receiver to him when he came through the connecting door.
‘This is Arthur Crippen, doctor. I thought I’d keep you up to date with what’s going on here.’ This was hardly true, as the DI really wanted reassurance once again that he was undoubtedly dealing with a murder.
‘Any progress, inspector? It’s a very odd case.’
‘You can say that again,’ said Crippen. ‘To be honest, we still haven’t a clue who did it, though it has to be someone at the farm.’
He paused. ‘Er, doc, any more confirmation from your end about what happened?’
Richard knew very well what he was getting at and had himself had a few worrying hours, concerned that he was right about Littleman’s death.
‘There’s not really anything more we can do from the pathology side,’ he admitted. ‘I’ve looked at those neck marks under the microscope and there’s no doubt at all that they are very recent bruises. The hanging mark showed no vital signs, so it was made after death.’
Crippen was at least reassured that nothing had been found to throw any doubt on the original findings and, after telling Richard what they had gleaned so far from the family, he rang off.
‘Anything new from deepest Breconshire?’ asked Angela as he came back into the lab.
‘Dirty work behind the cowsheds, it seems,’ he replied. ‘That Tom Littleman might have been an unsavoury drunkard, but he seems to have had a way with women.’
He repeated what the DI had told him about both wives now admitting that they had had affairs with the victim. Moira, who tended to be a little strait-laced, was primly disapproving.
‘I can’t understand how decent women get taken in by these rogues,’ she said. ‘But what could that have to do with his death?’
‘They have jungle law up in those parts of Wales!’ said Angela, whose very English origins surfaced occasionally.
‘Cuckolded husbands might have organized a lynching.’
Richard took this more seriously. ‘The guy wasn’t lynched, but you might be near the truth otherwise.’
‘You think the murderer must be one of the family?’ asked Sian, revelling in the drama.
‘The police certainly think so, mainly from lack of anyone else to suspect.’
As he moved off to take his papers to his room, Angela asked him if he had found anything useful in the libraries in Cardiff.
‘Nothing new, but confirmation of what I found in Bristol. I think I may have to make some enquiries in Germany next week.’
Sian’s eyes opened wide in surprise. ‘You’re going to Germany, doctor? Can I come with you to carry your bag?’
Richard grinned at her enthusiasm. ‘Not much point. I can’t speak a word of the language. But maybe some telephoning through an interpreter might help. We’ll see what the lawyers have to say about it.’
He remembered promising to ask if Sian knew anything about potassium in body fluids, so he did so now.
‘I know how to estimate the levels in plasma,’ she replied, pleased to be consulted by the great man. ‘I used to do a lot at the hospital, but you need a flame photometer for that. I was never asked to test an eye fluid sample – it would be hardly likely on a live patient!’
‘You never did any samples from the post-mortem room?’
She shook her head, and it reassured him that he had not missed out on some new technique that had been developed while he was away in the Far East for so long.
After a ham and salad supper, followed by one of Moira’s cream sponges, Richard talked to Angela over coffee, going again over the ideas he had gleaned from his library researches.
Then he left her to go up to her room upstairs and listen to her radio, while he put together a draft report for George Lovesey, the solicitor in Stow-on-the-Wold.
NINE
Next morning, a rather damp Friday, he went off early to deal with the post-mortems at Monmouth and Chepstow, each a few miles away at either end of the Wye Valley. All were straightforward natural deaths, but because of their sudden nature the family doctors were unable to sign a death certificate and they had to be referred to the coroner. Richard was back at Garth House by late morning and decided to phone George Lovesey to arrange a meeting, as time seemed pressing.
‘I’m glad you rang, doctor,’ said the lawyer. ‘I was going to contact you to see if you could attend a pretrial conference with our counsel tomorrow morning. I know it’s a Saturday, but Nathan Prideaux is at the Old Bailey every weekday.’
On the principle that the customer is always right, Richard Pryor readily agreed, especially as he discovered that the meeting would be in Gloucester, much nearer than Stow.
‘Our junior counsel has his chambers in Gloucester, so it would be a convenient place to meet,’ went on Lovesey. ‘We had to change our QC only a few weeks ago, as the original one will be tied up in another trial in Winchester. Nathan Prideaux is very well spoken of as a defence counsel, so I hope we can find him some ammunition to use.’
Richard had been going to see his parents on Saturday morning, but it was only an hour’s drive to Merthyr Tydfil, so he could go later in the day. His father was a retired family doctor in that historical industrial town and it was where Richard had been born and went to school. He liked to spend a weekend there fairly often, to be fed by his mother’s massive meals and to make up for the long years during the war and afterwards in Singapore, when he had hardly seen them at all.
Angela was also going off that afternoon to see her family in rural Berkshire, where she could relax in what Sian covertly called her ‘hunting, shooting and fishing’ lifestyle.
Richard decided that in the morning, he would leave a message and his father’s telephone number with the forensic laboratory in Cardiff in case there was a call-out. To the best of his knowledge, none of the other pathologists on the Home Office list were away, so he thought it unlikely that he would be needed anywhere over the weekend.
Such thoughts are only a temptation for fate to confound them.
That same morning Detective Inspector Crippen and his sergeant were back in the caravan at Ty Croes. The hold-up at the building society the previous day had been solved within an hour, when a Brecon constable had grabbed the youth as he came out of a nearby betting shop after placing his stolen thirty pounds on a no-hoper horse.
Now they got back to their interviews, and Aubrey Evans was the first to be called. One look at his face told Crippen that his wife had made her confession. His first words made this abundantly clear.
‘I wish to God that bloody man had never set foot in this place!’ he growled bitterly. ‘He’s brought nothing but trouble on us.’
‘I gather that your wife has told you what happened, Mr Evans,’ said Arthur, quite softly. ‘You must realize that it puts a different complexion on this death, with a possible motive now on the cards.’
Like Rhian the day before, Evans was truculent rather than apprehensive. ‘Listen, inspector, my main concern is what happened between Betsan and that bastard. I don’t really care about your motives, though I can’t see what our personal problems have to do with anything.’
‘I’ve only your word that you didn’t know about it before this,’ retorted Crippen. ‘You might have revenged yourself on him and got rid of a drunken partner at the same time.’
‘Nonsense! Prove it, that’s what I say. You can’t, because it didn’t happen like that.’
‘Then how did it happen, Mr Evans?’ asked John Nichols.
Aubrey rounded on him. ‘You’re the detectives – that’s up to you to find out. I don’t give a bugger what you do or say. I’ve got too many troubles of my own, thanks to you for meddling in my family affairs.’
‘I think it was Tom Littleman who did the meddling, Mr Evans,’ snapped Crippen. ‘Now let’s go through the whole matter again.’
Minutely, but uselessly, he was grilled as to his movements on the relevant day and the following night and morning, but the farmer admitted nothing and stuck to the story he had given days earlier. At the end of it, Crippen
