Grounds for Appeal

SEVEN

On the following Saturday afternoon, when Sian had gone home to Chepstow and Moira had returned to her house and little dog just down the road, the three doctors assembled in Angela’s sitting room in the front of the house. It was a typical Welsh autumn day outside, a cold drizzle under grey skies, so Richard had no urge to go out and play with his embryonic vineyard on the hillside behind the house.

Instead, he sat with Angela and Priscilla on the old but comfortable three-piece suite that had been Aunt Gladys’s pride and joy, to talk about the case that he had brought from Bristol. The main issue was medical, but there was the matter of the blood stains to consider and, in any case, he valued the general forensic acumen of the two women, who between them had a good many years’ experience.

Though Priscilla said she would be leaving them at the end of the month to return to London and look for a job, she was happy to join in the discussion. Her digs in Tintern Parva were comfortable enough but she didn’t particularly fancy spending a wet Saturday afternoon alone there. Richard had talked about getting a television set for Garth House, but so far nothing had materialized. They had agreed to go up to Monmouth that evening for a meal in one of the hotels, but for now, kicking around a forensic problem seemed the best option.

‘I’ve read through all that file,’ he said, pointing at the thick cardboard folder that lay on the low table in front of them. ‘Most of it is circumstantial stuff and umpteen witness statements, all of no real interest to us, apart from timings. You’re welcome to dredge though it, but the only two aspects that seem relevant to us are the time of death and these blood spots on Millie’s sleeve.’

‘Were the convicted woman and the dead man of different blood groups?’ asked Angela.

‘Yes, she was A-Rhesus positive, Shaw was O-positive, both very common groups. The Home Office lab in Bristol did the tests, so I doubt we can fault them.’

‘How good is the prosecution medical evidence on the time of death?’ asked Priscilla, cutting to the core of the matter.

‘In one word, lousy! It’s the old story of doctors who think they are Sherlock Holmes, instead of sticking to what can be proven. Their pathologist gives the time of death to within limits of one hour — which conveniently is the same hour in which Millicent Shaw’s alibi fails.’

‘Who was he, this doctor?’ queried Angela, snug on the settee with her elegant legs curled under her.

‘Anthony Claridge, a hospital pathologist from Gloucester. He was standing in for the regular chap in Bristol, who was on holiday.’

‘Never heard of him,’ said Angela. ‘Do you know him, Richard?’

‘I’ve met him in passing at a meeting of the Forensic Medicine Society. An old chap, must be about retiring age, I would think. Seemed a bit full of his own importance.’

He opened the file and took out a couple of pages covered in his own writing, notes he had made while reading through all the evidence.

‘Doctor Claridge wheels out all the old traditional stuff about estimating the time since death, most of which is incapable of proof. But with little better to put in its place, lawyers and judges are happy to go along with what’s in the old textbooks, most of which just copy from other books and previous editions, without any critical evaluation of its accuracy.’

Angela smiled at him, rather fondly.

‘You always get hot under the collar over this, don’t you, Richard?’ she teased. ‘I’ve heard you thumping the table before. Next, I suppose, you’ll be blaming Spilsbury and the other old fossils in your profession!’

Her partner had the grace to look a little sheepish.

‘Sorry, but it riles me to hear these chaps pontificate as if what they are claiming is the gospel truth, when it’s really only speculation. My motto is, if you can’t prove it, don’t claim it, especially when someone’s neck is at risk!’

‘So what have we got as a baseline of fact?’ asked Priscilla, still firmly identifying herself as a member of the team even though she was only with them for a short time. Richard tapped his papers with a forefinger.

‘Millie Wilson had one of her frequent quarrels with Shaw in the early evening of a Saturday in June last year. Then she cleared off to the pictures with a woman friend at about seven o’clock. Plenty of other witnesses, as well as the friend, to prove where she was until ten thirty, when she arrived back home.’

‘Presumably, Arthur Shaw was known to be alive during that time?’ asked Angela.

‘Absolutely! He was gambling in the kitchen all evening with three others who lived in the house. They all saw her come home at half-past ten. She came into the back room where they were playing poker and said something insulting to Shaw, about the bruising he had earlier caused to her face. They had a short slanging match and she went upstairs to their so-called flat.’

‘What happened to the poor woman then?’ demanded Priscilla, who, like Sian, was quick to sympathize with another female who was being ill-treated by some aggressive lout.

‘Shaw, who had been drinking as usual, became angry and left the game to go upstairs, saying that she needed to be taught a lesson. There was a devil of a rumpus for a time, but as usual, the residents took little notice. Then Millicent came down with a swollen eye and a bleeding cut on her lip. She screamed some abuse back up the stairs and shouted that she was going to her sister’s and was never coming back, then ran out of the house. This was at about eleven o’clock, give or take a few minutes, as the other occupants were also probably half-drunk and not too bothered about noticing the exact time.’

‘And he was found dead in the morning?’ concluded Angela.

‘Yes, at seven thirty, by one of the other men in the house, Don O’Leary. He and Arthur both worked in a car-breaker’s yard a few streets away. When Shaw didn’t appear at their usual time to go to work, O’Leary went up to wake him, as he knew that Millie wasn’t there. He got no answer, but found the door unlocked and Arthur Shaw lying dead on the floor, with a knife wound in his chest. So the times are pretty well established to within minutes.’

‘Are there any photographs?’ said Priscilla.

Richard went to the back of the file and pulled out two police albums, containing half-plate black and white glossy prints stapled between cardboard covers.

‘One is of the scene, the other the post-mortem. Not the greatest pictures, but they give the general idea.’

The two women took an album each, then swapped when they had looked at each photograph.

‘Stabbed almost in the middle of the chest,’ observed Angela. Richard nodded. ‘Got him straight through the right ventricle of the heart.’

‘Not much blood about,’ said Priscilla, holding up a picture of the victim lying on the floor of an untidy living room.

‘It’s often the case with a single chest wound, especially if the body lies on its back afterwards. He bled internally, filling the bag around the heart so that it couldn’t fill properly.’

‘That’s what you call a cardiac tamponade, isn’t it?’ said Angela, showing off some of the knowledge she’d accumulated from many years’ experience in London.

‘Yes, it wouldn’t cause immediate death, but he would have been rapidly disabled and could die within a few minutes.’

‘What about this blood on her sleeve?’ asked Angela. ‘Is this the picture?’ She held up the last photograph in the scene album. It was of a pale bolero type jacket, laid out on a table.

‘Yes, you can see a few small spots on the outside of the right sleeve, just above the cuff.

The two biologists looked at the photographs again, spending most time on the pictures of the scene, especially ones of the dead man lying on his back on the linoleum in the rather squalid living room, whose sagging furniture was decorated with empty beer bottles and overflowing ashtrays.

‘Any blood elsewhere in the flat?’ queried Angela.

‘Nothing mentioned in the statements. It looks as if he was stabbed at or near the point where he fell. The only other room is the adjacent bedroom and there was nothing of interest found in there. The police searched the rest of the house, but again nothing significant turned up.’

‘So how did the pathologist arrive at such a tight estimate of the time of death?’ demanded Priscilla.

Richard shrugged. ‘Using the old routine — temperature of the body, rigor mortis, post-mortem lividity, amount and state of the stomach contents… the same old mumbo-jumbo. Pick some figures from the air, then take away the number you first thought of!’

Angela smiled to herself at his forceful tone. She had heard this particular tirade several times, as time of death was one of Richard’s hobby horses.

‘So you think you can challenge that for the Appeal?’ asked Priscilla.

‘Damn right I can — and I will, given the chance!’

The Borth Bog investigation had run completely out of steam by the middle of the following week. There were only a few days left before the December page appeared on Detective Inspector Meirion Thomas’s calender, a rather racy one from a local garage, depicting a fluffy blonde wearing more eyeshadow than clothes, sitting provocatively on the bonnet of the new Ford Zephyr Zodiac.

He looked at the dates glumly, thinking that his only murder investigation for the last five years had run into the sand and that its pathetically thin file would soon end up at the back of the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet.

Though he knew it was traditional in detective novels for senior officers and the Chief Constable to come breathing fire down the neck of the failing investigating officer, he had to admit that the two men above him in their small police force had accepted the dead-end philosophically. They had seemed relieved that the two rather supercilious men from Scotland Yard had gone home and that the Press, after a brief frenzy, seemed to have forgotten all about the case. But being a conscientious man, Meirion would have liked to have nailed someone for such a nasty crime. Failing that, it would have at least been satisfying to have identified the body.

With a sigh, he pulled a wad of papers towards him and settled down to devising night-observation rotas for the painfully few men he had available. Sheep rustling had become fashionable again and several irate farmers near Tregaron were demanding some action from the police, backed up by their insurance companies. This issue was of far greater concern to the inhabitants of Cardiganshire than one solitary, if bizarre death that probably occurred long ago.

Yet as he pulled out his Parker 51 pen, the previous year’s Christmas present from his wife, the strange force of serendipity was working on someone he knew well, a hundred miles away in Birmingham.

‘Not a bad pint, this!’ said Gwyn Parry, studying the amber liquid in his glass, pulled from a barrel of Atkinson’s Bitter. He was sitting in the snug of the Red Lion in Moseley, a southern suburb of Birmingham. He had been taken there for a pre-lunch drink by his wife’s brother-in-law, Tony Cooper. The detective sergeant from Aberystwyth was spending two days’ leave in the Midlands, bringing his wife to stay with her sister, who had just come out of hospital after an operation on some obscure part of her female anatomy. He was leaving Bethan there for a couple of weeks to help look after her, as Tony had to work shifts, being a sergeant in the Birmingham City Police. He was not in the CID like Gwyn, but was a custody officer in one of the central police stations.

Their talk was the usual mix of topics always voiced by off-duty policemen — complaints about pay, pensions and conditions of service, mixed with anecdotes of unusual cases they had encountered. They had been joined in the pub by an elderly friend of Tony’s who lived nearby, a chain-smoking man in his late sixties with horn-rimmed glasses with lenses like bottle bottoms. Oscar Stanton was a retired journalist from a city newspaper and had a large fund of stories, ranging from the hilarious to the horrific.

Gwyn looked at the bar clock and reckoned that they had time for another round before going back home, where Bethan was making a meal. After that, he was driving back to Wales, to join in the fight against the sheep rustlers. When the drinks were in, their conversation continued and the detective got around to telling them of the curious case of the body in the bog, which seemed to have come to a dead end.

‘So we haven’t a clue who the fellow is,’ he concluded. ‘All we’ve got is a tattoo and a vague guess that he died sometime around ten years ago.’

‘Strangled and his head taken off?’ said his brother-in-law, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘So certainly not some domestic squabble. It sounds like some gangster execution, but you couldn’t get one of those in peaceful West Wales, surely!’

Oscar Stanton was looking thoughtful, slowly rubbing his bristly chin. ‘Rings a bell, this does,’ he said ruminatively. ‘I’ve got this dim recollection of some rumour going around amongst the lads on the paper, way back around the time the war ended.’

The two policemen stared at him. ‘What rumour?’ asked Tony.

‘I can’t remember any details. It was a long time ago. But one of the older reporters who covered crime in those days had this yarn about a pub somewhere, where the landlord claimed to have a pickled head in his beer cellar.’

Gwyn Parry looked dubious. ‘It could be a wind-up — or maybe some practical joke. I remember hearing about a shrivelled hand being found on the upper deck of a Cardiff bus. Turned out that a medical student had taken it from the college dissecting room.’

Tony was not so sceptical. Maybe after twenty years of policing a big, bad city, he was ready to believe anything. ‘Have you any idea if the chap who was telling the story is still around, Oscar?’

‘He died a couple of years ago, I’m afraid. But I still have a drink now and then with some of my old mates from the paper. I could ask around and see if anyone remembers the story.’

The Aberystwyth sergeant nodded his thanks. ‘We’ve got damn all to go on at present, so any lead is better than none. Could you let Tony here know if you dig up anything?’

With this appropriate plea, they moved on to Aston Villa’s chances at the coming weekend.

Richard Pryor, after a few hours poring over his collection of textbooks and journals, had written a considered appreciation of the possible forensic medical avenues that might assist Millie Wilson’s lawyers. He was used to calling them ‘the defence’, but this was not strictly accurate in this instance, as she was ‘the appellant’. The time for defending her was in the past, at the trial held at Bristol Assizes more than a year ago.

His report was carefully typed by Moira Anderson and sent off to the suave Mr Bailey. A couple of days later, he had a phone call asking him to attend a preliminary conference with their junior counsel, Miss Penelope Forbes, in Bristol on the last day of November.

‘I think you should come with me, Angela,’ he said to his partner. ‘These blood spots on the coat are more in your territory than mine.’

This was only partly true, as the interpretation of blood splashes had always been the province of a pathologist, but latterly, the rapid advance of forensic science was burrowing ever more deeply into what formerly had been medical territory. Earlier in the century, there was no separate forensic science worth mentioning, but it rapidly grew away from the grip of the medical men until the tail was wagging the dog.

The thirtieth of November was a Thursday and it saw the black Humber again crossing the river from Beachley aboard the Severn Queen, with Angela Bray in the front passenger seat. She had never made this journey before, always travelling eastwards on the A48 through Gloucester to reach her parent’s home in Berkshire. She found the short voyage across the dangerously turbulent currents of the estuary fascinating and Richard promised to take her up river one day, to see the famous Severn Bore when there was a high spring tide.

After bumping off the ramp at Aust on the southern bank, they set off for Bristol in the unseasonable November sunshine. Angela was dressed in what she called her ‘Old Bailey outfit’, a smart, rather severe grey suit with a fashionably long skirt and waist-nipping jacket over a white blouse. Richard, who had only a vague notion about A-lines and H-lines, thought she looked remarkably attractive, with her thick hair marshalled under a small saucer-shaped hat.

As he drove towards the city, his mind idly compared the four women in Garth House. There was Sian, the lively young blonde, full of bustle and energy, quite a contrast to the quiet neatness of Moira Anderson, to whom he often applied the old adage ‘still waters run deep’.

Then there was Priscilla, who was undoubtedly gorgeous in a more flamboyant way, with a racier line in clothes and make-up, compared to the restrained elegance of Angela.

He sighed to himself, feeling a little like a boy in a sweet shop without a penny in his pocket. It was just not prudent to start any romantic or ardent relationship within their little forensic family, but it was a long time since he had had any romantic or amorous outlet — in fact, none since leaving Singapore a year earlier. Though his divorce was finalized not all that long before he left, he had been separated from his wayward wife for some time and had not wanted for female company amongst the expatriate community in the Colony.

Before his wandering thoughts developed into fantasies, he found that they were already in the suburbs of Bristol and had to concentrate on navigating through the big city to reach the centre. Most barristers had their chambers in or around Short Street, an aptly named lane in the oldest part of the city, near the remnants of the medieval town wall. The Assize Courts were halfway along the street, providing lawyers with the minimum of exercise to get to their trials. Richard had no chance of parking in Short Street, but eventually found a space not too far away.

‘Traffic is becoming impossible in this country,’ he grumbled, as he manoeuvred the bulky car into a narrow space. ‘I can’t imagine what it will be like in fifty years’ time!’

‘I read that Winston Churchill wanted to pave over Horse Guards Parade and The Mall for parking places,’ said Angela, as they got of the car. ‘But there is some scheme to fit coin-operated parking clocks in London in the next couple of years.’

They followed the directions given by Douglas Bailey and found the chambers in a narrow alley alongside the court buildings. In the rather dingy entrance, a long hand-painted plaque on the wall gave the names of the resident barristers in pecking order of seniority. A third of the way up, they saw the name of Miss Penelope Forbes, the only woman on the list.

Inside, a stoop-shouldered clerk took them upstairs and along a corridor to a small room, where Miss Forbes had her office. She rose to meet them from behind a paper-strewn desk which filled almost half the room. Douglas Bailey was already there and he pulled forward two hard chairs for them. After introductions and hand shakes, they all sat down, giving Richard time to look at the barrister who would appear for Millie when she assisted her leader, a Queen’s Counsel.

Penelope Forbes was a tall, thin woman of about forty-five, with rimless spectacles and prematurely greying hair pulled back into a severe bun on the back of her head. Angela thought she looked very tired, but had a pleasant smile and a pair of sharp blue eyes. She began by thanking Richard for his report, of which she had a copy in front of her, as did the solicitor.

‘I’ve discussed it over the phone to Paul Marchmont, our leading counsel, who said it sounded promising. We’ll have to have another conference soon with Paul, of course, but I thought I’d just go through the main points with you today.’

Before they began, Richard explained Angela’s presence, as a senior forensic biologist with years of experience at the Metropolitan Police Laboratory.

‘Doctor Bray feels that the claim that the blood present on the sleeve came from the stabbing can also be contested.’

The barrister smiled at Angela. ‘I look forward to hearing your opinion, Doctor Bray. Before that, perhaps you, Doctor Pryor, could run through a summary of what you feel about the vital time-of-death issue.’

Richard ran his finger through his hair, in a rather nervous gesture that was unusual for him. Angela suspected that he was not used to displaying his professional expertise to a woman, even though he already had a virtual harem back at Garth House.

He was given a respite by the appearance of a secretary bearing a tray of coffee in a motley collection of cups and saucers. While they drank the rather insipid brew, the conversation became more general.

‘It’s the old story of doctors sticking rigidly to the rules of thumb that they have been taught since they were students,’ began Richard. ‘I’m not blaming them for having poor methods to work with, for I’m in the same boat. But the problem lies in the dogmatism and stubbornness which many doctors have. I’ve got no better methods myself, but at least I am always willing to qualify the results with an acknowledgement that they are very approximate and prone to large errors.’

Penelope Forbes smiled again, a habit which seemed to come easily to her.

‘Do I detect an allusion to the great Sir Bernard Spilsbury there? But I agree, I often come across such witnesses. Do you feel it’s a fault especially with the older experts? The one in this case is certainly getting on in years.’

Richard agreed, with reservations. ‘It’s not just because they’re old, in the sense of being doddery old fools. I think it’s more because with years of practice behind them, they feel too sure of themselves — the “I’ve seen it all before” syndrome.’

Angela joined in the discussion for the first time. ‘Doctor Pryor is right, I’ve seen experts steamrolling their way through their evidence, stubbornly refusing to accept any sensible contrary opinion.’

Richard hid a grin, as he detected a trace of bitterness in his partner’s voice. He felt that in the past, she must have had a couple of frustrating contests with other experts.

‘Yes, the harder they are challenged, the harder they dig their heels in and refuse to admit that they could be wrong,’ he confirmed. ‘It’s often a matter of professional pride, and I’m afraid forensic medicine tends to attract the prima donnas of the profession, those who like to see their names in the newspapers.’

Having finished his rather insipid cup of Maxwell House, Richard got back to business.

‘With the time-of-death issue, there are four aspects to consider — and, indeed, challenge. The first is rigor mortis, so beloved of crime novelists. Then there’s post-mortem lividity, the discoloration of the skin after death. The next is stomach contents and the last, the only one with any hope of giving a decent estimate, is the body temperature.’

The solicitor asked the first question. ‘How many of those can you challenge, doctor?’

‘All of them, I hope. At least, what I can challenge is Doctor Claridge’s interpretation of them. His confidence in his accuracy is completely unfounded and I suspect it was coloured by what the police told him of the circumstances.’

He began going through the items, one by one, keeping the explanation rather superficial, as he knew he would have to do it all again in more detail when they met the ‘silk’ — a lawyer’s name for a Queen’s Counsel, because of the gown he wore.

‘The easiest one to contradict is post-mortem lividity, or “death staining” as it used to be called. In fact, the modern name is hypostasis, not that a new name makes it any more useful.’

‘I see Claridge doesn’t actually claim that this lividity points to the one-hour time window that’s relevant?’ Miss Forbes pointed out.

‘No, he just says it’s consistent with that time of death. What he doesn’t say — and the defence didn’t ask him — was that it would also be consistent with death far outside that time bracket. And that’s the situation with the other criteria. They could all be correct, but they could also be hopelessly wrong.’

Miss Forbes seemed intent on being a devil’s advocate, as well as one for Millie Wilson — which was quite right, as the opposition would be asking the same questions of Doctor Pryor.

‘But Doctor Claridge said in his evidence that he took all those criteria into account together, in coming to his conclusion as to the time of death.’

Richard’s laugh was a sardonic bark. ‘Adding four lousy methods together still makes one lousy conclusion,’ he replied. ‘The answer doesn’t get better by its multiplicity.’

‘So that applies to rigor mortis as well, I presume?’ asked the solicitor.

‘Rigor is marginally better than lividity, but that’s not saying much. Claridge saw the body in the mortuary; he wasn’t even called to the scene. It had been dead since sometime the previous night when he examined it at two o’clock in the afternoon. There’s no chance of pinning the time of death to within an hour after that delay.’

‘You said that temperature is the best means of timing the death, doctor,’ said Penelope Forbes. ‘The pathologist here seemed to rely most heavily on that.’

Richard Pryor shrugged in dismissal. ‘It could have helped a lot more, but the whole examination was poorly carried out. No one thought of taking the temperature at the scene, when the body was found. It was almost another seven hours before the temperature of the body was measured. The body was never weighed in the mortuary, so we don’t know what his body mass was, which affects the cooling rate.’

Angela smiled at her partner, who was getting more voluble as he argued his case, gesturing with his hands, his unruly brown hair tossing about.

‘So you’ve rubbished three of his criteria! What about the state of his stomach contents?’

Richard subsided a little, but shook his head dismissively. ‘Another fairy tale, if you’re looking for accuracy. There are so many variables, there’s not a chance of settling on the true time many hours later. When I was in Singapore, I did a little research on this, in cases where it was known what time the dead person last ate. Comparing that time with what was in the stomach was too random to be of any use in evidence — and certainly not beyond reasonable doubt!’

For another half-hour they bandied the matter around, Richard giving his reasons why he felt it impossible to restrict the time of death to the time when Millie was back in the house in St Paul’s.

‘Of course she could have killed him in that half-hour, there’s no denying that,’ he said in conclusion. ‘But equally, he could have died in the many hours after she left the house — and this medical evidence is so nebulous that it can’t exclude that possibility.’

The junior counsel nodded her understanding of his argument and repeated what Moira had said back in Tintern.

‘Of course, it’s not up to the defence to prove that a person didn’t commit an offence. The onus is on the prosecution to prove they did!’ She sighed. ‘But often it doesn’t seem to work that way with juries. Especially when there’s such a poor defence effort — they didn’t even call any medical witness to try to challenge what Doctor Claridge was saying. I think they felt this was such an obvious case that it wasn’t worth putting themselves to much trouble.’

Miss Forbes turned over a few pages in her file.

‘It’s fortunate that the plea in mitigation impressed the judge, over the assaults which Millie suffered from Arthur Shaw, especially during that fateful hour — otherwise she would have been hanged by now, instead of getting life imprisonment.’

She turned to Angela. ‘Now, Doctor Bray, tell me about these bloodstains.’