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 Sian 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.
Sian 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
