The Thread of Evidence (24 page)

When David Ellis-Morgan had gone, Pacey went back to the office upstairs, where Gerald was nervously pacing the floor, smoking like a furnace. Pacey dismissed the stolid PC who stood on guard. As he left, Willie Rees came in with Edna Collins' statement.

‘Would you like a cup of tea, Doctor?' asked Pacey, being unable himself to really believe that this normal-looking man had killed and mutilated a young woman.

‘No, thanks. All I want is to see my solicitor and get this bloody nonsense cleared up. I've got no ill-will against you, Pacey, but this is too much this time! You sailed pretty near the wind with old Hewitt, but you've picked the wrong customer to antagonize in me!'

‘Your brother has been in to see me. He's just gone out to organize a lawyer for you. I'm not going to ask you for a statement until he comes. And I advise you, off the record, not to say another thing until you get some legal advice.'

Gerald made no reply and strode to the window, turning his back on them.

Rees showed Pacey the story as dictated by the blonde barmaid, and they spent a few minutes going through it.

‘I'd better go and phone the chief constable,' said Pacey in a low voice. ‘He'll go up in flames when he hears about this, but he's got to know sooner or later. You'd better come with me, so get that PC back in here. I don't like to see him standing so near that window. It's a long drop if he takes it into his head to jump.'

The two detectives went back to the office off the charge room and Pacey put a call through to Cardigan. The colonel was engaged and Pacey sat by the telephone ready to try later.

‘What about the Press?' queried Willie. ‘Poor Adams is going to be in a worse spot than ever – with his future brother-in-law on the spot, instead of his uncle!'

‘Yes, I feel sorry for him – and for the sister and father, to say nothing of the other brother. He took it well, but you could see that the news just about tore him apart inside.'

The telephone rang and Pacey answered it, expecting the call to be Cardigan ringing back.

It was David Ellis-Morgan.

‘Hello, Doctor. Have you managed to fix up your lawyer?'

David's voice came distantly over the line. ‘No, Mr Pacey. That won't be necessary. In fact, it never was.'

Pacey felt the first hint of something wrong as a prickle at the back of his neck.

‘I don't follow you, sir. What d'you mean by that?'

‘If I were you, I'd just listen for a few minutes, Superintendent. Gerald knows nothing about this business – nothing at all.'

Pacey made frantic signalling gestures to attract Rees over from the other side of the room, while he carried on talking to the caller.

‘I don't understand this at all, Doctor. Your brother admitted knowing the dead girl, and being in her company during the last week that her movements were known.'

The detective understood perfectly well – the truth had burst upon him at the end of the first sentence that David Ellis-Morgan had uttered; but now he was stalling for time.

As Willie hurried across to the telephone, the distant voice began to speak again.

‘He knew Julie Gordon all right. So did I – the little bitch!'

Pacey was scribbling on a piece of paper as he listened, with Rees leaning over him to see what he was writing.

‘You'd better tell me the lot, Doctor. Where are you speaking from, by the way?'

Pacey tried to make his voice sound as casual and matter-of-fact as he could; but he was wasting his time.

‘I'm afraid I won't be able to tell you that. You'll trace the call before long, I know. But, if you want to hear the truth, I'll have to have a few minutes grace.'

Pacey succeeded in scrawling a barely legible message for Rees. It read: “Trace call. Send any available patrol. Pick up David E-M. Urgent prevent escape or suicide.”

Willie nodded and rushed off to the telephone switchboard in the charge room. Pacey contrived to listen to David while this was going on.

‘Are you listening to me, Superintendent?' he asked sharply.

‘Yes, I'm here. Go on.'

‘You've already started to trace me, haven't you?' accused the doctor, correctly diagnosing the faltering attention of Pacey for a couple of moments. ‘So I'll have to make it short and sweet. Don't interrupt me, please. This is the last chance you'll ever get of hearing the real truth, so make the most of it. Then you can let Gerald go – with some apologies, I hope.'

‘I'm waiting, Doctor Ellis-Morgan.'

Pacey knew now that all he could do was to try to keep the other man talking long enough for Rees to contact a patrol car and pick David up. The man had only been gone from the police station a matter of twenty minutes, so couldn't be very far away.

‘Gerry had picked up this girl and brought her back to the flat I had in Cardiff on several occasions when I was out on duty. This was earlier in the week – that last awful week.'

For the first time, the iron control of David's voice weakened momentarily.

‘Why was your brother in Cardiff, anyway?' Pacey was both seeking information and trying to prolong the talking.

‘He used to come up to stay with me a few times a year – long weekends and an occasional week. He was fond of a bit of city life after his student days in London, and he found Tremabon a bit of a dead hole for the first few years. He used to sleep in the flat. I usually found myself a bed in the hospital when I was on emergency call. I found out later that he had picked up this Julie in a club and brought her back there on several nights until the early hours … but I didn't know it at the time. On the Friday morning, he had a phone message calling him back to Tremabon. Dad had caught the 'flu and Gerry had to go back a couple of days early to run the practice.'

Pacey looked at his watch – it was four minutes since the telephone had rung. Why the devil didn't Willie come back and tell him what was happening?

‘You're still there, Pacey?' David's voice sounded anxious.

‘Yes, don't worry. I still don't know what all this is about. I hope you're not wasting the time of both of us by inventing some far-fetched defence for your brother, sir.'

‘No defence needed, Mr Pacey. I had no intention of going for a lawyer when I left you just now. I could have told you all this sitting in your office. But, then, you would have stopped me from doing what I have to do very soon. This was the only way to get clear of you. Yes, I killed Julie Gordon, Mr Pacey. On the Friday night, after Gerry had gone, she came to the flat. He had arranged to meet her somewhere, but failed to get a message through to her. So she turned up to look for him. I didn't know who, or what, she was then. Gerry didn't talk much about affairs of that sort – he was a bit ashamed of his easy pick-ups. Anyway, to cut a long story short – it will have to be, Mr Pacey, now that you've got the police force out looking for me – to get right to the point, I took over where my brother left off. She came into my flat to explain. We had a drink together. One thing led to another and she didn't leave that night. In fact, she didn't leave at all – alive.'

Pacey was genuinely gripped now, without thought of his patrol cars closing in.

‘What happened?' he asked tensely.

‘We made quite a party of it that night. It was all the more exciting to me, as I haven't got Gerry's easy way with women. She was very attractive and made up for the scores of lonely, miserable nights I'd spent in that flat alone. We got a little drunk, then we went to bed. It was after that the trouble began. Whether it was conscience or fear, I don't know, but I sobered up quickly and felt revolted at myself. I tried to get her to go, but she began to turn nasty. She was still a bit drunk – bitchy and vicious. The more I tried to get rid of her, the worse she got. Then she began saying things – how would our father like it if he knew both his sons were sleeping with club hostesses – that it might cost us both a packet for her to keep her mouth shut. Looking back on it, I'm sure she wasn't really serious, but just drunk and showing off. Anyway, at the time, it made me see red, mainly because it was true – two respectable medical men carrying on like that – and my part was worse than Gerry's, by far; I almost felt that I was cuckolding my own brother.'

Pacey waited, both for the other to go on and for Rees to come back.

‘One thing led to another and she started shouting and sneering and shrieking. God it was awful! I shook her and slapped her and she yelled all the more, taunting me with what I'd done – and other things!'

Pacey guessed what the ‘other things' were.

‘And then?' he prompted, cursing Rees under his breath.

‘Before I knew what was happening, I had her by the throat, trying to shut her up. It was about one in the morning and the flat is right next to the hospital. I was afraid someone would hear her. The next thing, she was limp in my hands. I did everything I could – artificial respiration, heart massage – but she was dead. She just slumped down. It couldn't have been strangulation, just shock from pressure on her neck.'

He paused, even the impersonal wires of a telephone carrying the seven-year-old emotions in his words clearly to Pacey.

‘Believe me – not that it matters now – I had no intention of killing her. I was just scared and angry at the bloody things she was saying.'

At last Willie Rees hurried back into the room. Pacey put a finger to his lips to keep him silent; so the inspector, in his turn, scribbled a message:

“Phoning from public box at Tremabon. Nearest patrol at serious accident, Llanmaes, ten miles away.”

Pacey rolled his eyes up at Rees in frustration. At times like these, he envied the big city forces that always had a car within three minutes of anywhere – not like the rural areas where it was difficult even to keep cars within range of the radio transmitters.

He forced himself back to listen to the confessions of the doctor.

‘… in the bathroom, while I thought out some plan. I sat there all night. I must have had some sort of mad frenzy just after I did it, as I found myself with a surgical saw from the plaster clinic downstairs, standing by the bath with blood everywhere and her arm almost off. That pulled me together more than anything else could have. I sat down and thought all night, then locked myself in the bathroom while the cleaner came in the morning – so that she wouldn't see anything. Then, gradually, the plan about Mavis Hewitt came to me.'

‘How did you know about that?'

‘I heard it years before from Ceri Lloyd and someone else in the village – I used to go to the pub quite a bit when I was a student, home on vacation. The idea came to me to hide the body in a mine – I knew plenty from the days when Gerry and I used to play on the cliffs as boys. I knew Roland was the suspect, even though there was no proof that she was dead. And Roland had gone abroad years before, and everyone in the village seemed sure that he had died long ago. So I decided to insure myself against the body being found by faking it up as Mavis Hewitt.'

Pacey looked at the hands of his watch creeping round. Even if the nearest car could leave the scene of a serious accident straight away, it would take ten or twelve minutes at least to reach David Ellis-Morgan, going at seventy miles an hour – which was an almost impossible speed on the country roads.

‘What happened – how did you manage to fool us so well?'

‘I remembered from Ceri's yarn that Mavis was in her twenties when she vanished. I also knew that she was a redhead; Ceri was very clear about that. I stripped her clothes off, cut off all the dark hair and washed it down the lavatory.

‘Then I went out to a theatrical costumier and got a set of clothes from the nineteen twenties – insisted on having authentic stuff. I said it was for an amateur production of one of Somerset Maugham's plays. I hunted around for some pawnbrokers in the dock area and got some old-fashioned jewellery and a wedding ring with as near correct hallmark date as I could.'

‘How did you get rid of the bloodstained clothes?'

Pacey made no attempt to challenge the truth of all these revelations – there could be no doubt as to that. His only concern was to keep David talking for another ten or fifteen minutes.

‘The clothes? That was easy. I wrapped them up, took them over to the hospital mortuary and dumped them on the floor. There are always heaps of old clothes, often bloody, lying around, from accident cases. Every now and then, the attendants collect them up and take them to the incinerator. Another odd heap would go unnoticed.'

‘And the teeth – how did you get around that?'

‘Yes, that was difficult – she had three fillings, so I took them out together with another two spares. I was physically sick doing that, even though I earned part of my living in dissecting bodies. Still, it had to be done, not only for my own sake, but also to cover up for Gerry and to save my father and Mary from the ruin of the practice and their home.'

‘Well, that's going to happen now, isn't it?' grated Pacey.

‘We've had seven years, better than nothing. I'm sorry though.'

The voice sounded far off and Pacey began to think that, at last, the doctor's mind was beginning to crack. He looked at the hands of his watch again, crawling with a microscopic motion around the dial. He picked up his pencil and scrawled “PC Griffith?” on his pad.

He looked up at Willie, who nodded, shook his head and shrugged his shoulders, all in rapid succession. Pacey interpreted this as meaning that Rees had already thought of it, but could not get through to the Tremabon constable on the telephone for some reason.

David was talking again, and Pacey turned his attention back to him.

‘I also bought a switch of real auburn hair in the theatrical shop. I went back to the flat, waited until dark and loaded the body, wrapped in a hospital sheet, into the back of my Ford.'