According to the Evidence

by Bernard Knight

  ‘It seems that the antagonism began even before they went out to the Gulf, as several of the unit members we interviewed back at their depot near Salisbury said it was well known that the two men didn’t get on, to say the least.’

  ‘What does Squires say about this?’ asked Richard out of sheer curiosity, as it was no part of his medical brief.

  ‘He readily admits that he couldn’t stand Bulmer, who he claims was officious and overbearing, treating him as if he was a raw recruit rather than an experienced NCO who was only one rank below him.’

  Bannerman added to this litany of dispute. ‘Squires reckoned that Bulmer treated him with contempt in front of the trainees and often countermanded Squires’ orders to the men. We couldn’t get any confirmation from any of the officers, but a sergeants’ mess is well known to be adept at keeping their own affairs under wraps.’

  ‘So the allegation is that Squires took the opportunity of the firefight in the plane to put one in the back of Bulmer’s head?’ suggested Richard. When he was in the army himself, he had heard rumours of similar ‘accidents’ to junior officers or senior NCOs, when they were up at the head of a patrol.

  He picked up the photographs again and studied them, even fishing a small lens from his pocket to look closely at the ones showing the head injury.

  ‘A pity they’re such lousy photos,’ he muttered.

  ‘Can you tell anything from them?’ asked Bannerman.

  ‘It’s a big wound, slightly ragged around the edges, as far as one can tell. What weapons were being used?’

  ‘Bulmer and the trainees had standard-issue Sterlings, but Squires used a Thompson sub-machine gun. God knows where he got it from, but some of these Special Forces types insist on having their favourite weapons.’

  ‘There’s no doubt, I suppose, that the fatal shot came from his gun?’ hazarded Richard.

  Bannerman shook his head. ‘None at all! The Al Tallah police have virtually no forensic facilities, but they didn’t need to. A Sten gun uses nine-millimetre ammunition, but the Thompson fires forty-fives.’

  ‘So there was no microscopic matching of the bullet to the weapon?’ asked Angela. Although she was not a firearms examiner, a lot of knowledge had rubbed off on her during her years at the Metropolitan Police laboratory.

  ‘No point, even if Al Tallah were able to get it done,’ said Paul Bannerman. ‘No one else there had a weapon of that calibre.’

  ‘Did they keep the bullet after the investigation was over?’ asked Pryor.

  ‘It’s still available in Al Tallah, as far as I know. Did you want to see it?’

  Richard rubbed his chin, still staring at the photographs. ‘It’s possible, so perhaps you could make sure that they don’t chuck it away. What about his clothing? Did they keep that?’

  Bannerman looked nonplussed. ‘Clothing? I’ve no idea. Gordon, do you know anything about that?’

  The solicitor shook his head. ‘We can find out from the major out there. He’s still in Al Tallah. We sent a pair of NCOs out to replace Bulmer and Squires.’

  The show must go on, thought Angela cynically – especially if the War Office is getting a nice fat fee for the training.

  ‘So we don’t know if he was wearing a hat of any sort,’ continued Richard.

  Bannerman pursed his lips. ‘Again, I don’t know. The usual kit for that part of the world is a khaki tunic and shorts and a bush hat with a floppy brim. Does it matter, doctor?’

  ‘It might if the shot went through the hat. For a start, it might help with determining the range, if there was burning or propellant soiling from a close discharge.’ He looked again at the photos. ‘There’s no chance of seeing anything like that on these fuzzy pictures.’

  ‘Why do think it might have been a close discharge?’ asked Gordon Lane.

  ‘The wound is large and split, as far as can be made out. A direct distant shot wouldn’t do that, but a near-contact one could. The gases from the muzzle can be forced under the scalp and, because there is unyielding skull underneath, it causes a blowback which can split the skin.’

  The prim Mrs Wright paled a little at the description she had to scribble on her notepad.

  ‘Is there any eyewitness evidence as to how close the two men were when the shooting started?’ asked Angela.

  The two War Office men looked at each other uncertainly.

  ‘Not really. There are fairly sparse statements from the trainees. Some of them hardly speak any English and, given the hectic turmoil of the moment, I doubt their testimony would be of much help.’

  ‘It’s only now that these issues have blown up into such importance,’ said Lane. ‘Before, it was a tragic accident three thousand miles away. Squires was put through the grinder when he was brought back to the depot, but of course he would quite naturally avoid saying anything that was to his disadvantage.’

  ‘It’s only since the wife and her stroppy lawyer came on the scene that we’ve had to sit up and take notice,’ confessed Bannerman. ‘Is there anything you can do or suggest that might take us further forward?’

  ‘Have you got the post-mortem report from Al Tallah there?’ asked Richard. The colonel delved into his black bag again and brought out a single sheet of paper. When he handed it to Richard, he saw it was poorly typed on a printed pro forma with ‘Al Tallah Police Department’ at the top.

  ‘Pretty skimpy, but we get them just as bad in this country,’ he commented as he began reading.

  The brief report described a well-built man six feet in height. There was no mention of clothing or a hat. A fulsome description of rigor mortis and lividity was unhelpful, given that the time of death was known to the minute, but the actual head wound was given scant attention. It was described as being on the ‘back of the head’, and its dimensions were stated as ‘about one and a half inches by one half-inch’. There was no mention of burning of hairs or the blackening of surrounding skin.

  The rest of the body was dismissed in a few repetitions of ‘NAD’, an overworked acronym meaning ‘nothing abnormal detected’. At the end was a terse summary: ‘Death was due to skull fracture and brain damage due to a gunshot wound to the back of the head.’ At the bottom, it was signed ‘Dr Pradash Rao’.

  ‘Pretty uninformative,’ grunted Richard, always annoyed by skimped workmanship. ‘He offers no opinion as to whether it was a close or distant discharge.’

  ‘Is there anything you can tell us that might help us in challenging this claim?’ asked Bannerman. ‘They are saying that the army was negligent in not ensuring that the trainers were competent enough to avoid such incidents – which rather cuts across their other allegation that Squires deliberately shot Bulmer out of malice, though they also claim that the antipathy between the two men should have been known to senior officers and that the two men should not have been posted to the same place, especially if the opportunity arose to escalate their quarrel through the use of firearms.’

  Richard shrugged. ‘I’m afraid the legal complexities are outside my remit. But a couple of things occur to me about the gunshot wound.’

  He turned to Gordon Lane. ‘There’s absolutely no doubt that the fatal shot came from Squires’ weapon, which fired a forty-five-calibre bullet?’

  When the solicitor confirmed this, Richard tapped the photographs with a finger. ‘Then I’m surprised that if a man was hit in the back of the head at close range with a forty-five, there was no exit wound. It’s by no means inevitable, but a big slug like that fired from a few feet away – or even much nearer, for all we know – usually causes a through-and-through track across the skull, with a messy exit wound on the other side.’

  ‘Why didn’t this happen in this case, doctor?’ asked Bannerman.

  ‘As we’ve got only lousy pictures and an uninformative post-mortem report, I can’t tell. If it was a long-range discharge, the bullet may have been at the end of its trajectory and lost much of its energy, but this can’t be the case here, inside an aircraft. One other reason can be
that the bullet hit really dense bone inside the skull, but that’s all in the base and this impact is too high for that.’

  He shook his head in annoyance. ‘One way to take this forward is to have the bullet for examination, but, really, the only effective way is to have another post-mortem.’

  There was a silence, then Bannerman reminded him that the man had been dead for over three months.

  ‘That’s not a big problem,’ replied Richard. ‘You said the body had been embalmed, so it will still be in reasonable condition.’

  The two lawyers looked uncomfortable. ‘I see your point, but it’ll be a mammoth task to get permission for an exhumation.’

  Richard was too polite to say that that was their problem, but he suggested that if the widow and her lawyer were that keen on pursuing the claims, they would have to agree to it.

  ‘Getting Home Office permission is the hardest part of obtaining an exhumation,’ he said. ‘But, of course, you are in a different position, with your ministers in government able to oil the wheels of bureaucracy.’

  They discussed the matter for a further half-hour, though much of the conversation was between the pair from the War Office, bemoaning all the work they would have to do to get these various suggestions put into practice.

  ‘We’ll have to get this major back from the Gulf to see exactly what he knew about these two men,’ said Bannerman. ‘We may have to send some SIB men out there to interview those trainees more thoroughly, too.’

  Eventually, they got up to leave, with a promise that they would keep in touch about developments. The last welcome invitation Bannerman made as they went out to their hire car was for Richard to keep a note of his fee and expenses as he went along.

  The driver went up to the yard to turn around. When they had passed back down the drive and out into the road, Angela and Richard went into the house and locked the front door.

  ‘What did you think of that?’ he asked her. ‘A bit out of the usual run of cases, eh?’

  ‘What was that SIB he mentioned at the end?’ she asked.

  ‘Special Investigation Branch – it’s the army’s version of the CID, part of the Military Police, under the Provost Marshal.’

  They went back to the staffroom, where at teatime Siân and Moira were waiting impatiently to hear what the mysterious men from Whitehall had to say. Richard gave them a summary of the problem and said that unless more information could be found, there was little help he could offer.

  ‘Do you think they’ll get an exhumation?’ asked Siân.

  ‘Perhaps the thought of digging up her husband might persuade the widow to drop the case,’ said Angela, recalling the unpleasant procedure at their last exhumation in Herefordshire a few months earlier.

  Moira shuddered at the thought of disturbing anyone’s final resting place, especially that of a soldier killed doing his duty. It was too soon after the loss of her own husband for this image to be anything but disturbing. She tried to put the thoughts aside and asked Richard if he felt there was anything he could do for the lawyers.

  ‘Not unless they come up with something more definite. But I’m not happy about that gunshot wound, even if that staff sergeant was so close that his weapon was virtually touching the victim.’

  ‘Perhaps it was!’ declared Angela. ‘With that standard of investigation, anything could have happened.’

  Richard Pryor finished his tea and stood up, ready to go back to work in his room. ‘Well, there’s nothing more to be done about it unless those War Office types can come up with some more information, especially consent for an exhumation.’

  At the door he turned around with a last exhortation. ‘Keep your fingers crossed that we get something soon from Germany and the good old United States of America, or our veterinary client from the Cotswolds is going to be in deep trouble!’

  FIFTEEN

  Early on Wednesday Richard Pryor was up at the crack of dawn again to catch the Beachley–Aust ferry across the River Severn, as he had to give a nine o’clock lecture to the medical students in Bristol. A weekly event during the Michaelmas term, it was sometimes difficult to arrange when attendance at court or an occasional police call interfered with the timetable. Thankfully, the pathology staff, in whose lecture allocation the forensic topics resided, were flexible enough to swap their hourly slots to accommodate his problems.

  As he drove towards the medical school on the hill high above the Bristol Royal Infirmary where the Norman castle once stood, he savoured the task of talking to an audience who were keen to hear what he had to say. Students never showed any reluctance to attend forensic lectures, due to their intrinsic interest and the often gory slides that Richard showed to illustrate his teaching. In fact, with some of the more bloodthirsty or salacious topics, he knew that more than a hundred per cent of the class was facing him, as some students from other faculties crept in at the back. However, unlike some of his colleagues in other universities, he did not strive to be shocking or outrageous, but the very nature of the subject seemed to fascinate most people. He tried to tailor his talks to practical matters, especially the legal obligations of doctors, as he knew full well that probably not one of his audience would ever become a forensic specialist, the vast majority ending up as family doctors. Today was an example, as he was speaking about medical negligence, ethics and the General Medical Council, subjects of far greater relevance to doctors than cut throats or shootings, even though they were unlikely to attract any gatecrashers from the engineering or music departments. As he drove home in the late morning after the lecture, he wondered if Dr Pradash Rao had ever been taught much about gunshot wounds, as his report on the warrant officer was woefully inadequate. However, Richard sympathized with him, as he probably was a general-duties medical officer in the hospital, pushed into this extra job with little or no forensic experience.

  He got back to Garth House just in time for one of Moira’s welcome lunches, this time a pair of fresh trout from the nearby Wye, which Jimmy had produced, tapping the side of his nose to indicate that no questions should be asked as to how he had come by them.

  ‘I wonder when you’ll hear from abroad?’ asked Siân as she sat on the other side of the old table with her sandwiches and fruit.

  ‘Give it a chance. It’s only been two days,’ chided Angela.

  ‘I can’t imagine anything getting here from America in under a week, even if they use airmail. Germany should be quicker, I suppose.’

  ‘Couldn’t they telegraph it?’ persisted their technician. ‘I’ll bet they didn’t wait a week during the war when there was military stuff to communicate.’

  ‘If it’s a scientific paper, it would be a hell of long telegram,’ said Richard. ‘And they couldn’t include graphs and diagrams and things like that.’

  ‘The newspapers send photographs by wire,’ said Siân stubbornly. ‘I don’t see how written material is any different.’ She was the keenest of the lot to see her chief getting his teeth into something that might save the vet from hanging.

  ‘I know the Met used to get copies of fingerprints by wire from police forces overseas,’ said Angela. ‘But I’ve no idea how they did it.’

  This topic exhausted, the conversation moved on, over a creamy rice pudding, to current events. Siân, an avid cinema fan, had been particularly upset by the news on the wireless that James Dean had been killed in car crash in California, especially as fellow actor Alec Guinness had met him less than a week earlier and had announced his premonition of Dean’s death. Angela preferred discussing the new fashions in her latest Vogue.

  Afterwards, they went back to work, Richard to his microscope and Siân to her fume cupboard, where she was digesting tissue in nitric acid to look for diatoms. Ever since their first success in helping the police with a homicidal drowning some months earlier, she had taken a great interest in these microscopic algae and was trying out different methods of extraction, described in some journals that Richard had passed on to her.

  Angela w
as involved in a new procedure – at least new for the Garth House partnership, though she had dealt with hundreds at the Met lab. A solicitor had sent in an item of a lady’s undergarments, provided by a suspicious husband seeking a divorce. An alleged stain was claimed to be evidence of adultery, and Angela had to determine whether it was, in fact, seminal and, if so, whether or not it came from someone with a different blood group from that of the husband. Like the growing trade in paternity tests, it opened up a new avenue for increasing their revenue, and she was keen to get a reliable report out as soon as possible to encourage the lawyer to recommend her to his colleagues in the divorce business.

  Several days went by in the same pattern. Richard had post-mortems in Monmouth and Chepstow, as well as being asked to go to Hereford for a ‘special’ case. This was a death under anaesthetic, which had to be reported to the coroner if it occurred within twenty-four hours of an operation. It was customary for the coroner to ask an outside pathologist to conduct the examination, rather than the resident pathology consultant, in order that no suggestion of a cover-up could be made.

  In this case the issue was straightforward, as Richard Pryor found that the relatively young patient had severe coronary artery disease, which had been symptomless and impossible to foresee as a fatal complication – even a preoperative electrocardiogram had shown no abnormality.

  On Friday still no word had come from Stow-on-the-Wold about receipt of the reports from abroad, but Richard was diverted by the arrival of a British Railways Scammell lorry. The three-wheeled ‘mechanical horse’ laboured up the drive to the back yard, where the flat-capped driver waved a delivery form at Jimmy Jenkins, who came out of his shed to see what was making the racket. By the time he and the driver were dropping the tailboard, Richard had appeared, beaming with anticipation.

  ‘Your grape plants have arrived, doctor,’ announced Jimmy ungraciously as he helped lift off the first of six large boxes from the lorry. As soon as the truck had gone, Richard insisted that they prise off the thin slats and inspect the contents.