bruises gave the show away, so he devised a way he thought would destroy the evidence on the neck by crushing it.’
‘You say “he”, doctor,’ interposed Sergeant Nichols. ‘So we needn’t be looking for a woman?’
Richard grinned. ‘A good forensic motto is never say never, never say always, but I doubt if you need to
Crippen looked at his watch. ‘Four o’clock now. Any idea when you’ll finish up here, doctor? I’d like you and Dr Bray to come back to the scene afterwards, to have a look at a possible hanging site.’ He moved towards the door, sighing deeply.
‘Meanwhile, I’d better go and phone the good news to my chief inspector. It’ll make his day, I don’t think!’
It was almost three hours later before they got back to the barn.
After finishing the post-mortem and closing the body, they were taken into the hospital dining room and given tea and sandwiches. Billy Brown, being coroner’s officer, knew all the staff and had no problem in arranging some refreshment, the ghoulish activities of the past few hours having had no effect on their appetites.
When they returned to Ty Croes Farm, they found the same police team, but reinforced with two more uniformed constables, as the scene was to be guarded all night. It was now early evening and, although there was still full daylight, another van had brought a floodlight powered by a gas cylinder and some large torches, in case they were needed.
Arthur Crippen was waiting for them at the gate, where a PC stood to repel any spectators, not that this was likely in such a remote spot.
‘I’ve spent the time since I left you in questioning all the folks at the farm,’ he said mournfully. ‘But no one admits to hearing a damned thing last night. The farmhouse where Aubrey Evans and his family lives, as well as his cousin’s cottage nearby, are a good quarter of a mile away and no one had any reason to come down here until this morning.’
They walked over to the barn, where the big door was still open. Richard and Angela stood on the threshold and looked at the cavernous space, half filled with vehicles. The blue Fordson was still propped up on the jack, a few spanners scattered under the back end.
‘We didn’t put those blocks back under the axle,’ explained the detective sergeant. ‘They might have to be fingerprinted, though probably a dozen people will have handled them, like everything else in this jumble sale!’
‘I spoke to the liaison officer in the Cardiff lab,’ added Crippen. ‘He’s coming up in the morning with a scientist. We’ll keep the place battened down until then, but I just wanted you to point out any spot where the hanging could have taken place.’
The pair from the Wye Valley stood and looked around them. The barn had a high-pitched roof of galvanized sheets laid on wooden rafters supported by a number of thick metal cross-beams held up by rusty steel pillars. At one place on their right, a chain was slung over a beam, the two free ends holding a large pulley-block. From this dangled a continuous loop of thin chain, the lower end of which was at shoulder height. Hanging below the drum was a sturdy metal hook, and a length of heavier chain dangled down to floor level.
‘That chain hoist looks a likely candidate,’ said Richard, pointing at the device.
Crippen nodded his agreement. ‘I thought that, too. How’s it work?’
The DC with the passion for tractors enlightened him. ‘You keep pulling on that loop of chain, which lowers the hook down. To lift it up, you just reverse the direction of pull. It’s geared so you can lift a hell of a weight, though it’s slow.’
‘What’s it for?’ asked Angela.
‘Lifting anything heavy – here it would be for hoisting an engine out of its chassis, things like that.’
The DI contemplated the device hanging up in the air. ‘It’s the obvious place, but that was a rope mark around the neck, not a chain.’
‘The surface of the hook should be taped for fibres,’ said Angela. ‘If there are any, they might match those I took from the victim’s neck.’
‘Better leave that for the lab chap tomorrow,’ growled Crippen. ‘We’ll get all the fingerprints first, just in case. Not that that rusty chain will be much use for prints.’
‘Where’s this rope, I wonder,’ asked Richard, peering around the barn, which apart from the tractors, a couple of Land Rovers and an old car, had all sorts of junk lying around. There were parts of engines, oil drums, dismantled farm machinery and numerous shapeless pieces of rusty metal. Among all this there were several lengths of rope of various lengths and sizes.
‘Those fibres were coarse and looked like hemp or sisal,’ said Angela. ‘And the mark on the skin suggests it was about half an inch wide.’
‘Some of that coil over there would fit the bill,’ said John Nichols, pointing at a hank thrown over a drum of Duckhams lubricating oil standing alongside a grey Ferguson tractor.
‘All the rope will have to be packed up and taken back to Cardiff tomorrow,’ said the biologist. ‘Those fibres from the neck will have to be matched against them.’
Richard Pryor was staring up at the chain hoist hanging innocently above their heads. ‘Apart from the other evidence, it certainly rules out a suicide,’ he commented.
‘How d’you mean, doc?’ asked Crippen.
‘Well, he would hardly sling a rope over the hook, put the noose around his neck and then start hauling himself up by pulling hand over hand on the chain. He’d pass out before he got his feet off the ground!’
The detective inspector agreed. ‘No doubt someone did it for him, after strangling him. Then he must have spotted those fingermarks on the neck and realized that they gave the game away. So he decided to have him down again and squash him under the Fordson.’
Richard rubbed his chin, now bristly after a long day. ‘He must have been left hanging for some time, otherwise that lividity wouldn’t have had a chance to settle in his legs.’
‘How long, doctor?’ queried the sergeant. ‘The killer must have either hung about here all that time or come back later.’
‘Can’t put an exact time on it; it’s very variable,’ said Pryor. ‘But I suspect it must have been at least a couple of hours to get that intense.’
Crippen mulled this over. ‘So unless he waited here for a hell of a long time, he must have come back to the barn. Sounds like a local job, not just some passing thug.’
His sergeant snorted. ‘One of those buggers up at the farm, sir! Got to be. Who else would want to croak a boozy mechanic?’
Richard Pryor decided that he didn’t want to get involved in any police business, so he prepared to leave them to it.
‘Dr Bray and I will get back home, if we can’t do any more for you. It’s been a long day.’
The DI was sincere in his gratitude when he walked them to the Humber.
‘You’ve done a damned good job for us – and you, ma’am!’ he added. ‘I’ll keep you informed of what’s going on here. Perhaps you could have a word tomorrow on the phone with the forensic people in Cardiff, to tell them what specimens you took and that sort of thing.’
Angela promised to liaise with her old colleagues, as she knew all the case officers in Cardiff. ‘We’ve collected blood and urine samples for alcohol, especially as he’s got this history of drinking. Maybe that’s at the bottom of all this?’
As Crippen opened the car door for Angela, he gave a grim promise.
‘You may be right. Tomorrow, I’ll be squeezing all I can from those folk up at the farm.’
It was dark before they got back to Tintern Parva, the village nearest to Garth House at the lower end of the Wye Valley.
As Richard was putting the car away in the coach house at the back, Angela was surprised to see a light in the kitchen window. She had expected Moira Davison, the young widow who looked after them, to have left something cold for their supper in the old fridge, maybe sliced ham and salad. But when she opened the back door and went into the kitchen, she found Moira there, pulling something out of the Aga stove.
‘I thought you could do with a hot meal after such a long day,’ she announced, her gloved hands placing a large cottage pie on top of the big cooker.
