The Thread of Evidence

by Bernard Knight

  ‘He used to come up to stay with me a few times a year – long weekends and an occasional week. He was fond of a bit of city life after his student days in London, and he found Tremabon a bit of a dead hole for the first few years. He used to sleep in the flat. I usually found myself a bed in the hospital when I was on emergency call. I found out later that he had picked up this Julie in a club and brought her back there on several nights until the early hours … but I didn’t know it at the time. On the Friday morning, he had a phone message calling him back to Tremabon. Dad had caught the ’flu and Gerry had to go back a couple of days early to run the practice.’

  Pacey looked at his watch – it was four minutes since the telephone had rung. Why the devil didn’t Willie come back and tell him what was happening?

  ‘You’re still there, Pacey?’ David’s voice sounded anxious.

  ‘Yes, don’t worry. I still don’t know what all this is about. I hope you’re not wasting the time of both of us by inventing some far-fetched defence for your brother, sir.’

  ‘No defence needed, Mr Pacey. I had no intention of going for a lawyer when I left you just now. I could have told you all this sitting in your office. But, then, you would have stopped me from doing what I have to do very soon. This was the only way to get clear of you. Yes, I killed Julie Gordon, Mr Pacey. On the Friday night, after Gerry had gone, she came to the flat. He had arranged to meet her somewhere, but failed to get a message through to her. So she turned up to look for him. I didn’t know who, or what, she was then. Gerry didn’t talk much about affairs of that sort – he was a bit ashamed of his easy pick-ups. Anyway, to cut a long story short – it will have to be, Mr Pacey, now that you’ve got the police force out looking for me – to get right to the point, I took over where my brother left off. She came into my flat to explain. We had a drink together. One thing led to another and she didn’t leave that night. In fact, she didn’t leave at all – alive.’

  Pacey was genuinely gripped now, without thought of his patrol cars closing in.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked tensely.

  ‘We made quite a party of it that night. It was all the more exciting to me, as I haven’t got Gerry’s easy way with women. She was very attractive and made up for the scores of lonely, miserable nights I’d spent in that flat alone. We got a little drunk, then we went to bed. It was after that the trouble began. Whether it was conscience or fear, I don’t know, but I sobered up quickly and felt revolted at myself. I tried to get her to go, but she began to turn nasty. She was still a bit drunk – bitchy and vicious. The more I tried to get rid of her, the worse she got. Then she began saying things – how would our father like it if he knew both his sons were sleeping with club hostesses – that it might cost us both a packet for her to keep her mouth shut. Looking back on it, I’m sure she wasn’t really serious, but just drunk and showing off. Anyway, at the time, it made me see red, mainly because it was true – two respectable medical men carrying on like that – and my part was worse than Gerry’s, by far; I almost felt that I was cuckolding my own brother.’

  Pacey waited, both for the other to go on and for Rees to come back.

  ‘One thing led to another and she started shouting and sneering and shrieking. God it was awful! I shook her and slapped her and she yelled all the more, taunting me with what I’d done – and other things!’

  Pacey guessed what the ‘other things’ were.

  ‘And then?’ he prompted, cursing Rees under his breath.

  ‘Before I knew what was happening, I had her by the throat, trying to shut her up. It was about one in the morning and the flat is right next to the hospital. I was afraid someone would hear her. The next thing, she was limp in my hands. I did everything I could – artificial respiration, heart massage – but she was dead. She just slumped down. It couldn’t have been strangulation, just shock from pressure on her neck.’

  He paused, even the impersonal wires of a telephone carrying the seven-year-old emotions in his words clearly to Pacey.

  ‘Believe me – not that it matters now – I had no intention of killing her. I was just scared and angry at the bloody things she was saying.’

  At last Willie Rees hurried back into the room. Pacey put a finger to his lips to keep him silent; so the inspector, in his turn, scribbled a message:

  “Phoning from public box at Tremabon. Nearest patrol at serious accident, Llanmaes, ten miles away.”

  Pacey rolled his eyes up at Rees in frustration. At times like these, he envied the big city forces that always had a car within three minutes of anywhere – not like the rural areas where it was difficult even to keep cars within range of the radio transmitters.

  He forced himself back to listen to the confessions of the doctor.

  ‘… in the bathroom, while I thought out some plan. I sat there all night. I must have had some sort of mad frenzy just after I did it, as I found myself with a surgical saw from the plaster clinic downstairs, standing by the bath with blood everywhere and her arm almost off. That pulled me together more than anything else could have. I sat down and thought all night, then locked myself in the bathroom while the cleaner came in the morning – so that she wouldn’t see anything. Then, gradually, the plan about Mavis Hewitt came to me.’

  ‘How did you know about that?’

  ‘I heard it years before from Ceri Lloyd and someone else in the village – I used to go to the pub quite a bit when I was a student, home on vacation. The idea came to me to hide the body in a mine – I knew plenty from the days when Gerry and I used to play on the cliffs as boys. I knew Roland was the suspect, even though there was no proof that she was dead. And Roland had gone abroad years before, and everyone in the village seemed sure that he had died long ago. So I decided to insure myself against the body being found by faking it up as Mavis Hewitt.’

  Pacey looked at the hands of his watch creeping round. Even if the nearest car could leave the scene of a serious accident straight away, it would take ten or twelve minutes at least to reach David Ellis-Morgan, going at seventy miles an hour – which was an almost impossible speed on the country roads.

  ‘What happened – how did you manage to fool us so well?’

  ‘I remembered from Ceri’s yarn that Mavis was in her twenties when she vanished. I also knew that she was a redhead; Ceri was very clear about that. I stripped her clothes off, cut off all the dark hair and washed it down the lavatory.

  ‘Then I went out to a theatrical costumier and got a set of clothes from the nineteen twenties – insisted on having authentic stuff. I said it was for an amateur production of one of Somerset Maugham’s plays. I hunted around for some pawnbrokers in the dock area and got some old-fashioned jewellery and a wedding ring with as near correct hallmark date as I could.’

  ‘How did you get rid of the bloodstained clothes?’

  Pacey made no attempt to challenge the truth of all these revelations – there could be no doubt as to that. His only concern was to keep David talking for another ten or fifteen minutes.

  ‘The clothes? That was easy. I wrapped them up, took them over to the hospital mortuary and dumped them on the floor. There are always heaps of old clothes, often bloody, lying around, from accident cases. Every now and then, the attendants collect them up and take them to the incinerator. Another odd heap would go unnoticed.’

  ‘And the teeth – how did you get around that?’

  ‘Yes, that was difficult – she had three fillings, so I took them out together with another two spares. I was physically sick doing that, even though I earned part of my living in dissecting bodies. Still, it had to be done, not only for my own sake, but also to cover up for Gerry and to save my father and Mary from the ruin of the practice and their home.’

  ‘Well, that’s going to happen now, isn’t it?’ grated Pacey.

  ‘We’ve had seven years, better than nothing. I’m sorry though.’

  The voice sounded far off and Pacey began to think that, at last, the doctor’s mind was begin
ning to crack. He looked at the hands of his watch again, crawling with a microscopic motion around the dial. He picked up his pencil and scrawled “PC Griffith?” on his pad.

  He looked up at Willie, who nodded, shook his head and shrugged his shoulders, all in rapid succession. Pacey interpreted this as meaning that Rees had already thought of it, but could not get through to the Tremabon constable on the telephone for some reason.

  David was talking again, and Pacey turned his attention back to him.

  ‘I also bought a switch of real auburn hair in the theatrical shop. I went back to the flat, waited until dark and loaded the body, wrapped in a hospital sheet, into the back of my Ford.’

  ‘We tested that for stains yesterday – there were none. How did you manage that?’ asked Pacey.

  ‘So you did suspect me? Why?’

  Pacey added a moment or two to his valuable delaying tactics by explaining this, then asked about the blood again.

  ‘There was almost no bleeding by the time I moved her. I covered the wound in the arm with an adhesive surgical dressing, then – wrapped an old plastic mackintosh around it under the sheet. I brought them both back and dumped them in the mortuary, like the other stuff.’

  David Ellis-Morgan sounded almost too anxious to talk, thought Pacey. The words were tumbling out of his mouth as he stood alone in the red telephone box in Tremabon. He knew as well as Pacey that the time he had left before the patrol car reached him could be measured in minutes. He talked in a rush now, the mental purging flowing like a breached dam – a dam that had held firm against communication with even a single person for the last seven years.

  ‘I drove back to Tremabon that night, took the car past Bryn Glas Farm and up the track to the cliff. I put the lights out for the last bit across the moor and got within a few hundred yards of the cave before the going got too bad for the car. Then I carried the bundle to the cave – and left it on the ground, well inside. I had to chance it being found before the next morning, when I went back there. I drove the car back to the road and then deliberately ran into a gatepost to buckle the front wing.’

  Pacey was puzzled at this, curiosity getting the better of his constant study of his watch.

  ‘I was shaken and it was late. I had to have some excuse for turning up at home after midnight, shaking like a leaf. I said I’d had a slight accident – that covered up well enough.’

  ‘Did you tell Gerald anything about all this?’

  ‘No! He knows nothing – nothing at all.’ The voice cracked sharply and emphatically over the wire. ‘He didn’t come up to Cardiff to stay again – I made excuses and, as soon as I could, I left the job and came back home.’

  Pacey began stalling. ‘You said that you left the body on the floor of the cave. How did it get up on the ledge?’

  ‘I went for a walk from the house next day. There was nothing unusual in that; I often did when I was home for a weekend. I went straight up to the mine, put the body up on the ledge – I knew it was there from explorations as a kid. Then I bricked it in with stones and went home. If it wasn’t for that fall of roof, it would be there still.’

  It was nine minutes since Rees had notified the patrol car. Pacey searched for something intelligent to say to keep Ellis-Morgan talking.

  ‘Look, you’d better talk to your brother – hang on, I’ll get him from the other room.’ He motioned to Rees to do what he had said and the inspector sprinted away.

  ‘There may not be time for that, Mr Pacey. And I don’t think I want to talk to him – what could I say?’

  ‘You could say you’re sorry for rushing off and leaving him here to carry the can for you, for a. start,’ Pacey said, almost roughly. ‘And then you could tell him that you’re coming back here right away to get things sorted out. You silly ass, if you’d have gone to the police at the time, you would have walked away with a plea of manslaughter, with a defence of provocation like that. And you’ve a very good chance of doing it yet, if you come back here and act sensibly.’

  There was a sad, humourless laugh from the other end, a laugh with more than a hint of hysteria in it.

  ‘Keeping me talking, Mr Pacey? Unfortunately, I’m in a phone box at the bottom of the lane leading up to Bryn Glas and the cliff, with a view of almost a mile of the main road in both directions. Your patrol car hasn’t appeared, not yet. When I hang up, you can assume that it has!’

  ‘What are you going to do, man? Don’t be a damn fool! Come on in. Wait for the car and come back with the officers. I tell you, you’ll get away with manslaughter in a case like this.’

  ‘And what do I do when I come out of prison in five years’ time, become a bricklayer? No thank you, Superintendent.’

  ‘You can’t get away. Don’t be idiotic.’

  Pacey knew how Ellis-Morgan was going to get away, but he was unable to admit it, either to himself or to the doctor.

  ‘Sorry, I know what I’m doing. I’ve been on the verge of it more than once, in the first year or two – and then I thought I might have gotten away with it.’

  Twelve minutes. The door opened and Rees hurriedly shepherded a worried and mystified Gerald into the room.

  ‘Here, come and talk to your brother, for God’s sake! Make him see sense – he’s threatening to kill himself. He was the one responsible for the death of the woman in the cave – Julie Gordon.’

  Gerald almost fell down with shock. He groped for the telephone which Pacey held out for him and sank onto the chair as the detective made way for him.

  He looked up at Pacey for a moment, his face almost green, then put the receiver to his ear.

  ‘Dave – Dave, this is Gerry. Dave, Dave! Hello, David!’

  He rattled the button and almost shouted David*s name a few times, then looked fearfully up at the superintendent.

  ‘He’s hung up – Dave’s hung up!’ he whispered.

  Chapter Nineteen

  A double inquest was held in the church hall at Tremabon on the following Monday.

  The small building was packed with newspaper reporters and morbid spectators from far and wide. If the case had made very few headlines while it was being investigated, it was certainly making up for lost time now that it was all over …

  The first case was that of Julie Gordon. The main evidence came from Pacey, who had been the only witness to the oral confession of Doctor David Ellis-Morgan. Professor Powell, a senior scientific officer from the Swansea laboratory and Edna Collins gave other confirmatory facts and the coroner’s very imperative directions to his jury ensured that a verdict of murder by David Ellis-Morgan was brought in with a minimum of the dilly-dallying so beloved of coroner’s juries …

  The disposal of the woman was followed by the inquiry into the death of the doctor himself.

  Two county mobile policemen described how, in answer to an urgent radio call from Detective-Superintendent Pacey, they went at high speed from Llanmaes to Tremabon, with orders to take into custody the occupant of a telephone box at the junction of the main road with the lane leading up to Bryn Glas farm and the open moorland beyond.

  As Pacey, sitting in the front of the court, heard the dry official description from the patrol sergeant, his mind translated it into the real scene, so abruptly cut off from his room in Aberystwyth by the deadening of a telephone line.

  As the black police car appeared almost a mile away, racing along at something over seventy miles an hour, David must have slammed the telephone down and run out to his waiting car. The police saw nothing of the Austin-Healey until it broke from the cover of the hedges of the lane and went bumping out onto the moor. They lost precious seconds by stopping at the telephone box. It was only then, with their own motor cut, that they heard the roaring acceleration of the doctor’s powerful engine going up the lane. Until then, they had no idea that he was still in the vicinity. Racing after him in their heavier and slower saloon, they were a good quarter of a mile behind when they, too, broke from the hedges of the lane onto the open rough ground.<
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  The two cars, bouncing and jerking, headed straight up the long slope that formed the back of the cliffs. Though the two mobile officers did not know it at the time, the Austin-Healey was retracing the route the doctor had taken seven years before in his Ford estate car. But on that occasion, he had stopped short of the head of the little valley down from the crest of the cliff past the old lead mine. This time, the red sports car entered the neck of the gully at thirty miles an hour and plunged, rocking and swaying, down the seaward side. By the time it reached the place where the grass ended and the scree slopes began, it was doing almost sixty. The gravelly scree ended in a sheer two hundred-foot wall and the car shot out in a long parabola into the air above the breakers below. Pacey saw in his mind’s eye, the car slowly turning over and over as it fell, far out beyond the rocks at the foot of the cliff.

  The police car, unfamiliar with the sudden change from moorland to cliff, rocked and skidded dangerously to a stop just in time to avoid following the Austin-Healey down the valley. The policemen ran down the track of crushed ferns and muddy wheel tracks to the edge of the precipice.

  Far below, they could see nothing at first. Even the great splash of a few moments before had been swallowed by the restless waves. But, soon, a rainbow patch of motor oil appeared and two foam rubber seat cushions floated free from the drowned car.

  The body, firmly held by a safety belt, was recovered at low tide, twisted and broken like the car itself.

  Little other evidence was needed and the jury again speedily returned their verdict, one of ‘suicide while the balance of his mind was disturbed,’ the last part having more of a traditional than a logical significance. After the formalities were over, and the reporters had trooped off to their telephones and typewriters, the chief constable, Pacey and the professor went into the little side room used by the coroner for a last few words.

  ‘A sensible jury, for once – didn’t try to make a meal out of it,’ observed the coroner.

  ‘I suppose the papers are bound to splash it for a day or two – they always do when it’s a doctor or a clergyman involved,’ said Colonel Barton.