‘Yes, we’ve got all the photographs we need, and the fingerprint boys were here earlier,’ said John Nichols. ‘We’ve bagged up all the clothes the four men were wearing that day, ready for you to take.’
‘That’s probably a waste of time, but I suppose you’ll have to look for some bloodstains and try to match those fibres,’ observed Crippen. ‘Though as those ropes have been knocking about here for years, I doubt they’re of much evidential value. Anyway, the place is all yours now.’ He waved a hand at the barn.
The two men from the laboratory unpacked their kit and started on the scene, concentrating on the chain hoist and the area around the Fordson tractor. After watching for a few moments, Arthur Crippen decided that he and his sergeant would be better employed back at the farmhouse and left them to carry on.
Seated once again at the parlour table, they called in Mostyn, the elder of the Evans family. He was a large man, but Crippen felt that he must have lost weight lately, as his wrinkled neck seemed too narrow for the collar of his flannel shirt. A thick thatch of iron-grey hair surmounted a big, craggy face, from which a pair of watery blue eyes looked out with disconcerting directness.
‘You farmed Ty Croes for many years, I understand?’ asked the DI, rather deferentially in the presence of this chief of the clan.
‘I was born in the room above this one and worked on the land here since I was about four years old, feeding fowls and herding sheep,’ he said proudly in a voice that would have earned him a place in the bass section of any choir.
‘And then you handed it on to your son and your brother’s lad?’
Mostyn nodded, folding his large, veined hands placidly in his lap. ‘I lost interest when my wife died five years ago. The boys will get it all when I die, and they can work it until then. I still lend a hand when necessary, but after seventy-six years I reckon I deserve a bit of a rest.’
Crippen gave an almost imperceptible nod to his sergeant, and Nichols took up the questioning. ‘I gather you weren’t all that keen on Tom Littleman becoming a partner in the machinery business?’
Mostyn shook his leonine head. ‘It was alright for him to come here as a mechanic on a wage. I grant you, he knew his stuff where engines were concerned, but he started going downhill as a worker. The boys were daft to cut him into a share of the business. I warned them against him, but they would have their way.’
‘Why were you so against him, Mr Evans?’
The old farmer considered this slowly. He rubbed his hands together and then stroked his bristly chin. ‘There was something about him from the first. He was an outsider, see, from up in England somewhere. Never fitted in here, always seemed to hold himself apart from us.’
‘I don’t quite follow you, Mr Evans,’ said Crippen. ‘Did he cause any trouble?’
Again there was a pause, but shorter this time.
‘Only when his boozing started to interfere with his work. By then, it was none of my business – I’d given the place over to Aubrey and Jeff – but I warned them! We lost some customers over it, and we’ve got plenty of competitors. Not delivering on time is a serious business. These days since the horses went, a farmer without a tractor is worse than losing the use of his legs!’
John Nichols was busy writing in his notebook, though more formal statements would have to be taken from everyone later.
The detective inspector brought the questioning around to more immediate matters. ‘You know, of course, that Littleman was strangled and then an attempt made to cover it up?’
The older man nodded. ‘Must have been somebody from his past – or his present! God knows what he was up to in Brecon after he left here every day.’
‘And you’ve no idea what that might have been? Did he ever let drop anything to you about his private life?’
‘Naw, did he hell!’ exclaimed Mostyn contemptuously. ‘Tight-mouthed bugger, he was!’
The rest of the interview was barren of anything useful, and soon the father went back to the kitchen for another cup of tea and to discuss his interrogation with Aubrey and the others.
Arthur Crippen stared out of the small parlour window across the muddy yard to the large milking parlour and the cow pen alongside it.
‘Like the woman, I reckon our Mostyn could tell us a bit more if he had a mind to,’ he said ruminatively.
Nichols nodded. ‘I got the same impression. Think this Littleman was making a nuisance of himself with the two wives?’
His superior shrugged. ‘It bears keeping in mind. We’ll be having another go at them later on. Now where’s that damned kid Shane. He’s the last one, until we start visiting the neighbours, wherever they are.’
As if in answer to his question, he saw a red David Brown Cropmaster drive into the yard, pulling a filthy muck spreader. The tractor itself was not much better, caked in mud and manure. It stopped near the cattle pen and the driver vaulted off, a lanky youth in soiled dungarees with a woollen bob-cap on his head.
‘Here he is. Better late than never,’ grunted Crippen.
There was a short delay, obviously caused by Betsan forbidding the boy to enter the parlour in such a state. When he put his head around the door and hesitantly entered, he was in a check shirt and brown trousers, with only socks on his feet, his muddy boots having been confiscated.
He sat nervously on the chair between the two police officers, his narrow, wary face regarding them suspiciously. He had an untidy shock of mousy hair hanging over his ears and neck. John Nichols, a former military policeman, grinned to himself when he thought of the National Service haircut that Shane would soon have to endure.
‘You’re waiting for your call-up papers, I hear?’ he said easily.
The young man shook his head. ‘I’ve had me papers already. Got to go to Brecon Barracks at the end of the month.’
This was where the regimental headquarters of the South Wales Borderers was situated.
‘Now then, lad, you were the one who found Tom’s body?’
The DI made it more of a question than a statement of fact.
Shane scowled. He had seen plenty of police films where the finder was always the main suspect.
‘That don’t mean I had anything to do with it,’ he muttered.
‘Not saying it was, Shane. I just want to get things straight for the record. Now the body was just as we saw it when we came later, was it? You didn’t touch anything?’
‘No bloody fear! I took one look and ran like hell to me bike!’
‘You worked with him every day,’ said the sergeant. ‘How did you get on with him?’
Shane Williams suddenly became animated. ‘He was a bastard! I hated his guts!’ he snarled.
Nichols raised an eyebrow at his inspector, but Crippen seemed unmoved.
‘Why do you say that, Shane?’ he asked softly.
‘He was always at me, complaining and shouting. Sometimes he pushed me around, when he’d had a few too many.’
‘Drunk, you mean? Was he incapable, sometimes?’
‘Not incapable enough not to clout me across the earhole if I didn’t fetch him something quick enough!’ whined the youth.
‘You were a sort of apprentice. Didn’t he teach you anything?’
‘Only how to keep out of his reach whenever I could,’ answered the boy cynically. ‘I learned bugger all about machinery from him. All I was was a gofer – go for this, go for that!’
‘What about when Jeff Morton was there? He did a lot of the mechanical work, didn’t he?’
The young man sneered. ‘Tom was clever. He never had a go at me when Jeff was there. He could cover up his boozing, too, when either Aubrey or Jeff was around. They don’t know the half of it.’
‘Why did you stick it, then? Didn’t you complain to the others?’
Shane seemed to pull himself more upright from his usual slouch. ‘Nah, I’m not a sneak! Anyway, I’m leaving the bloody place in a few weeks.’ He suddenly realized the changed circumstances. ‘That’s if I’ve still got a job here now – and that sod’s gone anyway.’
Crippen fixed him with a steely eye. ‘Are you glad he’s dead, Shane?’ he demanded.
The lad slumped again. ‘I hated his guts, but I never wanted him croaked,’ he mumbled.
Sergeant Nichols changed direction once again.
‘You were with Littleman every day. Did you ever learn anything about his life away from the farm? Anything
