According to the Evidence (11 page)

‘If you can harden all this up into solid fact, you may well be on to a usable defence,' she said crisply. ‘This first proposition is very new. You say you found only one published paper?'

‘Yes, it appeared this year, though the research must have been going for some time for him to get all that data.'

‘And the other contention is established fact, accepted by the scientific establishment?'

‘That's what the books say, so I doubt it can be challenged. There must be plenty of physiologists who could be dragged along to confirm it.'

She finished her coffee and put the cup back on its saucer. ‘So what's the next move?'

‘Tomorrow I want to go through the medical library in Cardiff and visit the physiology department there, to see if I can find anything else and confirm what I've already got.'

He had qualified in the Welsh National School of Medicine in 1938, then did two years' pathology there before being called up in 1940. He had spent the war years in various military hospitals, mostly in Ceylon, ending up in Singapore as soon as the Japanese were thrown out. Now he trusted that his old Alma Mater in Cardiff would not begrudge him the use of their library.

‘When will you tell the lawyers what you've found?' asked Angela.

‘I'll ring the solicitor on Friday and arrange to go and see him early next week. I'll get Moira to type up a draft submission as soon as I've satisfied myself that there's nothing else to find.'

While Richard Pryor was on his way to Cardiff the next morning, Arthur Crippen and his sergeant were arriving at Ty Croes Farm once again. The DI had considered hauling all the residents to the police station in Brecon for more interviews, but he had lived long enough in a rural area to realize the disruption that would cause to the daily routine of a farm. However, he felt that their parlour was not the place to conduct what might turn out to be a more rigorous interrogation, so he had arranged for a police caravan to be towed out from Brecon and parked in the farmyard. It was normally used as a mobile police station at agricultural shows or at scenes of accidents, but with a small table and a few chairs it would serve his purpose as an interview room.

The constable who had dragged it there with a Land Rover was sent down to the barn to fetch Shane Williams. The repair work was back in operation and the irate farmer who had been waiting for his Fordson had been placated, as Jeff Morton had worked with Shane the previous day to get the brakes finished. What the owner felt about his machine having been involved in a murder was unknown, but getting his fields ploughed took precedence over any sentiment.

Shane duly appeared and slumped down in a folding chair on the other side of the table to Crippen. Sergeant Nichols sat at one end with a pile of blank statement forms as the inspector opened the questioning. Crippen had decided to play it tougher from the start, as the only hope of squeezing something useful from these taciturn folk.

‘Now then, Shane, we'll have a bit of sense from you today! You know more than you told me last time about what goes on in this farm, so let's have it!'

The lad protested that he'd told Crippen everything, but there was a shiftiness about him that the experienced detective recognized.

‘We'll start from the beginning again, right!'

Crippen went through every minute of the morning when Shane said he had discovered the body, but nothing new appeared.

‘You say you discovered Tom Littleman lying under the tractor – but how do I know that you didn't put him there yourself, eh?'

The apprentice squeaked in horrified denial. ‘I never did! Why should I?'

‘You told me the other day that you hated his guts, boy,' thundered Crippen. ‘No one else has admitted that, so you're my best suspect.'

‘Suspect? You must be off your head, mister! I left the barn at five the night before and didn't get back until seven that morning. When could I have done those awful things?'

The DI was implacable in his accusations.

‘You could have come back later that evening. You knew Littleman had to stay on to finish those brakes. You had a key – you could have locked up after you when he was dead.'

Crippen didn't believe a word of what he was saying, but he wanted to soften the youth up to winkle other matters from him.

He let Shane gabble his protestations of innocence for a while, then abruptly changed the direction of his questions.

‘If you want me to believe that you had nothing to do with it, we'll have to find the real villain, won't we? Now tell me something more about Littleman's relations with the people up here at the farm. Did he come up here much?'

Relieved at the pressure being taken off him, Shane was ready to open up a little more.

‘No, he hardly ever did, not that I know of. Jeff was down here every day, working with us when he'd done his bit with the cows, so there wasn't much call to go up to the house or the cottage. Jeff used to talk to him about the machinery business, and Aubrey called in every day to see how things were going.'

‘What about their wives, Rhian and Betsan?' put in John Nichols. Shane's eyes swivelled between the two policemen.

‘What about them?' he mumbled.

‘Come on, boy, spit it out!' snapped Crippen. ‘You know something, don't you?'

Shane's head was bent down, staring at the cap that he twirled between his knees. ‘I saw them together a couple of times, that's all,' he muttered.

‘Together? Littleman and which one, Betsan or Rhian?'

The lad raised his head and stared at Crippen almost defiantly. ‘Both of them,' he replied.

The DI looked across at his sergeant with raised eyebrows. ‘Where and when was this?' snapped the inspector.

‘I saw Betsan going into the cinema in Brecon with him, one Saturday afternoon a couple of months ago. And I saw Rhian with him one evening back in the summer, when I was cycling home after working late.'

‘What d'you mean “saw her with him”? What were they doing?'

‘Lying in a field about three miles from here, snogging under the hedge,' was the surprising reply.

‘How could you see them from your bike, then?' demanded Nichols.

‘His motorbike was standing in a gateway. I thought it might have been pinched or something, so I stopped and looked over the gate. As soon as I saw them, I pushed off quick, like.'

Another fifteen minutes of hard questioning could not drag any more from the youth and, after getting him to sign the statement the sergeant had written out, Shane was dismissed with dire warnings not to reveal anything of the interview to anyone else, especially those in the farm.

When he had gone, Crippen and Nichols discussed the significance of what they had heard.

‘Puts a different shine on the situation, doesn't it?' said Arthur. ‘We still can't eliminate the lad, though I don't fancy him for it.'

John Nichols was puzzled by this. ‘Why should he still be in the frame for it, sir?'

‘What if Littleman saw Shane ogling him when he was with either of the women? He might have gone for him, threatening him if he didn't keep his mouth shut. If it got physical, maybe Shane croaked him! He's a strong enough lad, even though he's as thick as two short planks.'

The sergeant was unimpressed. ‘That's the point, isn't it? He might have the muscle, but has he got the brains to think up a complicated scenario like this?'

Crippen made a face, indicating doubtful resignation. ‘Maybe not, but we have to keep all options open for now. So who are we going to grill next?'

The decision was made for them, as they saw Betsan Evans through the caravan window. She was coming across the yard with three mugs of tea on a tray.

‘This is going to get more and more bloody awkward as we go on, John,' muttered Crippen. ‘I hate these domestic affairs; it's just embarrassment all round.'

His sergeant thought it odd for an experienced detective to feel embarrassed, but this was certainly an unusual situation. Nichols went to the door to take the tray from the farmer's wife.

‘Thanks, Mrs Evans. I'm afraid we need to talk to everyone again. Can you come over in a few minutes, please?'

She nodded, albeit reluctantly. ‘If you want to speak to my husband as well, I'm afraid he's gone over to Llandovery with his father and Jeff. They took the trailer to fetch some calves and won't be back until dinner time.'

She walked back to the house, and the two police officers handed a mug of tea to the PC outside before settling back to drink their own and discuss the new twist that had cropped up.

‘This Tom Littleman seems quite a ladies' man, even though he was a boozer,' observed Nichols.

‘Some women seem to fall for these naughty fellows,' said Crippen gloomily. ‘Puts a bit of spice in their life, perhaps, after being stuck out here with a couple of husbands who smell of manure and talk only about the price of sheep.'

‘How serious was it, I wonder? Being seen going into the pictures in Brecon is hardly grounds for divorce.'

‘Depends on what their husbands thought about it, if they found out.'

The sergeant looked at Crippen. ‘Do you fancy either of the women for it, then?'

‘They're big and strong enough, tough country women. But no, not really. I've never heard of a woman throttling a man. It's always the other way around.'

‘So your money's on one of the men – or even both of them together?'

The DI shrugged. ‘Let's not jump our fences until we come to them, John. Drink your tea, then we'll hear what she's got to say.'

EIGHT

I
n the staffroom of Garth House others were also drinking tea when the telephone rang in the passage outside. Moira, as their nominal secretary, felt obliged to be the one who answered it.

A moment later she came back in again, an excited expression on her face. ‘I think you'd better talk to them, doctor,' she said in a stage whisper, though the phone was outside.

‘Who is it, Moira?' asked Angela, getting out of her chair.

‘The War Office!' she replied in hushed tones. ‘They wanted to speak to Dr Pryor, but I said he wasn't here.'

After a puzzled Angela hurried out of the room, Moira and Siân were consumed with curiosity, once again showing their intense interest in all the doings of the Garth House Consultancy.

‘What on earth would the War Office want with Richard?' asked Siân. Though he was ‘doctor' when they were with him, in private they spoke of both him and Angela by name.

‘He was an army officer all through the war,' pointed out Moira. ‘Let's hope they don't want to call him up again!'

Siân, who was surprisingly abreast of world events, thought this not beyond the bounds of possibility. ‘There's so much trouble in the world these days – Russia has just formed the Warsaw Pact, Germany joining NATO, our rail and newspaper strikes! I'd not rule out them calling up reservists.'

But when Angela came back, she was able to reassure them that Richard Pryor was not being hauled off to Aldershot next day.

‘It's another case for us, hopefully,' she announced. ‘That was a lawyer from the War Office. I think he said it was something to do with the Adjutant-General's Branch. I'm not well up with these military outfits.'

‘What sort of case could that be?' asked Siân, mystified as to why the army should want her hero.

‘It seems there's some controversy about a compensation case following a shooting death. They need a second medical opinion.'

‘Dr Pryor will be pleased at that,' said Moira confidently.

‘I know he was quite proud of his army service. He said once that perhaps he should have stayed in the RAMC instead of taking that civilian job in Singapore.'

‘Yes, I heard him say that, too,' chipped in Siân. ‘He reckoned if he'd stayed, he'd probably be a brigadier by now.'

Angela smiled at their enthusiasm for her partner. ‘Well, he'd better get his medals out and clean them up, because I arranged for this lawyer to come down to see us next week!'

Betsan Evans was not tearful or hysterical, just defiant.

When Arthur Crippen suggested to her that she had been economical with the truth over her relationship with Tom Littleman, the farmer's wife made no attempt to deny it.

‘It was an awful mistake, but there it is,' she said. ‘He was a good-looking chap, and in spite of the fact that I knew he was a bad lot there was something about him that I couldn't resist.'

‘It was more than just a visit to the pictures, was it?'

Betsan looked down at her hands, which were rough compared with the smoothness of her face.

‘We went back to that flat of his once or twice,' she murmured. ‘It was partly that grubby place that made me end it so soon. It made me see how sordid the whole affair was.'

The sergeant looked up from writing on his statement forms. ‘When did it finish, Mrs Evans?'

She sighed and ran a hand through her dark hair. ‘A few weeks ago. He didn't seem all that bothered, damn the man! Shows how little it meant to him.'

‘Does your husband know about it?'

The question certainly jerked the woman out of her state of dull apathy. ‘No, of course not! For God's sake, don't tell him, will you?'

As he spoke again, the inspector felt as if he was walking on eggshells. He was a kindly man, but this was a murder investigation and he couldn't see how he was going to avoid hurting a few people.

‘I'm afraid I can't guarantee anything, Betsan. It depends on how the investigation goes.'