to jail or even the gallows himself. So he decided to fake a hanging and hoisted Littleman up on a length of rope. He locked up the barn and went home. He has his own entrance and even staircase to his room in the farmhouse, as it used to be divided into two cottages, so no one was ever sure of his comings and goings.’
‘This must have been a long letter,’ observed Richard. ‘I suppose he wanted to clear up everything so that there would be no question of Aubrey or Jeff getting any blame.’
‘There were quite a few pages of it, yes. He ended by telling us that he couldn’t resist going down the barn well after midnight to check on the scene. Then he saw that the bruises on the man’s neck were all too obvious under the rope and that he would have to do something different. So he hauled him down, put the rope away and laid the body under the tractor wheel, which was already jacked up. Then he hit the blocks away with a post and closed up again.’
‘If it hadn’t been for you, doc, he might have got away with it,’ said Nichols.
‘That’s flattering, sarge, but it was pretty obvious what had happened,’ said Richard deprecatingly. Even so, he felt gratified at the compliment. Pathologists rarely got thanks from their ‘patients’, not like his physician and surgeon colleagues, who were given bottles of whisky and chickens at Christmas!
Two hours later the penultimate act in the sad drama was played out, the last one to be an inquest in a few weeks’ time. At the dismal mortuary behind Brecon Hospital, Richard Pryor confirmed all that was anticipated from the circumstances.
The gunshot had not caused an exit wound on the back of the head, as the small cartridge from a four-ten had not had the power to send lead shot and gas through the thick bone of the upper spine and base of the skull and still have enough force to penetrate the back of the head.
‘Was it a contact wound, doctor?’ asked Nichols, airing his forensic knowledge gleaned from his inspector’s course.
Pryor looked closely at the front of the neck, below the chin.
‘Yes, near enough, though there’s a bit of soot and burning at one side, so there was room around the muzzle for the gases to escape sideways. But pretty tight, all the same, as there’s a partial muzzle mark on the skin.’
The coroner’s officer handed him the tape measure and Richard stretched it out from the wound down to the tip of the index fingers of each hand.
‘Thirty inches from muzzle to trigger, doc,’ quoted the constable from his notebook.
‘That’s OK, then, he could easily discharge it with these long arms.’
When Richard opened up the body, he found ample evidence of the prostate problem, with secondary growths beginning in several bones. The interior of the neck and the base of the skull had been shredded by the shotgun blast, and the skull bones at the back of head were widely fractured.
‘I’ll save a few lead shots for the lab, just in case anyone ever wants to check that they are the same as the ones that would have been in the spent cartridge in the gun,’ he said.
‘Doubt we’ll need that, doc, but as you say, just as well to do things by the book,’ agreed Crippen.
After he had sewn up the body and cleaned it as well as the basic facilities allowed, it was seven o’clock. After a decent wash in the hospital itself and a cup of tea and some sandwiches in the dining room, he was ready to set off for home in the advancing dusk.
‘Thanks for everything, doctor,’ said DI Crippen as the officers saw him off from the hospital car park. ‘We’ll see you again at the inquest, no doubt.’
As he drove the Humber across country, he felt rather sorry that tonight he could not expect to be greeted by Moira with a good meal and a warm welcome.
THIRTEEN
Monday was a routine but busy day for all those in Garth House, except for Jimmy Jenkins, who mysteriously disappeared, as he often did. Richard knew that he gardened for other people in the valley and, given the minuscule weekly pay that he received, Pryor had no complaints as long as he did what was needed here. Sian was happy playing with a new EEL colorimeter that had arrived, which, though a relatively simple instrument for measuring colours from chemical reactions, added a few more analyses to their repertoire.
Angela had come back from her weekend in a buoyant mood, which Sian and Moira put down to the shopping spree she told them about in Oxford on Saturday. Wartime austerity was rapidly fading, though it was only a couple of years since the end of rationing, and excursions to the big shops was now Angela’s main indulgence. When Richard returned from Chepstow mortuary later in the morning, he put his head around the laboratory door but retreated quickly when he heard a three-sided conversation about A-lines, pencil skirts and peplums.
Back in the safety of his own room at the back of the house, he opened his notes and drew the telephone towards him.
Dialling the overseas operator, he gave her the number of the medical faculty of the University of Cologne in western Germany. He had found the telephone number during his researches in the medical library in Cardiff, in a large directory of all European universities.
The operator said there would be a delay of probably an hour, as on Monday mornings there was always heavy traffic on the lines. He settled back to write out rough drafts of the three post-mortems he had carried out earlier for Moira to type up. He thought again about getting one of the portable tape recorders that could be carried in a case, which would cut out the need for all this pen-pushing. He had heard that some operated off batteries, so they could even be used outdoors at scenes of crime or in mortuaries without mains electricity. He had done a post-mortem a month ago in a cemetery outhouse, where there was no light other than that coming through a small window.
The phone rang about forty minutes later with his call – it must have been a slack Monday in the Federal Republic, he thought wryly. The first problem was language, as all he could manage was ‘
‘I would like to speak to Professor Wolfgang Braun in the Institute of Forensic Medicine, please,’ he asked gratefully.
‘Of course. I will put you through to his secretary,’ came the well-modulated voice. As he waited, he wondered how many switchboard operators in British universities could reply so effectively in German.
Soon he was speaking to Braun’s secretary, who had adequate English, though not so good as the first lady. It turned out that the good professor had just gone to lunch, as Richard had not appreciated the one-hour time difference in Germany. However, the secretary gave him her direct line number to avoid the main university switchboard and asked him to call back in two hours’ time, presumably to allow Wolfgang Braun time for a good meal.
He decided to brave the fashion debate and went into the laboratory to tell Angela that ‘the game’s afoot’, in true Sherlockian style. Moira had gone off to get their lunch ready and soon the quartet was in the kitchen, where the figure-conscious Sian was eating her salad sandwiches and Angela and Richard were tucking in to one of Moira’s specialities, a shepherd’s pie. Between mouthfuls, he told them of the outcome of the Ty Croes Farm affair, Moira staying back for a time from her usual return home for lunch and dog-walking to listen to the unhappy denouement.
‘The whole thing is tragic,’ she observed sadly. ‘All that grief and trouble in two families, just because of some drunken man’s lust!’
Richard saw Angela slightly raise an eyebrow at him and knew she was referring to Moira’s strong sense of morality. He could have said that Betsan and Rhian needn’t have gone along with Tom’s importuning but decided to keep quiet and not contradict Moira’s more puritanical feelings.
‘What will happen now?’ asked Sian.
‘There’ll have to be two inquests, I’m afraid,’ said Richard. ‘Hopefully, the coroner will try to keep much of the scandal out of the public eye, but he’ll have to show the notes to the jury, so I can’t see that the affair with the two wives can be kept quiet. The press will have a field day if they find out about it.’
‘What will the verdicts be, d’you think?’ asked Angela.
‘Has to be suicide in Mostyn Evans’ case. I’m not sure about Littleman,’ he replied. ‘I don’t see how a coroner’s jury could decide between murder and manslaughter with so little evidence available. Maybe “unlawful
