The Thread of Evidence (19 page)

‘Huh, I don't see how he could shorten her legs – but carry on.'

Willie, becoming more harassed than ever from his chief's nagging, stumbled on with his story.

‘I limited the years to fifty-three to sixty. The professor had said that the remains couldn't be less than two years old.'

Powell blew his nose violently. ‘I've given up being surprised at anything in this game, but I'll stick my neck out that far.'

‘Well, sir, that brought me in thirty-six names for the list. I've got the copies of their descriptions here, and I've managed to go through them all just the once, so far.' Rees held out a sheaf of typewritten papers.

The colonel ground his cigar butt into Pacey's ashtray.

‘Thirty-six! I hope you're going to whittle that lot down a bit.'

‘I've already cut it to a short list of sixteen, sir.'

The lanky detective consulted another piece of paper.

‘Eighteen were eliminated on height – for the first run-through, anyway. I took an inch on either side of five foot four, as the professor said, and scrubbed all those outside that limit.'

Powell looked slightly uncomfortable. ‘You've got a touching faith in science, Inspector,' he said with a smile. ‘I think that should be all right. But if you get an otherwise dead cert who is half an inch too big or too small, I would keep her in mind, all the same.'

Pacey summarized his assistant's work. ‘So you've got another eighteen with nothing to choose between them, Rees?'

‘Yes. But that's in the area I chose, mind.'

‘Can we narrow those down to even less? It would save us a devil of a lot of chasing around the countryside.' Rees looked hopefully at Powell, who seemed to be meditating.

‘Any with red hair among them?' asked the pathologist. Rees had the answer off pat, without looking at his list. ‘Yes, four of them, Doctor.'

‘Well, that's another four excluded, on my theory.'

‘Wait a moment,' cut in Pacey. ‘We can't do that.'

‘Why not?'

‘I'll bet a couple of those were dyed auburn our murderer is too clever a bloke not to have thought of that one. Real red hair would be just as effective a fake against dyed red hair as against a blonde. The real Mavis was a genuine auburn.'

There was silence again as the others worked out the rather tangled reasoning of this one.

‘Any advance on eighteen?' asked Pacey.

‘Of course!' The pathologist suddenly smashed his fist into his other palm in a gesture of inspiration. ‘The teeth – at last, I've got a chance to show off with those. If we can get as many dental records as possible of all these girls, I can eliminate most of your list. In fact, if our girl is amongst them, I might even be able to pinpoint her for you!'

Everyone shifted their position, to stare expectantly at the professor. The chief constable put all their thoughts into words. ‘That sounds almost too good to be true. How could you possibly do it?'

Leighton reached for a spare piece of paper from the desk and produced a pencil.

‘I'll show you,' he said, rapidly sketching two semicircles on the paper. ‘These are the upper and lower jaws of our skull.' He drew five small rings at various places on the semicircles. ‘These represent the five teeth which are missing from the skull. The sockets are quite normal, so that means one of three possibilities:
one
, the teeth dropped out after death – but you didn't find them in your sieves. Or,
two
, they were extracted within a few weeks before death – which is highly unlikely, as there's no disease at all in the other teeth. Or
three
, they were deliberately pulled out after death by the murderer. And that's what I think happened.'

There was an uncomprehending look on every face except that of the speaker.

‘What's all this leading up to, sir?' asked Pacey.

‘Look, if the killer wants to pass off the body as Mavis, he has to eliminate anything that can be shown to belong to someone else. Now, he hasn't a clue what Mavis's teeth were like, but he guesses – quite correctly – that we won't either. People didn't go so regularly to the dentist in those days. And the record card, even if she did, would hardly survive all these years. But now he has a body, which otherwise is a good match for Mavis, but which has five teeth with fillings. So all he can do is to pull them out and chuck them away!'

The chief constable shuddered at Powell's enthusiasm over the prospect of a killer cracking out his dead victim's teeth.

‘With due respect, Doctor, I find that hard to believe. For a start, if there were no records of Mavis's teeth, why didn't he just leave them in his other body?'

‘Because fillings date almost as well as clothes. A dentist could have told almost at sight that they were modern fillings, not thirty years old. You see, the techniques and material used would be unmistakeable to an expert.'

Pacey bobbed his head slowly. ‘I'm with you now, Professor. But how are you going to apply this to the missing girls list?'

‘We get as many dental record cards as we can,' explained Powell. ‘Any woman who had even one tooth extracted is out – there wasn't a single dead socket in that skull.'

‘How can you tell that?' asked the colonel.

‘When a tooth is pulled out during life, the socket gradually collapses and fills up with bone. This starts soon after the extraction and it's obvious after a few weeks.'

Barton seemed to be convinced and the doctor went on talking:

‘Then we narrow them down further by scrubbing out all those with fillings in their teeth in any place other than these five.' He tapped his sketch with a finger.

The others nodded their understanding.

‘Now, if we came across a woman who had perfect teeth apart from fillings in these same five, and who had had no extractions, on purely statistical grounds, I'd recommend you to be very interested in her as a candidate for our bones.'

Pacey found some objections to this brainwave.

‘Two snags, Professor. The first is that I'll bet that we won't be able to find half the dental records – a lot of the women may never have had any to find. The other thing is that, as this killer seems such a cunning bastard, what's to stop him taking out a couple of extra teeth, healthy ones, just to confuse the issue?'

Powell shrugged and grinned wryly. ‘Ah, there you have me, Superintendent. Though I think that these days, most people in this age group would have had some dental treatment and so there'd be a record. But, in any case, this is a method to exclude a lot of your list. It will be the ones with no record – unless you find the jackpot one with the five teeth. Yes, it will be the blank cases that will need following up.'

The colonel came in to defend Powell. ‘I think it sounds admirable. It will narrow down your list a devil of a lot, Pacey; you should be very thankful for that.'

He changed the subject, turning to speak to Willie Rees.

‘Rees, which of these women is nearest to Tremabon?'

‘There's one in Swansea, sir. And another in Brecon. The other two are from Cardiff. Those are the only four from Wales.'

Powell looked mildly astonished. ‘I'm always amazed at the number of people that just vanish. Where do they get to – they can't all be murdered, or white-slaved!'

‘A lot of them take damn good care not to be found,' replied Pacey. ‘They either elope, or run away with the lodger. They don't really disappear at all – that is to say, they just change their way of life and keep well clear of their families.'

The chief constable slid off the desk and made for the door.

‘You'll get straight on with the job of tracing those dental records, I suppose, Mr Pacey.'

His words were more of a statement than a question.

‘Yes, Colonel, right away,' Pacey replied evenly, keeping the exasperation out of his voice. ‘I'll get them down to Professor Powell as fast as they come in.'

The chief vanished and Powell and Meadows soon followed, leaving the resident detectives to have a smoke and a cup of tea.

Pacey hoisted his great legs onto his desk and watched the smoke from his cigarette swirl about in the draughty air.

‘Willie,' he said after a while. ‘Did anything strike you about that last session in here?'

Rees stared at him. ‘No, not particularly – what d'you mean?'

‘All that guff about skulls and X-rays and teeth and hair – all medical, Willie – all medical.'

The inspector still looked blankly at Pacey.

‘Willie, if you had just croaked somebody and had to get rid of the body – would you think to pull out certain teeth, and of the type of fillings and the colour of the hair?'

Rees, still not seeing what the other was getting at, shook his head.

‘No, Willie, nor would I. Nor would the majority of lay people.'

‘What do you mean by “lay” people?' asked the inspector.

Pacey slid his legs off the desk and crashed them down on to the floor.

‘I mean, Willie, that this whole affair smells very “medical” to me. I'm going over to the county reference library for a few minutes. I feel a “hunch” coming over me!' He clumped out, leaving a thoughtful and somewhat mystified Rees sitting in his room.

Chapter Fifteen

‘I still think we're barking up the wrong tree,' objected Willie Rees.

He and Pacey were striding across the wide road alongside the castle which led to Cardiff Law Courts and Police Headquarters. Two days after the meeting in Cardigan, they had sifted all the information from the list of missing persons and had got down to a shortlist of four.

‘But why are you so mad keen on this one?' persisted Rees.

‘Because it's the only one to make any sense,' replied the superintendent. ‘Look, we had sixteen to chase up at the beginning. Then Powell's scheme about the teeth whittled that down to seven. Right?'

‘Yes, thank God – and the professor.'

Pacey did some of his favourite finger-jabbing into Willie's ribs as they neared the elegant civic buildings.

‘Seven. Then you found that one of them had a short “polio” leg – so we're down to six.'

The inspector grunted his agreement.

‘Then two of the others had photographs available – which any fool could see were impossible to fit on to the professor's skull picture. So they were knocked out and we're stuck with the last four.'

‘But I still don't see why you're so sold on the Cardiff girl. That other one from Bristol seemed a dead ringer to me. And we had a photo of her which fitted the skull like a glove.'

‘This one might, if we can get a picture.'

‘Might – and it might not!'

‘Well, I've got my money on this one, Willie. I feel it in my bones. I'll lay you a dollar that it won't turn out to be the one from Bristol. There now!'

Rees scowled again. ‘I'm not taking you; you've screwed too many dollars out of me like that in the past,' he grumbled. ‘I reckon you've got something up your sleeve that the rest of us don't know about.'

Pacey was all wide-eyed innocence. ‘What, me? I wouldn't hold out on you. Now, would I, Willie?'

The inspector's unprintable reply coincided with their arrival at the police headquarters, much to the disgust of a policewoman standing on the steps.

Within a few minutes, they were shown into a room where a swarthy police officer in plain clothes sat at a table. After introducing himself as Detective Inspector Austin, he waved them to a couple of seats and told them what he had to offer.

‘We've had one missing girl on the books for seven years,' he started. ‘We haven't been very interested until now – as she was one of the “fly-by-night” type, if you get me.'

Pacey eyed him with professional interest and decided that, although the Cardiff man was cocky-looking and wore far too natty a suit, he was very much on the ball. Austin picked up a record card from the table.

‘Julie Gordon, her name was. In November, fifty-five, another woman called Edna Collins reported her missing. She shared a flat with Gordon. They both worked as hostess-cum-barmaids at a posh drinking club in town. This Collins said that the girl Gordon had been in the club as usual on the Friday night, but hadn't shown up since. She reported it on the following Wednesday, by the way. Apparently, it wasn't all that unusual for Julie to buzz off for the odd weekend – presumably dirty – but she'd never stayed away as long as this before. And, by the time the middle of the week came without any sign of her, the room-mate thought she had better tell somebody.'

The detective paused, turned over the card and then flipped it back again.

‘And that's about all. We went through the usual routine – inquiries at the club, circulating the description and notifying the Bureau, but we've never heard a word since then about her. At least, not until you telephoned yesterday with a description that fits this one, for what it's worth.'

Pacey looked across the table with interest in his face. ‘What about relatives?''

‘A dead loss – the girl was originally from an orphanage, according to this Collins. She came from London, via Birmingham, where she had the same sort of background – barmaid, theatre usherette, club hostess. No record of being a “tom”, you understand, but it sounds as if she was pretty accommodating to the club members and anyone else in trousers who took her fancy. This Collins character is of the same sort.'

Pacey's fingers tapped the edge of his chair as he listened.

‘What about her appearance – hair and all that?'

The local man's eyes dropped back to the card. ‘Five foot four, as you said it had to be over the phone; black hair; “good-looking” – I don't know whose opinion that was, but there's a photo here that the other woman gave us. Only a small one, but she certainly looks a dish in it!' He gazed at the snap with relish.