The Thread of Evidence (21 page)

‘So what do we do next?' asked Willie Rees.

‘Just for fun, let's say David Ellis-Morgan clobbered this girl Gordon in Cardiff back in fifty-five. What should we look for now?'

‘Hell of a long time ago! If he tried to cut her arm off, there might have been bloodstains around somewhere, I suppose.'

Rees grudgingly allowed himself to humour Pacey by playing his game of make-believe with him.

‘Where would
you
look, Willie?'

‘In his house, or wherever he did her in.'

Pacey grinned. ‘Do you think he carried her the eighty-odd miles from Cardiff to Tremabon on his back?'

‘Oh, a car. Yes, but he won't have the same one now, will he?'

‘"No, but you're going to start looking for it this afternoon, boy. And, when you find it, you're going to get the forensic chaps to go over every square inch of it for blood.'

‘After seven years' hard wear?' countered Rees in an offended voice.

‘Why not? I read the other day that they even grouped the blood of an Egyptian mummy after three thousand years, so I don't see why seven should strain them too much.'

‘And that's my first job, is it?'

‘Your
only
one for the time being. I've already asked the Cardiff CID to find out where Ellis-Morgan was living, and to see if they can get a good look at the premises.'

Rees sat stonily for a moment. ‘You know, Super, this is all very well,' he said eventually; ‘but aren't we mucking about wasting time? I'll admit that I think your theory is all a lot of tripe. But the quickest way to kill it would surely be to let that Collins woman have a look at the doctor. Her “yes” or “no” would be the finish of it, near enough – especially as I'm damn sure she'll say “no”.'

‘I'm going to do that – but I want a day or so to try to dig up some corroboration, if that's possible. This attempt at identification will have to be done very tactfully, Willie, to say the least. The colonel would blow a gasket if he thought I was lining up one of the county's most respected GPs for an identity parade. No, boy, we've got to do this subtly and try to get a bit of extra ammunition up our sleeves for our own protection. That's why I want you to find that car, and why I'm going to call on the pathologist.'

A couple of hours later, they were standing at the door of the post-mortem room in the medical school in Swansea, watching Leighton Powell as he stood cheerfully in his rubber boots and plastic apron amongst half a dozen gutted corpses in the long chilly room.

Organized confusion reigned about him, as three attendants bustled about, clanging enamel trays full of organs and noisily dropping instruments into the sinks.

Pacey stood for a few minutes before attracting the attention of the professor, hypnotized by the macabre scene lit by the harsh fluorescent lights. For all his years of familiarity with violence and sudden death, the sight of the wholesale carnage in a public mortuary still gave him a momentary heave of the stomach.

Powell caught sight of the two detectives and hurried across to them, pulling off his rubber gloves. He hustled them into a side office and took off his gown and apron.

‘I'm sorry to interrupt you, sir,' began Pacey. ‘But we've raised another possible candidate for the Tremabon bones and I'd like to know what you think of it from your angle.'

Powell struggled with his Wellington boots. ‘Of course. Let me get these togs off, and I'll take you up to my rooms, away from this blasted smell!'

A few minutes later, Pacey was showing the doctor the photograph of the club girl from Cardiff.

‘This is Julie Gordon, a sort of high-class barmaid. She upped and vanished in fifty-five.'

The professor studied the photograph. It was a copy of a picture of professional quality and showed the face and shoulders of an attractive girl, with a saucy pair of eyes and a full-lipped mouth.

‘Very nice, too,' he said appreciatively. ‘But what about this hair? It looks a false blonde, if I ever saw one.'

Pacey explained, ‘It was bleached, when the photo was taken. But her pal, who reported her missing, said that it was dyed black at the time she vanished. The real colour was mousey-brown, apparently.'

‘And her age and size?'

‘Twenty-seven and five foot four. There's no record of dental work; they couldn't trace her before she came to Cardiff, but she had some teeth filled. I don't know which ones.'

‘What exactly do you want me to tell you, Mr Pacey?'

‘I just want you to check that there's nothing in the facts that we have about Julie Gordon here, such as they are, that would rule her out as a candidate for the Tremabon skeleton.'

Powell looked quizzically at the superintendent.

‘Have you got anyone on the hook, then?'

Pacey grinned evasively. ‘I'm thinking of sticking my neck out if you give me the OK, Professor. Sticking it out so far that I daren't tell even you what I suspect until I get a bit of confirmation.'

Powell respected Pacey's reluctance to let the cat out of his bag, so didn't press him any further.

‘I can't help you an awful lot, I'm afraid,' he said. ‘The age is right, the height is right and, as we know nothing about the teeth, that doesn't help one way or the other. The only other thing I can do is to check the skull against this photo here. After the Mavis Hewitt fiasco, though, I've got even less faith in that method than I had before.'

‘I'd like you to do it, if you would, sir,' asked Pacey. ‘I'll have to get this photo copied up to size, then.' Pacey fished in his breast pocket. ‘If it would save time, I've got the negative of that photo here. The Cardiff police copied the original and loaned me the negative as well.' Powell took the square of black celluloid and held it up to the window.

‘Well, it's almost exactly full-face, so I could do a very rough check here and now. It'd not be at all accurate; but it ought to show up any glaring failure to correspond.'

He turned to a side bench and began fiddling with a slide projector and a large picture of the Tremabon skull which was mounted on a sheet of cardboard.

Willie Rees took the opportunity, while the doctor was busy, of looking around and satisfying his curiosity about the inside of a forensic pathologist's den.

If he expected glass jars full of mutilated organs and rows of grinning skulls on the shelves, he must have been very disappointed.

The main feature of the room was paper.

There were stacks of white forms, piles of large blue forms, and heaps of tattered flimsies. A generous drift of quarto typescript lay like snow on all the available desk and bench space and even overflowed onto the floor. There were bookcases full of books and untidy rows of box files peeped through the avalanche of paper.

A small sink was embedded in the bench below the window and contained several empty bottles, a dirty cup and saucer, and a potted plant.

Rees' now despairing eye, nurtured by newspaper articles about Spilsbury and his colleagues, was slightly revived by the sight of a gleaming microscope, the dramatic effect of which was spoilt by a postcard propped against the twin eyepieces. On it was scrawled the mundane message – “Remember to buy cabbage on way home”!

On the floor below the sink was a large cardboard box, bearing the emblem of ‘Gusto Baked Beans'. Below this, the detective noticed that the words “Mavis Hewitt” had been written in crayon, followed by a large and significant question mark.

Now utterly disillusioned, Willie turned to watch the pathologist as he finished erecting his makeshift apparatus.

‘I've put the negative in the projector,' he explained as he switched it on. ‘And I'll shine the image of it onto the skull photo, to see how they coincide.'

He closed the slatted sunblind to darken the room and then slid the projector back and forth along the benchtop until the face on the negative was the same size as the skull.

‘There we are – not bad, is it, for a rough check?'

Powell moved the cardboard of the skull photograph around until it coincided exactly with the rays from the projector. Pacey and Willie Rees crowded behind him and craned their neck to squint down the line of the bench.

‘Looks just as good as the Mavis Hewitt one,' said Pacey in a self-satisfied tone. ‘Same size jaw and eye sockets.'

The professor grimaced into the darkened room. ‘And it might be just as much of a red herring, too. Still, there's nothing here to justify me telling you that you're wasting your time with this girl. The front teeth – what little of them show – are the same shape, the width of the cheekbones are the same and the eye sockets are the same shape, and distance apart.' He dropped the card and went to open the sunblinds.

‘And that's about all I can tell you, I'm afraid.'

Pacey looked satisfied at even this most cautious of opinions.

‘There is one more thing, sir. This woman was reported missing in nineteen fifty-five. Is that all right as far as your date of death is concerned?'

Powell grinned. ‘I seem to get asked this question about twice a day! Yes, Superintendent, I know it's being wise after the event, but I've said all along that anything more than two or three years will satisfy me. If this one here is the true bill, I'll admit that I'm a bit surprised that the soft tissue on the bones being so far gone in seven years. Even the membrane around the shaft of the bone, and the last traces of gristle around the joints, have gone.'

Pacey looked a bit upset at this. ‘But you're not going to rule out seven years as being possible, are you?'

‘No, no. I'd be a fool to say it couldn't happen. Almost anything can happen in this game. That's why it's so foolish to be dogmatic. As I told you before, I've seen a body reduced to skeleton in less than a year; but then the bones still had tags of fibre and gristle on them. But seven years is a dickens of a lot longer, isn't it? And that mine was very damp and not far below the surface – the ground water, which must have been heavily contaminated by sheep, is certain to have been seeping over the body all the time. No, I won't quibble about seven years. If you can find your other evidence to pin the identity on this girl, I'll back you up all the way with the medical guff.'

There was nothing more that Pacey could learn from the professor. Soon he and Rees made their way back to Cardigan, leaving the elusive ‘Miss X' quietly resting in her baked bean carton under Powell's bench.

Chapter Sixteen

On the following morning, the Tuesday of the week after the skeleton was first discovered, Pacey and Rees managed to get down to the backlog of work on other cases for a few hours.

Willie had contrived to swing Pacey's order to find Ellis-Morgan's old car on to Detective Sergeant Mostyn, while he himself dealt with the welter of paper in his ‘In' tray.

About mid-morning, he went into Pacey's office to have a chat over their ‘cuppa and a fag' – an established part of the CID routine.

The burly superintendent was relaxing in his favourite posture, his collar button open, coat off and large boots up on his desk.

‘Willie,' he said, after important matters like last night's television and the rugby prospects for the weekend had been dealt with. ‘Willie, did that fancy DI in Cardiff say anything to you about finding the place where David Ellis-Morgan lived when he was a doctor up there?'

Rees shook his head. ‘No, why should he?'

‘I asked him on the phone on Saturday if he could have a snoop around. He obviously hasn't had any joy yet. What about Mostyn? You sent him out to look for that car, did you?'

Willie grinned sheepishly. ‘Yes, 'fraid so. If the doctor sold it to a Scotsman, he might be in Glasgow by now!'

‘You're a real scream, Willie,' Pacey said coldly. ‘More likely the ruddy thing has been melted down for scrap by now.'

In actual fact, Mostyn had struck lucky and, by lunchtime, was looking at the car that had once belonged to the doctor. He had expected the tracking down process to be long and tedious, especially as he had to use the discretion impressed on him by Pacey. However, from the time when he had arrived at the police house in Tremabon, everything had been made easy for him. He had learned from the local PC that the doctor had only possessed two cars, still having the second one at the moment.

‘He bought his first one, a Ford estate car, when he was in Cardiff,' said Griffith, mystified by the query. ‘He used it right up to a couple of years ago, when he bought his Austin-Healey.'

‘Any idea what the registration number was?' the sergeant asked hopefully. ‘I could trace it through the county registration people then, as I can't ask him personally.'

Griffith grinned at him. ‘I can't remember the number, no – but if it's just finding the car that you want, I can tell you where it is.'

Mostyn almost fell on the constable's neck with gratitude.

‘Where is it? Somebody local bought it, did they?'

‘Dr David traded it in for his new car in Aberystwyth. Harry Sayers, the garage owner, uses it in the business – for running around with spares and that sort of thing.'

Mostyn drove to the seaside town and found the garage. He noticed an old Zephyr station wagon parked outside and the owner confirmed that this was the vehicle in question. To cover the delicate situation, Mostyn had to pitch him a fictitious story.

‘This is in strict confidence, Mr Sayers, but we need to have the car for examination by our laboratory – only until tomorrow morning.'

The other man looked anxious. ‘Nothing
I've
done, I hope?'

‘No, it's to do with something that happened when the previous owner had it. It may have been involved in an accident with another vehicle and a serious charge is pending – on the other driver, of course. We want to make some paint tests and other examinations, that's all.'