. Together with local carrots and peas, the two scientists tucked in hungrily, washing the food down with cider from a large flagon.

  ‘Aren’t you joining us, Moira?’ asked Angela, eyeing the apple tart that she was taking from the warming oven.

  ‘No, I had something at home earlier. But I’ll make some coffee and have one with you, so that you can tell me what you’ve been up to today.

  ‘By the way,’ she added. ‘There were a couple of messages today, nothing urgent. I’ve left a list on your desk, doctor. The only one that sounded interesting was a call from a firm of solicitors in Stow-on-the-Wold, who wanted to talk to you about giving them a medical opinion in a criminal case.’

  ‘Did they say what it was about?’ asked Angela.

  ‘No, but they left their number, and I promised that we would get back to them tomorrow. Perhaps it’s another murder!’

  Like their technician Siân, Moira was very enthusiastic and partisan when it came to the work of the Garth House consultancy. They took a pride in being part of it and wanted to be involved as much as possible. The cases were often highly confidential, often being sub judice until cases came to court, but both employees had shown in the past months that they could be trusted to keep their mouths shut. Moira had been a secretary to a local solicitor and Siân had worked in a hospital laboratory, both jobs requiring strict attention to confidentiality.

  Between the pie and the apple tart and then over coffee, the partners gave Moira the details of the unusual case in Breconshire that had occupied them for most of the day.

  ‘How extraordinary! A good start for your first Home Office call-out,’ she exclaimed. ‘Who on earth could have done such a thing?’

  ‘Our friend Dr Crippen seems set on blaming one of those up at the farm,’ said Richard, making Moira giggle over the poor detective’s name. ‘I suppose he’s right, as there are very few others to suspect
in that lonely place.’

  By the time they had helped their housekeeper to clear up the kitchen, it was getting late. Richard saw her to the bottom of the steep drive and watched her go down the road with her torch, keeping well into the hedge as there was no verge or pavement.

  When he got back inside, Angela declared that she was going up to her room to listen to the wireless and read for a bit, before going to bed.

  Accommodation had been something of a dilemma when they had first come to Garth House. Though there were plenty of rooms, there was only one bathroom. At first, Angela had stayed in a bed and breakfast in Tintern, but soon rebelled at the cost when there was a large house available. It belonged equally to both of them – or more accurately to the legal partnership that they had set up. When she left London, Angela had sold her flat and put the money into the firm, Richard contributing Garth House itself, a substantial Victorian dwelling with four acres of land. His aunt had died in a retirement home twelve months ago, her husband having passed away years before. She left her estate to her only nephew Richard, who used to stay with her when a boy and even when a medical student in Cardiff. This legacy coincided with the offer of a ‘golden handshake’ from his university post in Singapore. As he had been divorced not long before, there seemed nothing to keep him in the Far East, so he took the plunge and came home to Wales to set up in private practice with Angela.

  The problem with the house was that even in these enlightened 1950s, it was a little daring for two unmarried people to live together in the same house. However, after a few nights in the B&B, Angela had declared that she had had enough and moved in with Richard.

  It was a purely platonic relationship – she had a sitting room and a bedroom upstairs and he took another bedroom on the other side of the house. Downstairs was devoted to the business, each having a study, the other rooms being an office, a laboratory and staffroom, as well as the kitchen. The original problem was the single, old-fashioned bathroom, as his aunt had done nothing to improve the house for thirty years. However, in the intervening months a local jobbing builder had divided the cavernous bathroom in half, with two separate doors. This his-and-hers arrangement now worked very well, with a new modern bath in place of the cast-iron monstrosity in Angela’s half. Richard was content with a shower cabinet, so their problem was solved and they were happy to ignore any scandalized gossip in the village.

  After seeing Moira off, Richard took the samples of blood and urine he had collected in Brecon and put them in the new refrigerator in the laboratory, for Siân to deal with the next day. Then he went back into his own office on the ground floor, opposite the staffroom. Here he had a desk, a workbench and a microscope, as well as shelves with all his medical textbooks and journals.

  Next door was Moira’s office, the main features being a filing cabinet and a typewriter. A new communicating door went into the laboratory, a large front room with a wide bay window looking out on to the valley below. The house had two such windows, one each side of the central front door. The one on the other side was Angela’s study, with the same superb view of the woods and cliffs opposite.

  Sitting at his desk, he drew a yellow legal pad towards him and began to write a draft report of his visit to Ty Croes Farm and the subsequent post-mortem in Brecon. In the morning, Moira would type it up for him, with a couple of carbon copies, so that he could send one to the Brecon coroner and the other to DI Crippen.

  As he sat writing under his table lamp, Moira was sitting alone in her own house down the road. Her comfortable armchair was pulled up near the hearth, where a small fire was burning, as October evenings were becoming cool. Her Yorkshire terrier was asleep at her feet and a small glass of sherry stood on a table alongside her. An open copy of a Georgette Heyer novel lay on her lap, but she was not reading it, just staring at the flames flickering between the coals in the fire.

  The thirty-year-old was thinking once again of the profound changes in her life that had taken place over the past couple of years. Happily married, three years earlier she had suddenly become a widow when her husband, an industrial chemist, had been killed in a factory accident in Lydney. Generous compensation and a modest pension had allowed her to live on comfortably in their house, but she found herself somehow aimless and lacking direction in her life.

  Moira had not contemplated marrying again, though she was certainly attractive enough, as no one she knew remotely interested her. Then six months ago, a postcard advertisement in the village post office had spurred her to apply for a job as a part-time housekeeper with the new people who had just moved in to Garth House, virtually next door. It was the best move she could have made, as it jolted her out of her rut and she soon found the position fascinating. She had rapidly become an indispensable part of the ‘forensic family’.

  Staring into the flames of her fire, she wondered yet again about the relationship of Richard Pryor and Angela Bray. Though they slept in the big house every night, she had never seen any sign of intimacy or affection between them, just a pleasant friendship. She knew the story of their meeting at a forensic conference eighteen months ago and their eventual decision to set up in partnership. Her main source of information had been Siân Lloyd, who seemed to know every bit of gossip. She and Siân had often discussed the nature of the relationship between their two employers, but they came to no conclusion. Siân, young romantic that she was, was inclined to think that they were secret lovers, but Moira felt that though the situation could one day go that way, at present Richard and Angela appeared to be in a purely professional relationship.

  She sighed and took a sip of her sherry. A rather prim woman, it would be brash to suggest that she ‘fancied’ Richard Pryor, but certainly he was often in her thoughts. She had enjoyed marriage and missed all aspects of her former wedded state. Maybe it was time that she began to look around, she thought – taking this stimulating job had started to nudge her out of her previous apathy.

  Her book forgotten, she stared into the fire and visualized Richard’s lean face and wiry body. He was quite tall, with abundant brown hair and appealing hazel eyes. Siân, who was an ardent film fan, claimed he was very like Stewart Granger or Michael Rennie, an image that was reinforced by the way he dressed. Richard was fond of light suits with a belted jacket and button-down pockets, strengthening the Granger image of a big-game hunter. As he had lived in the Far East for the past fourteen years, it was natural that he had these Singapore-made suits, but the women in the house had recently ganged up on him and sent him off to get clothes better suited to the British climate and appearing in local courts.

  Though she always thought of him as ‘Richard’, Moira never failed to address him as ‘doctor’, as did Siân. Apart from being their employer, they had a genuine respect for him that discouraged overfamiliarity, even though he was the son of a Merthyr general practitioner, a valleys boy still with a slight Welsh accent even after all his years abroad.

  He was certainly an attractive man, she thought once more. In his early forties, he was more than a decade older than her, but these days that was no bar to a romance – or so she fantasized.

  This led her to think of the age of another woman – Angela Bray, who was only slightly younger than Richard. Here was competition indeed – a tall, handsome woman with a similar academic background to the doctor, coming from an affluent family in the Home Counties. Siân Lloyd, that fount of all gossip, had soon discovered that Angela’s parents ran racing stables and a stud farm in Berkshire and that she had gone to a select boarding school in Cheltenham. A London University degree in biology, followed by a PhD, had led her to fifteen years in the Metropolitan Police Laboratory, where she had risen to a responsible position but then stuck halfway up the promotion ladder.

  Moira sighed when contemplating the challenge Angela posed in her daydreams of a romance with her boss. The scientist was elegant, poised and extremely well dressed – and, most of all, she was living in the same house as Richard Pryor!

  Almost ang
rily, Moria pulled herself together, mentally chiding herself for being such an adolescent fool. Drinking down the rest of her sherry, she opened her Georgette Heyer and determinedly began to read.

  FOUR

  Next morning the people from the Home Office Forensic Science Laboratory in Cardiff were due at Ty Croes Farm at ten o’clock, so DI Crippen used the waiting time to interview the residents more thoroughly than the previous day had allowed.

  Milking was finished, and by eight o’clock he sat with his sergeant in the parlour of the farmhouse, a musty little-used room. A bobble-edged velvet cloth covered a round table, and there was even an ancient aspidistra on the window sill. On the wall above Crippen’s head was a framed sampler dated 1864, the faded threads displaying in Welsh a gloomy extract from the Psalms.

  The householder, Aubrey Evans, was the first one they spoke to. He came into the room and sat at the table between the inspector and John Nichols, who had a notebook at the ready. Aubrey wore a thick check shirt buttoned at the neck, his brown corduroy trousers held up by wide red braces.

  ‘Let’s start again at the beginning, Mr Evans,’ began Arthur in a mild voice. ‘You run the farm, but it actually belongs to your father?’

  ‘He’s kept the freehold of the land, but he’s given me a lifetime lease on this house, just as he has to Jeff in regard to the cottage next door.’

  ‘What happens when he dies?’

  ‘It’s all arranged with the lawyer. He’s leaving the land to me, as he doesn’t want it split up. It’s been in the family since Noah’s Ark was afloat. He’s giving the freehold of the cottage to Jeff.’

  ‘And what about the business?’ queried Crippen.

  ‘My cousin and I split the farming two ways, then we’ve got a partnership that runs the agricultural repair business. Jeff and I have got a third each, the other thirty-odd per cent is Tom Littleman’s.’