According To The Evidence

TWELVE

He arrived at his parents’ home in the early afternoon, to be faced with a huge cooked lunch that his mother had waiting for him. This was the usual routine for his weekend visits, Lily Pryor trying to make up for the two decades since he last lived at home. She was convinced that he had not been fed well enough through all these years, ignoring his normal wiry body, which he inherited from his equally stringy father.

After a couple of hours’ relaxation, in which he was brought up to date with the local gossip, tea was served, with sandwiches and home-made cake. When he had recovered sufficiently to move, he was hawked off in the family Standard Vanguard to visit his widowed Aunt Emily and her spinster sister Bronwen, who lived in a terraced house in Cefn Coed a couple of miles away. Thankfully, he was only expected to have a glass of sherry and some Welsh cakes, while he was interrogated about his divorce and the prospect of getting married once again.

He took it all in good part, as he was fond of his family. It was just as well, as he had aunts, uncles and cousins scattered all over the nearby valleys and was dragged to visit them in rotation whenever he came home. Later that evening he went up to his father’s golf club on a high plateau above the town and had a couple of pints with men he had known since he was a boy. Contentedly, he went to bed in his old room, with his pre-war books and toys still in cupboards and on shelves.

He slept well, though the task of pursuing the impending murder case revolved in his mind for a time before he fell asleep and was there again when he woke late in the morning.

A full Welsh breakfast was shaken down by a walk with his father around Cyfarthfa Park, where a Victorian castle belonging to one of the rich ironmasters was a visible reminder of the days of the industrial dominance of Merthyr Tydfil, as well as violent labour relations, squalid living conditions and epidemics of cholera and typhoid.

He planned to set off for Tintern Parva soon after the inevitable large Sunday lunch. When this was over, he was drinking his coffee when he heard the telephone ringing in the front hall.

As his mother went to answer it, his father smiled complacently.

‘I wonder how many times your mother’s done that for me?’ he asked. ‘That’s the one thing I don’t miss since giving up the practice – the damned phone dragging me out at night and weekends!’

As if to mock him, his wife’s head came around the door. ‘It’s for you, Richard. It’s the police. They want to call you out!’

‘Sorry to drag you out on a Sunday, doc, but we felt we should get you to deal with this, as you are already involved.’

Arthur Crippen sounded genuinely apologetic as once again he stood with Richard Pryor outside the small door of the barn at Ty Croes Farm. Around them were the same team, Detective Sergeant John Nichols, the coroner’s officer and one of the detective constables who had been here the previous week.

‘I was already in Merthyr, so I was more than halfway here,’ Richard said reassuringly.

The sergeant pulled the small door open and went in to release the bolts of the big door and push it back, letting the late-afternoon sunshine into the cavernous building.

The big blue Fordson Major had gone, but in its place on the floor sprawled a body. It lay on its back, the arms by its side. Richard hardly needed to look at the corpse to know the cause of death, as a shotgun lay on the concrete not far from the right hand. It also took only one step forward to discover the identity of the dead man.

‘Mostyn Evans! Well, well! Has this cleared up your case, Mr Crippen?’ In spite of the several thousand deaths that he had dealt with over the years, Richard always felt a little saddened at the loss of a life, whatever the circumstances.

‘He left a note, doctor,’ said the detective inspector. ‘In fact, he left several notes. Will you have a look at him first?’

Richard went to crouch alongside the corpse, which was fully dressed in the same clothes as Mostyn had worn at his last interview. Under the chin was a narrow smear of soot around a central hole the size of a shilling piece. At one edge he saw a reddish-brown rim extending about halfway around the hole, where skin had been forced up against the muzzle by the expanding gas beneath. There was an ooze of blood and tissue from the wound, but for a shotgun blast the external damage was relatively slight.

‘That gun is a four-ten, I assume?’ he asked, looking up at the officers standing nearby.

Arthur Crippen nodded. ‘Yes, with a single barrel. The typical farmer’s rabbit and rat gun, but it seems to have done the job well enough.’ The four-ten was the smaller of the two types of shotguns found on farms, the twelve-bore being its big brother.

Richard felt the forehead and hands of Mostyn Evans. They were cold, but the armpit still had some warmth. When he tentatively moved the elbow and knee joints, he could feel stiffness developing.

‘Do we know when this happened?

John Nichols answered. ‘Almost to the minute, doc. Jeff Morton heard a gunshot just after midday. That’s why the body was found so quickly, as he came straight down to investigate. No one else would have been out shooting on the farm today.’

The pathologist still squatted, looking at the body. The face was quite peaceful, the eyes closed, though he knew well enough that it did not reflect the state of mind at death. Crime novelists’ lurid descriptions of ‘features contorted in fear’ always exasperated him.

‘Where did the gun come from?’ he asked.

‘It was his own, though there are several other shotguns locked up at the farm,’ said the sergeant.

Richard got to his feet and faced the detectives. ‘How much do you want to do about this? Are you treating it as suspicious, with the full works, like calling the Cardiff lab out?’

Crippen looked undecided. ‘Given the gist of the suicide note, I can’t see the point. I know there was another murder in exactly the same spot, but surely this clears it up. It’s beyond belief that anyone else could be involved in both of them.’

‘You’d like a post-mortem straight away, I expect? I’ve got a busy week ahead of me. I’d rather not have to come all the way back here tomorrow. Is it possible to use the mortuary in Brecon on a Sunday?’

‘No reason why not, doctor,’ said Billy Brown. ‘I can get the key from the hospital lodge. There’s no attendant anyway; the porters look after the place.’

Crippen turned to his sergeant. ‘Just to be on the safe side, we’ll take the gun for fingerprints and lock this place up until tomorrow.’

The detective constable who was acting as exhibits officer fetched a new brown-paper sack from his van and put on a pair of rubber gloves. He bent down to carefully lift the shotgun and for safety’s sake opened the breech. He checked to make sure the cartridge inside had been fired by looking at the pin impression on the base.

‘Stinks, sir. Not long since it was fired,’ he reported.

Richard stepped nearer. ‘Before you bag it, can someone measure the distance between the muzzle and the trigger?’

As Billy Brown went to the van to fetch a tape measure, Richard explained that it was best to check that Mostyn Evans’ arm was long enough to fire the gun after it had been placed against his own neck.

‘I’ve seen people use lengths of wood or even complicated bits of string to pull the trigger, when the barrel was too long, but there’s nothing like that lying around here.’

The coroner’s officer measured the distance Richard wanted, the DC recording it in his notebook. After the weapon had been safely packed, there was little to do except wait for the duty undertaker to come out from Brecon in response to a radio message from the police car.

Arthur Crippen and the sergeant retreated to the other side of the yard for their inevitable smoke, while the inspector explained to Richard Pryor what had been in the notes.

‘He left three envelopes on the ground, a few feet away,’ he explained. ‘Two were addressed to his son and his nephew and were very personal, as well as talking about his will and the farm finances. The other one was for me and the coroner.’

‘He seemed very well organized,’ observed Richard. ‘Makes a bit of nonsense about the usual suicide verdicts at inquest, when they say “while the balance of his mind was disturbed”!’

‘I agree. He seemed very calm and calculating about the whole affair,’ said the detective inspector. ‘It was quite a detailed note, but the gist of it was that he didn’t want any further suspicion to fall on anyone else.’

‘I think your veiled threats about one of the family possibly facing the gallows made up his mind to end the investigation,’ commented his sergeant. Arthur nodded, sending his half-smoked cigarette spinning over the fence.

‘He also told us that he was suffering from prostate cancer, and his doctor had told him he wouldn’t last another year. The family didn’t know, as he had refused any treatment.’

‘So did he actually say that he’d killed Tom Littleman?’ asked Richard.

‘He described it in some detail!’ replied the DI. ‘He found out about the man’s sexual adventures last week, when he came across his daughter-in-law crying in the house one day. She confessed to having allowed him to seduce her, though he’d dumped her by then. She was dead scared that her husband would find out.’

‘So what did he do about it?’

‘He wrote that he wanted to keep it from the others at the farm, so he waited until he knew his son and nephew had gone off to their NFU meeting, then went down to where Littleman was putting in his overtime to finish that tractor. He was in a rage to start with, but he says that the mechanic told him to piss off and mind his own business.’

‘Not the right thing to say to a big bloke like Mostyn,’ said John Nichols with a wry smile.

‘No, especially when the silly bugger boasted that not only had he been knocking off Betsan but Rhian as well,’ growled Crippen. ‘Mostyn says in his letter that he was already in a high temper and that made him lose it altogether. He grabbed Littleman around the throat to give him a good shaking before he “punched the lights out of him”, as he described it. But the fellow immediately went limp on him and dropped to the ground, stone dead!’

‘Is that possible, doctor?’ asked the sergeant. ‘I thought they struggled for a time and went blue in the face and all that!’

Richard shook his head. ‘That’s only if the air supply is cut off first. It’s well known that in some cases a sudden pressure on the arteries at the side of the neck can stop the heart instantaneously. Squeezing the neck, even in fun, is a dangerous thing to do.’

‘So it could have been a manslaughter rather than a murder?’ suggested Crippen.

‘Sure, the defence would certainly plead that, and I’d have to agree with them about the mechanism of death. It makes it less premeditated than squeezing for five minutes with the victim’s eyes popping and the tongue sticking out!’

Crippen lit up another Player’s Navy Cut, his preferred smoke.

‘The rest of his story followed what we thought all along. When he saw the fellow lying dead, his temper evaporated, he says. He didn’t want to bring down a murder hunt on the farm – and he didn’t particularly want to go to jail or even the gallows himself. So he decided to fake a hanging and hoisted Littleman up on a length of rope. He locked up the barn and went home. He has his own entrance and even staircase to his room in the farmhouse, as it used to be divided into two cottages, so no one was ever sure of his comings and goings.’

‘This must have been a long letter,’ observed Richard. ‘I suppose he wanted to clear up everything so that there would be no question of Aubrey or Jeff getting any blame.’

‘There were quite a few pages of it, yes. He ended by telling us that he couldn’t resist going down the barn well after midnight to check on the scene. Then he saw that the bruises on the man’s neck were all too obvious under the rope and that he would have to do something different. So he hauled him down, put the rope away and laid the body under the tractor wheel, which was already jacked up. Then he hit the blocks away with a post and closed up again.’

‘If it hadn’t been for you, doc, he might have got away with it,’ said Nichols.

‘That’s flattering, sarge, but it was pretty obvious what had happened,’ said Richard deprecatingly. Even so, he felt gratified at the compliment. Pathologists rarely got thanks from their ‘patients’, not like his physician and surgeon colleagues, who were given bottles of whisky and chickens at Christmas!

Two hours later the penultimate act in the sad drama was played out, the last one to be an inquest in a few weeks’ time. At the dismal mortuary behind Brecon Hospital, Richard Pryor confirmed all that was anticipated from the circumstances.

The gunshot had not caused an exit wound on the back of the head, as the small cartridge from a four-ten had not had the power to send lead shot and gas through the thick bone of the upper spine and base of the skull and still have enough force to penetrate the back of the head.

‘Was it a contact wound, doctor?’ asked Nichols, airing his forensic knowledge gleaned from his inspector’s course.

Pryor looked closely at the front of the neck, below the chin.

‘Yes, near enough, though there’s a bit of soot and burning at one side, so there was room around the muzzle for the gases to escape sideways. But pretty tight, all the same, as there’s a partial muzzle mark on the skin.’

The coroner’s officer handed him the tape measure and Richard stretched it out from the wound down to the tip of the index fingers of each hand.

‘Thirty inches from muzzle to trigger, doc,’ quoted the constable from his notebook.

‘That’s OK, then, he could easily discharge it with these long arms.’

When Richard opened up the body, he found ample evidence of the prostate problem, with secondary growths beginning in several bones. The interior of the neck and the base of the skull had been shredded by the shotgun blast, and the skull bones at the back of head were widely fractured.

‘I’ll save a few lead shots for the lab, just in case anyone ever wants to check that they are the same as the ones that would have been in the spent cartridge in the gun,’ he said.

‘Doubt we’ll need that, doc, but as you say, just as well to do things by the book,’ agreed Crippen.

After he had sewn up the body and cleaned it as well as the basic facilities allowed, it was seven o’clock. After a decent wash in the hospital itself and a cup of tea and some sandwiches in the dining room, he was ready to set off for home in the advancing dusk.

‘Thanks for everything, doctor,’ said DI Crippen as the officers saw him off from the hospital car park. ‘We’ll see you again at the inquest, no doubt.’

As he drove the Humber across country, he felt rather sorry that tonight he could not expect to be greeted by Moira with a good meal and a warm welcome.