According To The Evidence

ONE

Breconshire, September 1955

The burly youth pedalled his way along the lane, its high hedges still green, with just a few signs of approaching autumn. The Raleigh was old and clumsy and he made heavy weather of the slope up towards the barn. The bike was his father’s cast-off and, though Shane had tried to modernize it with a pair of drop handlebars, it still remained an old bone-shaker. If his employers weren’t so tight-fisted, he grumbled to himself, he could have got in a bit of overtime to afford the down payment on a new machine.

It was just seven o’clock when he dismounted at the gate and leaned his cycle against a post. Hauling a pair of keys from the pocket of his stained dungarees, he undid the padlock and pushed the metal gate wide open with a squeal of protest from the rusty hinges. He was always first here in the mornings, as Jeff and Aubrey were milking down at the main buildings, almost a quarter of a mile away. That lazy bugger Tom Littleman never got here before eight – or even later if he’d been hitting the beer the previous night.

Shane wheeled his bike into the large yard, the ground sticky with yesterday’s rain mixed with years of old oil from the vehicles scattered around like an elephant’s graveyard. Land Rovers, tractors, a couple of small trucks, muck spreaders, reapers and even an ancient threshing machine littered the area, laced with old tyres and unidentifiable pieces of rusty metal. Some of the debris had been there so long that grass, nettles and even briars were growing through it.

The young labourer propped the Raleigh against the wall of the barn, a huge structure with a corrugated-iron roof. The walls were of concrete block up to head height, from which rose vertical slatted timbers. A large corrugated-iron door gave access for vehicles, but the youth went to a small door alongside it and again unlocked another large padlock.

Whistling tunelessly between his teeth, he went into the gloom within the barn and pulled back the two metal bars that locked the main door and, with a heave, pushed it open. He kept walking until the door was flat against the outside wall, where he secured it by a rusty chain to a staple. In high winds, it was a beast to push open, but today the air was warm and still.

With the full light streaming into the barn, he could now see the usual collection of farm machinery under repair, a couple of tractors with their radiators and fuel tanks removed and a Land Rover minus its engine.

It was a moment before his eyes, used to the familiar scene, realized that something was not right. He was looking directly at the soles of a pair of boots which were projecting towards him from under a large blue tractor. They were attached to a pair of legs and, as he slowly moved forward, his uncomprehending mind was forced to accept that not only was the top end of the body directly under the huge back wheel of the Fordson but that the dark stain that had spread beneath it was certainly not motor oil.

After gaping at the body for long enough to recognize the clothing as that of their mechanic, Tom Littleman, the apprentice grabbed his bicycle and pedalled like fury back along the road to Ty Croes Farm, four fields away.

In the countryside, dealing with a death can be a slow process.

It was forty minutes before the first policeman arrived on his little Velocette ‘Noddybike’ from the police house in Sennybridge and almost another hour before the coroner’s officer appeared from Brecon.

The constable had been phoned by the owner of the farm, Aubrey Evans, who had left the milking shed as soon as Shane Williams had arrived to gabble his news. He had immediately raced back to the barn in his old Bedford pickup truck, the boy bouncing up and down on the seat beside him.

When they reached the yard, the farmer had jumped out and run to the threshold of the big door. After a single glance, Aubrey had dropped to one knee alongside the still form and grabbed the nearest outstretched hand. A dour, practical man, he felt the deathly cold of the skin and knew that his mechanic was beyond any help.

‘Bloody fool!’ he muttered uncharitably to Shane as he looked at the massive treads of the tyre crushing the victim’s neck. The pile of large wooden blocks that had been propping up the back axle of the Fordson were scattered under the vehicle. ‘I told him to get this job finished, but not when he was half pissed!’

With a muttered command to his shaken apprentice to get the big door closed again and to stand guard, he jumped back into the pickup and clattered off to use their only phone, which was back in the farmhouse.

By nine o’clock the group outside the barn door had grown appreciably and soon the arrival of a black Wolseley 6/90 brought two more, a detective inspector and a plain-clothes sergeant.

The DI was a tall, thin man of an age approaching retirement. He wore a long fawn raincoat and a permanently miserable expression, perhaps because of his name. After almost thirty years in the police, Arthur Crippen had heard every variation of the joke and it had long been worn thin. He advanced on the group and fixed his mournful eyes on the coroner’s officer, PC William Brown.

‘Right, Billy, what’s going on and who are these people?’ he demanded.

Brown was a thickset fellow with a pronounced limp, caused by a shell splinter in the Italian campaign. His Monte Cassino disability had gained him the job of coroner’s officer when he returned to the police force.

‘Like I said on the phone, sir, we’ve got an apparent accidental death from a chap squashed by a tractor.’ He jerked a thumb back at the barn, where the main door was open again and the body covered with a tattered canvas sheet. ‘But it’s a bit unusual, so I thought it better to be on the safe side and ask you to have a look before we move him.’

Crippen’s eyes peered out from under the wide brim of his brown trilby, scanning the other men standing around him.

Billy Brown pointed them out, one at a time.

‘This is Aubrey Evans. He runs the farm down the road in partnership with his cousin here, Jeff Morton.’

The two men nodded in acknowledgement. Aubrey Evans was a typical Mid-Wales farmer, impassive in nature but with shrewd eyes beneath the flat cap that he wore at a rakish angle. About forty years old, his big muscular body was clad in a brown warehouse coat, held closed by a length of binder twine tied around his waist.

Jeffrey Morton had a family resemblance to his slightly older cousin, but he was slightly shorter, though still sturdy. He had a fuller, more open face, marred by a large purple birthmark on his left temple. Like Aubrey, he wore a crumpled tweed cap, but it was perched on the back of his head, revealing slightly gingerish hair. Being as much involved in their mechanical repair business as working the farm, he wore faded blue dungarees, oil-stained at the front.

‘And this gentleman?’ demanded Crippen, staring at an older man standing behind the two cousins.

‘I’m Mostyn Evans, owner of the farm,’ came a deep voice as he stepped forward. ‘At least I own the land and used to work it until I passed the business on to these two here. Aubrey’s my son and Jeff is my nephew.’

He was in his seventies, the DI estimated, but still a strong man both in physique and temperament. Wiry grey hair covered a big head, his craggy face lined with a lifetime’s exposure to the elements. A baggy brown suit, with an old-fashioned waistcoat, covered a collarless flannel shirt fastened at the neck with a brass stud.

‘What about this young fellow?’ growled Crippen, staring at the youth, who lurked at the edge of the group.

‘That’s Shane Williams,’ said the coroner’s officer. ‘Sort of an apprentice mechanic. He was the first to find the body.’

The lad shuffled uneasily. ‘I’m not a proper apprentice,’ he mumbled. ‘Just working here, while I’m waiting to be called up for National Service.’

For the next five minutes the detective inspector dragged what little information he could from the four men about their scanty knowledge of ‘the occurrence’, before going towards the barn to look at the scene. Billy Brown and his sergeant walked each side of him as they went up to the big Fordson, where the coroner’s officer carefully removed the tarpaulin and put it to one side.

‘They shouldn’t really have put this on,’ he said. ‘But I suppose they didn’t want to leave him exposed until we came.’

Arthur Crippen stood for a long moment looking at the scene.

The tractor was on an almost even keel, its offside back wheel resting squarely on the neck of the corpse, the head hidden by the massive tyre. A few spanners lay scattered around, amid the rough wooden blocks, which appeared to be sections sawn from a railway sleeper.

‘Why shouldn’t it be an obvious accident, guv?’ murmured Sergeant Nichols.

‘Bloody daft thing to do if you’re a proper mechanic, putting your head under a jacked-up wheel!’ objected Billy Brown, who felt obliged to justify his calling out the CID.

Crippen continued to stare at the inert body lying on the stained concrete floor. He slowly rubbed his face, pushing his sallow cheeks into even deeper wrinkles as he tried to make up his mind.

‘Shall I get the tractor jacked up again, so that we can get the poor sod out?’ asked John Nichols. The sergeant was quite young, a slim, fair man with a narrow Clark Gable moustache.

Crippen came to a decision and slowly shook his head from side to side. ‘I don’t think we will, John,’ he grunted. ‘Like Billy here, I feel we need to be cautious about this one.’

Aubrey Evans broke away from the group still standing in the yard and came up to the policemen. ‘Are you going to leave him there much longer? It doesn’t seem very respectful.’

The senior detective didn’t answer him directly but countered with another question. ‘What was he doing, to be under there like that?’

‘I’m not sure. It’s Jeff who mostly looks after the repair side – I do the farming.’ He turned and called across to his cousin, who ambled over to join them.

‘What was Tom doing with this Major?’ he demanded.

‘Fitting new brake shoes,’ replied Jeff Morton. ‘He should have finished them yesterday morning, but the idle bugger didn’t turn up until midday.’

Crippen ignored the lack of respect for the dead but filed the comment away for later enquiry. ‘So he had to have the tractor jacked up for that?’ he asked.

‘Yes, one side at a time. Get the wheels off, then open the drums to change the shoes.’

‘But the wheels are on now?’ objected Crippen.

‘Yes, but the shoe clearance would have to be set by using a spanner on the adjusters behind the drums. Each side would have to be jacked up again for that.’

‘Is putting a pile of wooden blocks under the axle a safe way of doing that?’ demanded the sergeant.

Morton shrugged. ‘We’ve always done it – and so does every other farm repairer. Never had trouble before.’

‘Can’t you use a proper trolley jack?’ asked the coroner’s officer.

‘We do, to get it off the ground. Then we stick the blocks underneath and take the jack away. It’s always being needed for other jobs.’ He swept his hand around the barn, where half a dozen other vehicles were in various states of disorder, some up on their own blocks.

Crippen returned to staring at the man lying dead at his feet.

‘Would any sensible mechanic trust his head underneath more than a ton of tractor?’ he asked.

‘Tom Littleman wasn’t what you’d call sensible, officer,’ said a deeper voice, as Mostyn Evans had walked up to stand behind them. ‘He was a lousy mechanic, if the truth be told. I told the lads that when they employed him – and I was dead against them taking him into partnership with the repair business.’

‘What was wrong with him?’

‘He was far too fond of the booze, for one thing,’ growled the older man. ‘Lost a lot of working time, and when he was here he was often half-cut. I’m not all that surprised that the stupid sod ended up like this.’

Aubrey murmured something to his father in Welsh, but Mostyn Evans shook his head. ‘No, it’s got to be said, son! Tom was a liability and a disaster waiting to happen. Now it has happened.’

The detective inspector seemed to have made up his mind. He turned to Billy Brown. ‘Has a doctor been here to look at him?’ he asked.

The coroner’s officer shook his head. ‘I left a message with Dr Prosser, the local police surgeon. He was out on his rounds, but I left a message for him to come here as soon as he gets back for his morning surgery. I doubt he’ll do more than certify death,’ he added rather caustically.

Crippen did some more face-rubbing, which seemed to aid his decision-making. ‘I want a pathologist to have a look at this, before we write it off. Any chance of getting one up here this side of Christmas? I suppose we’ll have to go through the forensic lab in Cardiff.’

His sergeant shook his head. ‘There was a circular from headquarters last week. The Cardiff man is away, so a new Home Office chap from the Wye Valley is standing in for him.’

Crippen shrugged. ‘I don’t care if he’s from Timbuktu as long as he clears this up for us. Get hold of him, then shut that barn door and leave the PC here on watch.’

He loped back to the waiting police car and ordered the driver to take him back to Brecon. ‘I’ll come back when the pathologist is due,’ he called through the window.