According To The Evidence

FOUR

Next morning the people from the Home Office Forensic Science Laboratory in Cardiff were due at Ty Croes Farm at ten o’clock, so DI Crippen used the waiting time to interview the residents more thoroughly than the previous day had allowed.

Milking was finished, and by eight o’clock he sat with his sergeant in the parlour of the farmhouse, a musty little-used room. A bobble-edged velvet cloth covered a round table, and there was even an ancient aspidistra on the window sill. On the wall above Crippen’s head was a framed sampler dated 1864, the faded threads displaying in Welsh a gloomy extract from the Psalms.

The householder, Aubrey Evans, was the first one they spoke to. He came into the room and sat at the table between the inspector and John Nichols, who had a notebook at the ready. Aubrey wore a thick check shirt buttoned at the neck, his brown corduroy trousers held up by wide red braces.

‘Let’s start again at the beginning, Mr Evans,’ began Arthur in a mild voice. ‘You run the farm, but it actually belongs to your father?’

‘He’s kept the freehold of the land, but he’s given me a lifetime lease on this house, just as he has to Jeff in regard to the cottage next door.’

‘What happens when he dies?’

‘It’s all arranged with the lawyer. He’s leaving the land to me, as he doesn’t want it split up. It’s been in the family since Noah’s Ark was afloat. He’s giving the freehold of the cottage to Jeff.’

‘And what about the business?’ queried Crippen.

‘My cousin and I split the farming two ways, then we’ve got a partnership that runs the agricultural repair business. Jeff and I have got a third each, the other thirty-odd per cent is Tom Littleman’s.’

He stopped as if a new thought had just struck him. ‘No, we’ve got half each now, with him gone.’

‘His family will surely inherit his share?’ suggested Nichols.

The farmer shrugged. ‘He hasn’t got any family. Lived alone, not married and I’ve never heard of any other relatives. He came from up in England somewhere after the war.’

Crippen’s lined face developed a few more furrows. ‘He’s the dead man here, so I’ve got to know everything about him. How come he became one of your partners?’

Aubrey stretched out his legs, his feet encased in thick socks. Even at this fraught time, he couldn’t come into the parlour in his work boots.

‘Worst thing we ever did, taking him on! When we began building up the repair business six years ago, we needed a real mechanic for the engine work. Jeff’s cousin had been in the army through the war, in the REME, mending trucks and tanks. Tom Littleman was a pal of his, and when we wanted someone he suggested him.’

‘So he’s been here about six years?’ asked the sergeant.

Aubrey nodded. ‘He worked for us as an employee for a couple of years and was fine before he really took up the booze. Later, when my father gave us the farm and we set up a partnership, we took him on as a partner rather than pay him wages.’

He sucked on a hollow tooth. ‘And regretted it ever since!’

‘Was he that unreliable, then?’ asked the sergeant, who was making notes as Aubrey spoke.

‘Unpredictable, he was! Sometimes as good as gold, for he certainly knew his stuff with machinery. But he’d been getting slacker and slacker – coming late, sometimes not turning up at all.’

‘Just because of drink?’

‘I suppose so, no reason otherwise. But he’d show up drunk some mornings, then get ratty when we told him off. He gave that poor kid Shane a hard time.’

Aubrey leaned back in his chair and scratched his head. ‘My dad was always sounding off about him, said we should never have taken him on. He warned us that he was going to be trouble. We’ve kept trying to buy out his share, but he wasn’t having any.’

‘So, really, it’s quite handy that he’s gone?’ said Crippen with an air of false innocence.

The implication was not lost on the farmer, and he scowled at the detective. ‘We didn’t want the bugger killed, if that’s what you mean,’ he said sullenly.

Arthur Crippen changed tack. ‘Let’s go through what happened yesterday and the previous evening,’ he said placidly. ‘When did you last see Littleman?’

‘About five o’clock that evening. I drove down to the barn to pick up Jeff, as we were going to an NFU meeting in Brecon. Shane was just knocking off, and I wanted to check that the brakes had been finished on that Major. The owner had been getting shirty because we’d promised to have it ready for him the previous day.’

‘And it wasn’t finished?’

‘No way. Tom hadn’t turned up at all on Monday and he was even late coming that day. I tore him off a strip, as the owner had been bawling down the phone at me, threatening to take his work elsewhere.’

‘You had a quarrel, then?’ suggested the sergeant.

‘We were always having shouting matches, either me or Jeff. But Tom always had some excuse – or he just shrugged it off. Drove us bloody mad, it did!’

John Nichols wrote rapidly in his notebook as the DI continued.

‘When you left, Littleman was still working on the tractor? How far had he got, d’you know? Was it jacked up then?’

Aubrey shrugged. ‘I didn’t really notice, to be honest. See, I do the farming and Jeff splits his time between that and seeing to the machinery side, especially since Tom became so unreliable.’

The questions went on for a few more minutes, but there was little else that they could get out of the man, apart from how Shane had rushed up to fetch him and how he had rung the police in Sennybridge the previous morning. As he got up to leave, Crippen had one last question.

‘You said that you and your cousin went into Brecon for a National Farmers’ Union meeting the night before. What time did you get back here?’

‘The meeting finished about half eight. We went for a couple of pints in the Boar’s Head and got home about ten, I suppose.’

When he reached the door, the inspector asked him if he would send his wife in for a word.

Aubrey stared at him. ‘What d’you need her for? Betsan never went near the damned barn!’

‘Just routine, Mr Evans. She might have noticed something about Littleman, you never know.’

The farmer grunted something and left the room. A few moments later his wife appeared, and the two police officers stood while she sat down. Betsan Evans was in her mid-thirties and was still a good-looking woman, slim and straight-backed, with a long face framed with dark hair. Though a hard-working farmer’s wife, she had an innate elegance that could be envied by many women living a softer city life. She wore a blue wrap-around pinafore dress above lisle stockings and house slippers.

Betsan sat calmly with her hands in her lap and waited for the inspector to speak.

‘We won’t keep you long, Mrs Evans,’ he said. ‘Just a few points to try to clear up this nasty business.’

‘Is it definite that someone killed Tom?’ she asked in a flat voice. ‘I can’t believe it.’

‘I’m afraid it looks that way. How long have you known him?’

Betsan looked up sharply at this, a movement that was not lost on the two detectives. ‘Known him? Well, since he came here, about six years back. Out of the army, he was. Good with machines, that’s why Aubrey and Jeff wanted him here.’

‘We’ve heard he was a heavy drinker. Is that right?’

She nodded. ‘He got worse these past two years. He was fine when he first came.’

‘Any idea why?’ asked the sergeant.

She shook her head vigorously. ‘He never said much about himself, and we never got under his skin, as they say. Don’t even know if he had any family, he never mentioned them.’

‘Not married, then? Did he have any lady friends?’

Betsan shrugged, just as her husband had. ‘Not that we knew about. He lived eight miles away in Brecon. Used to come on a motorbike every day, so we didn’t know what he got up to when he wasn’t here.’

‘Never see any strangers hanging about, maybe talking to him?’ hazarded Nichols, running out of things to ask this quiet woman. ‘Didn’t gamble on the horses or perhaps had debts to someone?’

Again she twitched her shoulders. ‘I wouldn’t know, would I? I didn’t see much of him. He didn’t come up here to have his dinner; he used to bring his food with him – often in a bottle!’ she added with a touch of bitterness.

‘But as far as you knew, he was a good mechanic?’ persisted Crippen.

She nodded. ‘Never had any complaints about his work – it was getting him to do it was the problem. Aubrey and Jeff always had to nag him to get things done, he lost so much time lately with the drink.’

She was silent for a moment. ‘It was a mistake having him here in the first place!’ she burst out vehemently. ‘My father-in-law was against it from the first. We should have listened to him. This would never have happened then.’

Though she was nowhere near tears, she seemed to be building up a head of emotion, so Crippen decided to let her go. When the door had closed behind her, he looked at his sergeant.

‘Something’s going on there that she’s not letting on about,’ he murmured.

‘Maybe they had a fling together at some time,’ said Nichols.

He got up and went out into the passage of the old house, which, though it had been modernized, was a typical centuries-old Welsh longhouse. Originally, the family would have lived at one end and the animals at the other, but a series of sheds and outbuildings had now separated the humans from the livestock. All the family, including the cousin and his wife, were sitting eating breakfast in the huge kitchen. Crippen and the sergeant had been given tea when they arrived, declining the offer of a fried breakfast.

Now Nichols asked Jeff Morton to come in, and soon he was sitting between them at the parlour table. He was slightly shorter than his cousin, but still had the powerful build of a countryman, toughened by hefting bales of hay and all the other physical tasks of farm labour. He had an amiable face, but Crippen’s eyes could not avoid being drawn to the livid birthmark on the side of his head.

‘Bad business, this!’ he began before the DI could say anything. ‘I wasn’t keen on the fellow, but I wouldn’t wish that on him.’

‘I gather he wasn’t popular around here?’ observed Crippen.

‘Lately he was a pain in the arse. He was alright when he first came and for a fair bit afterwards,’ said Morton, echoing Mrs Evans. ‘You could never get close to him; he always had a tight mouth. But the drink ruined him.’

‘When did you last see him?’ asked the sergeant and got a recital of the facts that Aubrey Evans had given them about going to Brecon.

‘I understand you worked with him more than your cousin did?’ queried Crippen. ‘You must have talked to him a lot, being with him every day?’

Jeff shook his head. ‘Never got much out of him, only what he did when he was in the army and stuff about football. Crazy about the pools, he was. God knows what he spent a week on them. But he never opened up at all about personal things. He’d shy off them if you brought the subject up.’

‘How did the drink affect him? Was he drunk on duty, so to speak?’

Again Morton shook his head. ‘He wasn’t falling about or anything,’ he replied. ‘Slowed down, but he could still do the job. It was just that often the bloody man didn’t show up at all or came hopelessly late when we had a job to finish.’

‘And that was the situation on the last day, with that blue tractor?’ said Nichols.

‘Yes. I nagged him all day – at least all afternoon, as he didn’t show up until dinner time. Then Aubrey had a go at him and there was a row about not getting that Fordson ready.’

‘Did it get nasty, that row?’ asked the inspector. ‘Violent, I mean?’

‘No, it was Aubrey and me that used to do the shouting. Tom would just get sullen and turn away. He wouldn’t even reply half the time.’

They went through the same questions again, but Jeff Morton was adamant that, as far as he knew, Littleman had no debts or enemies that came pestering him. No one had ever come asking for him at the farm, and once he rode away on his BSA motorbike he was an unknown quantity as far as his life was concerned.

As he got up to leave, Crippen asked him if his wife was in the house. ‘I’d just like a word with her, same as with Mrs Evans, to see if there might be anything useful she might have heard or seen.’

The cousin looked surprised. ‘Rhian wouldn’t have a clue, sir. She hardly ever spoke to Tom. He was always down at the barn, a few fields away.’

‘Just the same, I’ll have to speak to her, just for the record. Same as we’ll have to take fingerprints from everyone, just to eliminate any we find in the barn.’

Morton gave a wry smile. ‘You’ll find prints from half the people in Breconshire down there! Most of the farmers around here come in and handle the stuff they bring in.’

Arthur Crippen thought he was probably right, but it would still have to be done. Just as Jeff Morton was leaving the room, one of the uniformed constables put his head around the door to say that the forensic people had arrived.

The DI got up to follow him out. ‘I’ll have to go down to see them. We’ll leave talking to Mrs Morton and the father until afterwards,’ he said to his sergeant.

‘And the lad, this Shane Williams,’ said Nichols. ‘He was the one who found the body, after all.’

In the next county, Angela Bray and Siân Lloyd were working in the laboratory of Garth House, trying not to be distracted too much by the striking view through the wide bay window.

The technician had one side of the room for her chemical equipment, a long bench covered with glassware and some optical instruments. It was divided in the centre by a fume cupboard, a glass-sided cabinet with an exhaust fan that vented out through the side wall of the house.

The scientist reigned on the opposite side, where Angela handled the biological investigations, ranks of small tubes for blood-grouping tests being lined up on the white Formica top. Two box-like incubators were held at body heat and against the third wall, next to the door into Moira’s office, was a large white refrigerator.

Siân was working through the specimens that Richard Pryor had brought in from recent post-mortems at Chepstow and Monmouth – a carbon monoxide analysis from an industrial coal-gas poisoning and a barbiturate identification from a suicide. Before coming to Garth House, she had been a medical laboratory technician in a large Newport hospital and was currently studying for an external qualification in biochemistry.

Angela was dealing with a batch of paternity tests, one of the mainstays of their practice. In the six months since they had started, she had worked up quite a reputation among solicitors far and wide for helping them in cases where mothers were claiming that a certain man was the father of their child and should be paying maintenance. She checked the complex pattern of blood groups of the mother, child and putative father to see if he could be excluded, though the tests could never positively prove his paternity.

As they worked, they chatted sporadically. Angela had told Siân about their experiences the previous day in the depths of Breconshire, as the girl was always avid for details of their forensic cases.

‘From what you say, whoever killed that man must be someone on the farm,’ she declared with her usual forthrightness. Siân always saw everything in black and white, rather than acknowledging shades of grey.

‘It seems most likely, as there’s hardly anyone else within walking distance,’ agreed Angela. ‘But we mustn’t jump to conclusions in this game. Proof has to be according to the evidence.’

There was a silence as Siân put one eye to the Hartridge reversion spectroscope sitting on her bench. She adjusted a knob to line up the spectra of a solution of blood from the victim of the factory accident, which would give her a percentage saturation with the deadly gas carbon monoxide. She noted down the reading, then picked up the conversation where they had left it.

‘But who else could have done it? You say the place is way out in the sticks?’

‘No doubt that’s what the police are doing today, knocking themselves out to see if there’s any possibility of someone else being involved. Maybe there’s somebody in this chap Littleman’s past that’s relevant. He was a heavy drinker. Maybe he gambled as well and owed a lot of money.’

Siân thought that strangling the fellow wasn’t a very good way of collecting the arrears, but she contented herself with remarking that she would be doing the alcohol estimations on his samples that afternoon.

Moira came in from the office at that point with the typed copies of the short statement that Angela had dictated earlier about her involvement. ‘What about these fibres you collected?’ she asked. ‘You haven’t examined them yourself?’

‘No, it’s an odd situation. I could have dealt with them – it’s just up my street – but I can’t get involved any further than just handing them over to the police as exhibits. I’ve got no official standing in the case, unlike Richard. It’s the forensic lab in Cardiff who will have to do the business.’

‘Couldn’t the cops have employed you to do it, instead of them?’ persisted Siân.

Angela shook her head. ‘Then they’d have to pay us, but they get the forensic lab for free, as it’s part of the Home Office system. Anyway, Cardiff will probably have to examine other stuff from there, like the clothes that people were wearing, so it would be pointless having two lots of scientists involved, especially if eventually we had to go to court about it.’

Moira went back to her office and Angela swung back on her rotating stool to get on with adding sera to her racks of tubes, while Siân began a duplicate run on the carbon monoxide test. All was quiet for a while, until the sound of a car was heard, hauling itself up the steep drive outside.

‘He’s back. I wonder if he’s brought me more work?’ observed Siân. She was not complaining, as every aspect of the job intrigued her, even after six month’s familiarity. Richard Pryor had been doing his routine post-mortems for the coroner at the shabby public mortuaries in Chepstow and Monmouth, which, like Angela’s blood tests, were his main contribution to the finances of the partnership. He had been fortunate in that an old classmate of his, when they were medical students in Cardiff before the war, was now a general practitioner in Monmouth and also the part-time coroner for the area. He had given the post-mortem work to Richard, and this, together with a similar function in several hospitals as a stand-in when the regular men were away, brought in a steady income to the Garth House business.

When he came in through the back door and dumped his bag in his room, Moira declared a tea break and went off to the kitchen to put the kettle on the Aga. As she passed him in the passage, she reminded him about returning yesterday’s phone call from the lawyer in Stow-on-the-Wold. When they assembled in the staffroom ten minutes later, Richard told them about the brief telephone conversation.

‘It was a chap called Lovesey, a solicitor in Stow. He was a bit guarded about the details, but he wants an expert medical opinion on behalf of the defence of a veterinary surgeon who’s been charged with murdering his wife.’

Siân and Moira leaned forward eagerly, wanting to hear more, though Angela’s interest was mainly concerned with the possible fee that this might bring to the partnership.

‘How did he do it?’ asked Siân, with morbid curiosity. ‘Did he shoot her or strangle her?’

‘The juicy details don’t normally get discussed over the phone. He wants an urgent conference, as the case goes to trial at Gloucester Assizes in a few weeks.’

‘Bit late to think of a defence, isn’t it?’ asked Angela critically.

‘Apparently, they’ve had one already, but it didn’t help them. Now they’ve got a new defence counsel, some hotshot QC from London, and he’s demanding another opinion.’

Moira’s brow wrinkled in puzzlement. ‘I don’t understand this defence business. If they get a first post-mortem in a murder, then that doctor’s opinion is accepted, surely?’

Richard Pryor put his mug of tea on the table, ready to lecture.

‘Don’t you believe it! There are almost as many different opinions as there are pathologists. Some of them have very strange ideas and some are just plain inexperienced in forensic work, being basically clinical pathologists in hospitals.’

‘Few forensic pathologists are free from strange ideas,’ commented Angela drily. ‘Present company excepted, of course!’ she added mischievously.

He made a face at her and carried on with his explanation.

‘In most murders, either the defence gets an opinion from another independent pathologist who has read the first chap’s report or who has done another examination of the body himself, as I did a few months ago in that Swansea case.’

‘They had three PMs on that poor woman,’ observed Siân, critically.

Now Moira entered the discussion. ‘In this Stow case, you said the defence already had a second opinion and they didn’t like it. Presumably, they’re hoping you will come up with a different view?’

‘That’s obviously the idea – but I may also agree completely with the first pathologist,’ replied Pryor. ‘It often happens that way, but at least it means that the accused has had a fair crack of the whip. Doesn’t always happen abroad; they have a different system on the Continent.’

‘So what have you arranged?’ asked the ever-practical Angela.

‘I’m going to see the solicitor tomorrow afternoon. Perhaps you’d like to come, Angela? There may be some forensic science angle to it.’

The handsome brunette nodded. ‘I’ve never been to Stow-on-the-Wold. Here’s a chance for me, even if it is a homicidal visit, so to speak!’