The Thread of Evidence (18 page)

Roland shook his head sadly. ‘No, I think she must be dead, Miss Mary. She couldn't have stayed as quiet as this all these years. I knew her too well. She was much too keen on her rights and her share of my money to have stayed away for long. That's partly why I've been afraid. I knew she must be dead and feared that this body could well have been hers, even though I had nothing to do with it getting there.'

John Ellis-Morgan jumped out of his chair, like a sparrow hopping off a branch, and stood with his back to the fire.

‘I wouldn't worry about that, Mr Hewitt. I'm sure these X-rays will show that the body is that of someone quite different. You and Peter here will convince the detectives in the morning and it'll be plain sailing after that. As long as that wasn't Mavis up in the mine, it doesn't matter two hoots where she is now. I don't think you care much yourself, do you?'

Roland sighed. ‘No indeed. Any feelings I ever had for her vanished before she did herself. I would have left her, or divorced her, before long, if this hadn't happened. That's what has been making it look so bad for me, you see.'

There was a scrunching of tyres on the gravel outside and the sound of a car door slamming.

‘Here's Dave now. I'll go and tell him the news.' Mary said. She ran out to open the door for him. In a moment, he appeared in the lounge, peeling off a short leather coat and driving gloves. Summer and winter, he insisted on driving an open Austin-Healey, only resorting to the hood in the very worst weather.

‘A proper family gathering. Hello, Mr Hewitt.'

His father waved the X-rays at him.

‘Success, David. Come and look at these. Peter has foiled the majesty of the law!'

David strode across the room to take the films.

‘Well, well!' he breathed, after holding them to the light. ‘You're committed now, Peter – for better or for worse.'

‘Are you talking about us or the X-rays?' asked Mary in mock indignation, holding on to her fiancés arm.

‘These, sis.' He waggled the films. ‘You're going to risk showing them to the superintendent, are you?'

‘What the dickens do you mean, David?' bristled his father. ‘I hope you're not suggesting that they are likely to be the same as the skull.'

David flopped down into a vacant chair.

‘Of course not – but will there be a recognizable difference? It would be awful to give the coppers something to strengthen their case, instead of cracking it – just because there was not enough to declare the two things were different.'

John Ellis-Morgan bobbed up and down on the tips of his toes.

‘Look, son, you might have been a quack pathologist in Cardiff before you came into practice, but I was a quack X-ray wallah. And I'm telling you that the chances of getting two identical skull X-rays are nil! Think of all the different things that would have to coincide – the sinuses, the thickness of the vault, the shape of the vault, the pituitary, jaws, teeth and roots … impossible!'

This list convinced even the habitually pessimistic elder son, and the group in the lounge became cheerfully confident of success by the time Peter and Roland left for home.

Roland had a good night's sleep without tablets; and, next morning, they made an early start for Cardigan. They arrived at the police headquarters at nine o'clock and ran Pacey to earth in his office. As they were shown in, Inspector Rees entered through another door and stared curiously at Roland Hewitt, wondering what had brought him to the police. Pacey was standing behind his desk, ploughing through a heap of letters and messages.

‘Morning to you, Mr Adams. And to you, Mr Hewitt … do sit down.' His tone was a little too hearty and Peter thought that the detective looked uneasy.

‘What can I do for you both?'

Roland was dressed in his best suit, which smelled strongly of mothballs. He sat gingerly on a hard chair and appeared to be waiting for Pacey to call someone to clap the handcuffs on his wrists.

The superintendent stood expectantly, a bland smile on his face. Peter was puzzled. After the repeated urgings he had made to Roland to come across with the truth, he expected Pacey to say something like, ‘Have you come to make a statement, Mr Hewitt?'

Instead, the policeman waited behind his desk like a genial John Bull.

Peter produced his precious X-ray films and dropped them on the desk in front of Pacey.

‘We came to give you these, Mr Pacey,' he said, failing to keep a trace of smug triumph from his voice. ‘They are new evidence – for the defence,' he added facetiously.

Pacey picked them up, looked briefly at them and put them back on the desk.

‘What are they?' he asked.

‘X-ray films of the real Mavis Hewitt's skull. If your pathologist cares to compare them with the skull that was found in Tremabon, I'm sure that he'll have to tell you to forget all about Mavis Hewitt. And then you can stop pestering my uncle here.'

Pacey picked up the X-rays and held them out across the desk.

‘OK, you win!' he said, ‘I apologize for roughing you up a bit, Mr Hewitt, but I promise I'll never come near you again.'

He smiled broadly at Peter and then at his uncle.

Peter was dumbfounded. He glared at the superintendent. ‘Look, I'm serious, I want you to keep those and give them to Professor Powell.'

‘I'm serious too, Mr Adams. I've said I accept your word. Actually, I'll keep these for now. Perhaps the professor would like to see them, for interest.'

‘For interest!' exclaimed Peter. ‘How do you know I'm not spinning you a yarn? What's the idea? You'll have to get them checked against the skull first.'

Pacey smiled gently at the journalist. ‘It's all right, Mr Adams. I don't need convincing that your uncle had nothing to do with this affair. Thanks for your trouble, but I knew already that this woman wasn't Mavis Hewitt.'

Willie Rees, a silent spectator of the scene, looked sharply at his superior. He only just avoided letting his mouth fall open with surprise.

Pacey looked at his wristwatch. ‘Look, I owe you some reward for messing you about, Mr Hewitt, so perhaps I can repay you through your nephew here. If you come back, in say an hour, Mr Adams, I can give you a bit of hot news that will go down well with your editor. I've tried to keep everything under cover so far, but something's broken this morning that should be a fair sensation. That suit you?'

Peter, bewildered but relieved beyond measure, nodded mutely.

Pacey galloped around the desk to shake Roland by the hand. ‘Sorry again for all the trouble, old chap, but we had our job to do the best way we could. Now you go home and forget all about it. I'll see you about half past ten, Mr Adams. You'll have a clear twelve hours' lead on any other papers.'

As the door closed on the stupefied pair, Rees found his voice.

‘Super, for God's sake, what was all that about? I thought we were due to go to Tremabon today, to work old Hewitt over again.'

Pacey lumbered back to his chair and dropped his dead weight into the protesting frame. He picked up one of the flimsy telephone message slips from the litter on his desk, and waved it at his assistant.

‘This was waiting for me when I came in this morning.'

His voice rose in pitch a little. ‘We've been had, Willie. Some smart alec has led us right up the bloody garden path.'

He stood up suddenly and his long-suffering chair skidded backwards.

‘Nineteen twenty-flaming-nine be damned! … look at this panic message from the forensic lab.'

He walked across to Rees with the form and poked him hard in the chest with a massive forefinger.

‘See that? … they say that one of the blouse buttons from that bleeding shaft was sewn on with Terylene thread! And Terylene thread wasn't on the market until at least nineteen fifty-three!'

Chapter Fourteen

The conference next day was in Pacey's own room. It was a much more informal affair than the previous one. The colonel sat on the edge of the superintendent's desk, smoking a small cheroot, while Leighton Powell, Meadows, Rees and Pacey sat or stood wherever they could amongst the cramped furniture of the small room.

‘So we still know that the body is that of a five foot four young woman, anyway. This damned bombshell hasn't altered any of the medical evidence, I hope?'

The colonel's usual suave manner had been rubbed a little thin by the panic to find a new approach to solving the identity of the Tremabon skeleton now made famous by Peter Adams' front page article in that morning's
News
.

‘It's added to the medical knowledge, actually,' contradicted the pathologist gently.

Barton jerked the cigar out of his mouth. ‘Added to it? How the devil can it do that?'

‘Before this, we thought that she was a red-headed woman. Now I'm quite certain she isn't.'

It was Pacey's turn to look astonished.

‘Why not? That red hair was quite genuine, according to the lab.'

‘Genuine all right – and cut at both ends. If our murderer was smart enough to fool us into thinking that the body was thirty years old, instead of less than nine, I'll bet my bottom dollar that the red hair doesn't belong to her. He would have cut off all her own hair down to the scalp and slung in some auburn, just to confuse us. So now we can be quite sure that the original owner was blonde or brunette – otherwise, there would be no point in changing it.'

Pacey breathed heavily. ‘Fine! All we have to do now is to find a five foot four blonde, or brunette, missing from somewhere in Great Britain between nineteen fifty-three and about nineteen sixty!'

The colonel stared at the glowing tip of his cheroot.

‘Professor, there's no doubt that this Terylene gag is consistent with your estimate of the time of death? I mean, this can still be a burial within the last few years, as far as you are concerned?'

‘Yes, there's no trouble there. If you remember, I said anything from two to two hundred years, so give me credit for that!'

Pacey slumped into a chair in the corner of the untidy office.

‘How did your people in the lab come to spot this thread?' he asked Meadows.

‘During a routine examination of the stuff, one of the boys found that a certain button didn't fall off the cloth when it was touched, as the others did. His inquiring mind wanted to know why and discovering that it was a non-rotting synthetic fibre was easy after that. They've got ways of telling Terylene from nylon and other man-made threads.'

Powell turned his head back to where Pacey was sitting.

‘How did young Adams get hold of these X-rays that you sent down to me last night?'

‘I didn't bother to ask details – I was too shattered by this other news,' the superintendent replied ruefully. ‘But I gather that he went up to Liverpool and tracked down an old sinus operation that the real Mavis had done years ago.

Powell smote his forehead with his fist. ‘My God! That's something that never occurred to me.'

‘Well, sir, it was hardly likely to unless you knew of it. If it's anyone's fault, it's mine for not squeezing every drop of information out of old Hewitt.'

The chief constable looked a little severe. ‘This thread and button business is quite fortunate, in a way,' he said heavily. ‘It saves us from being made to look complete fools by those X-rays, if they were genuine.'

‘I've got no doubts that they are the real thing,' said Leighton Powell. ‘The films are certainly antique and the skull shows a definite sinus disease. But what's more important is that they look nothing at all like the skull from Tremabon.'

There was a momentary lull in the discussion as each one brooded on the way that some unknown killer had kept them fooled.

The colonel kicked off again, after a moment.

‘So what's your next move, Mr Pacey?'

The detective crooked a finger at Willie Rees, who was skulking in a corner of the room.

‘Inspector Rees here has spent a fortune of the ratepayers' money on phone calls to various police headquarters to get lists of their missing persons. I only wish there was a central bureau for the whole country, like they have in the London area. It would save all this mucking about with lots of little districts.'

Rees cleared his throat. He was always a little wary of the chief constable, who reminded him far too strongly of his wartime company commander. ‘I limited the area a lot, sir. I got details of women missing from Wales, Liverpool, Bristol and the West Midlands.'

‘Casting your net a bit wide, weren't you?' said Barton.

‘We may have to go a lot further yet,' growled Pacey. ‘If nothing comes of that lot, we'll do the rest of the Midlands and then London.'

Meadows diffidently broke into the discussion. ‘But, surely, only a local man would know of that particular shaft, facing out to sea and all that?'

‘And the existence of the Mavis Hewitt legend,' added Powell.

Pacey wagged his head patiently. ‘Agreed. But the girl needn't be a local as well – in fact, it seems certain that she isn't. Rees says that there's no one missing during these years from this county, or any of the adjoining ones, who could possibly fit the bill.'

‘How the hell did she get there, then?' demanded Barton.

Pacey heaved his big shoulders. ‘That's what I hope to find out, sir – one day!'

Willie Rees looked hesitantly from one to the other, then carried on with his explanation. ‘That was the area I took, anyway. Then I limited the requests to women between the ages of twenty-two and thirty-five, just to be on the safe side.'

‘You didn't specify any range of height – say, under five foot five?' asked the colonel.

‘No, sir. I thought that as there had already been such a lot of mucking about with clothes and hair, there might be something fishy about the height, so I asked for them all.'