According To The Evidence

NINETEEN

Colonel Bannerman telephoned the following Monday, when Richard Pryor was away at Hereford County Hospital, the local coroner having asked him to perform a post-mortem on a patient who had died during an abdominal operation. Moira took the call and when Richard returned at lunchtime she passed on the message from the War Office, checking the actual words from a note she had made.

‘The colonel said he had had a report from the Woolwich place and would like to talk it over with you. He has to come to Bristol tomorrow on another matter and wonders if you could meet him at lunchtime at his hotel, as he would prefer to speak to you personally, rather than over the telephone.’

Richard had no commitments on that Tuesday and readily agreed. Moira had the name of the hotel in Clifton and he asked her to phone Bannerman’s secretary to confirm that he would be there.

‘You must come too, Angela,’ he said over lunch. ‘You were at the examination last week, so you need to see the thing right through with me.’

Next morning they drove down to the Beachley-Aust ferry, which intrigued Angela, as she had never seen it before. When they trundled the Humber off the ungainly vessel on the Somerset side, she declared that the sooner they built a bridge, the better she would be pleased.

They found Bannerman’s hotel, a large, Edwardian building in Whiteladies Road, and discovered the War Office man waiting for them in the bar. His tall figure hovered over them as he invited them to sit at a small table in the corner and signalled to a waiter to take an order for drinks. When Angela had been served with a gin and tonic and Richard with a half of bitter, Bannerman raised his own glass of whisky in a toast.

‘To your good health and my thanks for your able assistance,’ he said genially. ‘I think the report from Woolwich will confirm what you outlined to me when we last met in London.’

He pulled out a thin folder from his black briefcase, which seemed as much a part of him as his pinstriped suit and old school tie.

‘Perhaps we can look at this now, then we can have lunch in peace. I have to be at a conference with counsel at two, over a legal problem with a procurement contract, but I’ve booked a table in the dining room, if you would care to be my guests.’

Angela obviously appreciated his old-world courtesy and Richard covertly felt that his partner came from the same social stratum as the rather upstage colonel.

Bannerman opened the file and put it on the table so that they could all see it. ‘They sent this photograph as well,’ he began, tapping a long finger on a large black and white print.

It showed a much-magnified image of the distorted bullet, the sharp focus emphasizing a pale streak on the least-damaged side.

‘That was the thing you were interested in, doctor. They concentrated on that and sent this short report that confirms what you suggested to me.’

He slid the photograph to one side and displayed a single sheet of typewriting, beneath an official letterhead that bore the logo of a crowned lion over crossed swords.

Richard and Angela bent over the form with their heads almost touching and read through the somewhat terse report. The pathologist skipped the preliminaries, then read out the significant part aloud.

‘“The item submitted was a.45-inch-calibre bullet consisting of a copper jacket over a lead core. It was badly damaged from impact and had a discoloured streak on one side consistent with a glancing impact during its trajectory. Metallurgical analysis of this artefact indicated that it was an alloy of aluminium, containing copper, magnesium and manganese, commonly known as Duralumin.”.’

Richard looked up at Bannerman and grinned. ‘Looks as if that clinches it, colonel!’ he said.

Following a good lunch, Angela could not resist another hour’s delay for her to investigate Clifton’s main shopping street, where there were several smart boutiques. Her partner stayed in the hotel lounge, where he treated himself to a leisurely pint of bitter while he read The Times and the Telegraph. After they left Bristol, they were fortunate with the ferry at Aust and arrived back at Garth House before Moira and Siân had left for the day, both anxious to hear what had transpired.

Deciding that this justified an extra cup of tea, Moira brought a tray into the staffroom and they settled down to listen to Richard’s explanation. He briefly recapped the story for Siân’s benefit, as she had not had Moira’s knowledge of the War Office call.

‘It’s all about the family’s claim that this warrant officer’s death out in the Gulf was either due to negligence or even might have been deliberate,’ he began. ‘There’s no doubt that the fatal shot came from his sergeant’s weapon during this practice assault in the fuselage of an old aircraft, but it’s the way he was shot that has given rise to all this controversy.’

‘How did the widow come to start this claim?’ asked Siân.

‘I suspect she went to a solicitor to see about demanding compensation and he started the hare running. He got a medical opinion but really didn’t understand what sort of expertise was needed. A hospital surgeon may know a lot about treating wounds, but he’s not the best person to decide how they’re caused.’

Angela nodded her agreement. ‘I’ve seen this in the forensic science business – there are too many instant experts around. They know a bit about everything, but not enough about the issue in question.’

Siân still looked dubious. ‘But you say that no one is claiming that the sergeant didn’t shoot the poor chap! It was his gun, so what’s the controversy about?’

Richard took a Marie biscuit from the tea tray. ‘The widow, or rather her lawyer, is claiming that the shooting was deliberate, under cover of the exercise. The alternative is that it was caused by negligence on the part of the sergeant – and perhaps also by the army itself for having faulty procedures.’ As he bit into his biscuit, it was Moira’s turn to question him.

‘Why on earth should the sergeant want to kill him?’

‘Because it’s admitted that there was bad blood between the warrant officer and the staff sergeant. They had even come to blows not long before, over disputes about how to run the training programme and claims that the senior NCO was bullying the sergeant.’

‘So he took the chance to aim one of his shots in the wrong direction?’ summarized Siân. ‘It seems a damned dangerous business to me, firing off guns inside an aeroplane.’

Richard shrugged. ‘War and fighting terrorists is a dangerous business. You can’t learn it from a book, that’s why the War Office hired these chaps to this place in the Gulf, to train their own fellows.’

Moira wanted to get down to the denouement. ‘So how did you sort it out, Dr Pryor?’

She was already proud of him, even though he hadn’t yet explained anything.

‘Having studied the original post-mortem report and the poor photographs, the medical expert the family had hired was convinced that the wound on the back of the head came from a direct shot at close quarters. He based this on the large size of the hole, claiming that a more distant discharge would have made a small round hole, but that because it was much bigger it must have been due to the gases from the end of the gun barrel bursting into the tissues.’

‘Is that right, doctor?’ asked Siân, determined to see fair play.

Richard nodded. ‘Up to a point. The gun would have to be very close indeed, so that the hot gas blasts through the skin, hits the hard skull underneath and bounces back, splitting the skin. It can’t happen over soft areas, like the belly.’

‘So why do you disagree?’ demanded Siân, determined to be devil’s advocate.

‘There was no burning or propellant residue on the hair or skin which you would get with that close a discharge, though I admit straight away that if he had been wearing a bush hat covering that part of his head, it would have filtered off any of those signs.’

‘But they didn’t mention a hat in the Al Tallah reports, and no one there thought to keep the clothing, so we don’t know one way or the other,’ explained Angela, determined to get a little forensic science into the discussion.

‘So where’s the proof to the contrary?’ demanded Siân, doggedly. Richard thought she would have made as good a lawyer as she was a technician. He held up three fingers and ticked them off with the index finger of his other hand as he spoke.

‘First, the scalp wound didn’t look right for a gas burst. It was roughly oblong and the edges weren’t torn badly enough. There was a gouged slope at one end and I felt that the bullet hadn’t penetrated nose first but had hit sideways on. Second, there was no exit wound – the bullet hadn’t gone right through the head and was still resting against the inside of the skull on the left side.’

He tapped his third finger as he made his last point. ‘And though badly distorted, the bullet had this pale streak down the one side.’ He held up a copy of the photograph that Bannerman had given him at lunchtime.

‘Those bullets have a copper jacket, but the laboratory confirmed that this pale stripe is mainly aluminium, with traces of other metals which make up the alloy Duralumin.’

Siân and Moira looked blankly at their employer. ‘So what does that tell you?’ demanded Siân.

Richard held up another photograph, a view down the length of the Dakota’s interior, with the foreground slightly out of focus but showing a double row of rather dilapidated seat frames, partly covered with the remains of ragged upholstery.

‘Nearly everything you see is made of aluminium alloy. It’s been shot up by repeated previous exercises, but the walls of the fuselage, stripped of their lining, are Duralumin, as are the seat frames. I’m convinced that one of the bullets fired by the staff sergeant must have hit a seat frame with a glancing impact and ricocheted away to hit Bulmer in the head.’

‘Why a seat frame and not the walls of the plane?’ asked Moira.

‘The skin of the plane is so thin it would probably have gone straight through. The seats are much more substantial,’ he replied.

‘Does that fit with the nature of the wound?’ asked Siân.

Richard Pryor nodded. ‘It explains it very well. The bullet would have been knocked off its direct trajectory and would probably have started tumbling, perhaps end over end. It hit the scalp sideways on, and even the scuffing at one end of the wound suggests that it was a tangential impact.’

‘Anything else?’ asked Moira.

‘The bullet didn’t go right through the head, probably because it had lost much of its energy by hitting the seat frame. Even high-velocity missiles like that can get stopped inside the skull if they strike the thick bars of bone in the base, but this one hadn’t done that. It just didn’t have enough momentum to break out at the front of the head.’

‘I suppose we should have excluded carbon monoxide in the tissues under the scalp,’ added Angela. ‘Though maybe the embalming would have obscured it if it had been there.’

Siân pricked up her ears at this, as carbon monoxide estimations were part of her job. ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ she asked.

‘Where the gas from a close discharge is blown into the tissues, the carbon monoxide from the explosion in the cartridge combines with the blood and muscle in the tissues,’ explained Angela. ‘It persists a long time. I recall finding it in a case we had in the Met Lab six months after death.’

Moira looked satisfied that Dr Pryor had proved his case. ‘So the sergeant didn’t deliberately shoot his boss!’

Richard shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. He fired some rounds past the warrant officer at the dummies down the far end of the plane, but for some reason one bullet hit the top of a seat and went pinging off at an angle, tragically hitting the victim on the back of the head.’

‘So the poor widow won’t win her claim?’ said Siân rather truculently. ‘It seems a bit hard. Are you really sure about this?’

Richard grinned at his technician’s crusading spirit. ‘Hold on. I’m not a judge or a court of law! I was asked to give an opinion on how that wound came about, and I’m quite sure that what I think happened, did happen. It’s not for me to say what is done with my opinion, but I reckon there’s no justification for suggesting that it was a deliberate attempt to kill the warrant officer. No one could arrange a ricochet that just happened to hit the poor guy!’

‘So she’ll get no satisfaction at all out of this?’ grunted Siân.

‘I didn’t say that, did I? It may well be that she can sue the War Office for employing a faulty, dangerous practice – though I suspect that Crown Indemnity might mean that you can’t sue the government, but I’m not a lawyer.’

‘What a stitch-up!’ exclaimed Siân. ‘That’s what we get for electing another Tory government this year!’

Pryor sought to head off a political argument. ‘Hold on a minute! Bannerman, the chap from the War Office, mentioned to me at lunchtime that they would probably make an ex gratia payment to the widow, as a matter of good public relations. So she wouldn’t have to try to bring any legal action or start campaigning for justice in the Daily Mirror if the army coughed up a reasonable sum in addition to the pension she will get as of right.’

This seemed to mollify Siân, and she joined in the general self-congratulations that the Garth House forensic consortium had triumphed once again.

Richard finished his tea and got up. ‘Right, I’d better start writing a full report for the dear old War Office, so that Moira can type it up in the morning and get it off to London. It will mean a few more shillings to keep us all out of the workhouse!’