The Thread of Evidence Read online

  THE THREAD OF EVIDENCE

  A Sixties Mystery

  BERNARD KNIGHT

  A classic murder mystery by acclaimed author Bernard Knight.

  When some boys find a human bone in a cave in Cardiganshire, Wales, a case that has gone unresolved for over thirty years suddenly springs back into life. For that grisly find is only the start of things…

  When the rest of the skeleton is soon discovered, the disappearance of a local woman decades earlier comes back to public attention. The woman’s husband has recently returned to the area after years out of the country, and he has no explanation as to why his wife suddenly went missing. The local gossips consider him guilty of murder, as do some in the police force…but not everyone is convinced. It’s up to Superintendent Pacey to work out which bits of the whole sorry tale are fact and which are fiction – and there are some unpleasant surprises along the way…

  Author’s Note

  The Sixties Mysteries is a series of reissues of my early crime stories, the first of which was originally published in 1963. Looking back now, it is evident how criminal investigation has changed over the last half-century. Though basic police procedure is broadly the same, in these pages you will find no Crime Scene Managers or Crown Prosecution Service, no DNA, CSI, PACE, nor any of the other acronyms beloved of modern novels and television. These were the days when detectives still wore belted raincoats and trilby hats. There was no Health and Safety to plague us and the police smoked and drank tea alongside the post-mortem table!

  Modern juries are now more interested in the reports of the forensic laboratory than in the diligent labours of the humble detective, though it is still the latter that solves most serious crimes. This is not to by any means belittle the enormous advances made in forensic science in recent years, but to serve as a reminder that the old murder teams did a pretty good job based simply on experience and dogged investigation.

  Bernard Knight

  2015

  Original Author’s Note

  Neither the Cardiganshire Constabulary nor a Chair in Forensic Medicine at Swansea exist, in fact. Apologies are due to both the Home Office and the University of Wales for the arbitrary rearrangement of their departments!

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Sixties Mysteries

  Chapter One

  The taller of the two men raised his cap to the young lady who opened the door.

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you on a Sunday afternoon, miss, but I wondered if the doctor was at home.’

  He jerked his head at a bundle wrapped in newspaper, which his companion held reverently in his hands.

  ‘You see, we think we may have found a bit of a body!’

  Mary Ellis-Morgan stared blankly at them for a few seconds. As the daughter and housekeeper of the local doctor, she thought she had seen every kind of medical emergency, but to be faced by two slightly embarrassed men clutching what they alleged to be part of a corpse, was something outside even her experience.

  ‘Er … yes – yes, he is in. I’ll call him for you.’

  Her wits rapidly returned and she opened the door wider. ‘You’d better come in and wait in the surgery – it’s through here.’

  Mary ushered them into the hall and through another door into a waiting room furnished with a collection of odd chairs, an electric fire and a pile of tattered magazines.

  ‘I’ll call him from the garden. He won’t be a moment.’

  She closed the door and hurried back to the kitchen at the rear of the house. Opening the window, she called out to her father, who was sitting on the lawn in a deckchair, talking to a younger man.

  ‘Daddy, there’s someone in the surgery to see you.’

  ‘Very well – I’m coming.’

  Without enthusiasm, the doctor hoisted himself from his chair and walked slowly towards the surgery annexe at the far end of the house.

  Pausing only long enough to give a tidying pat to her red hair, Mary passed through the kitchen door and crossed the lawn to where her fiancé sprawled drowsily in his deckchair. As she plumped down alongside him, Peter Adams shaded his eyes against the September sun and peered at her quizzically.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he demanded.

  ‘Nothing much,’ she replied with studied casualness. ‘Just a couple of men with a parcel for Daddy. They said they had found some human remains.’

  ‘Huh-huh!’

  The sun was warm and Peter lay back in his chair, eyes closed again, his brain hardly registering. Mary sat watching him, smiling affectionately and patiently waiting for her words to arouse the journalist’s instinct within him that was never very far below the surface. The penny dropped and Peter sat up abruptly.

  ‘What did you say?’ he asked, blinking owlishly at her.

  ‘Two men called about some human remains,’ she repeated, her eyes glinting with mischief.

  ‘What sort of human remains?’

  ‘I couldn’t see. They were wrapped in newspaper.’

  ‘Wrapped in newspaper! Good God, do you mean that these two characters brought the stuff in handfuls?’

  She nodded. ‘For Daddy’s opinion. I’m glad I’m not in his place, aren’t you? Fancy having to unwrap that stuff!’

  ‘But these two men,’ he persisted, not to be sidetracked, ‘where did they find these relics?’

  ‘I don’t know, darling.’

  ‘Well, for goodness’ sake, didn’t you ask them?’

  ‘I did not! I’ve been a receptionist to three busy GPs for long enough to have learnt some of the tricks of the trade! And the first is never to ask questions if you don’t want to be swamped by the symptoms of every patient who comes to the house.’

  ‘But these men weren’t patients,’ he objected in exasperation. ‘This is incredible. Two men knock on your door, announcing the find of the century, and all you can think of doing is to ask them to step into the surgery!’

  ‘That’s right, darling,’ she admitted sweetly. ‘But, then, I’m not a newshound like you. I don’t think of every titbit of news in terms of flaming headlines.’

  Peter rolled his eyes skywards in supplication.

  ‘And to think that I shall soon be joined in holy wedlock with this woman who describes as “titbits of news” whole corpses wrapped in newspaper!’ He began to climb to his feet. ‘Excuse me, my sweet, but this is an act I really must get in on.’

  ‘You needn’t bother to get up,’ Mary told him, looking across her shoulder towards the house. ‘You’re too late. Here comes Daddy now. I expect he’ll tell you as much as he thinks is good for you.’

  Peter turned his head and saw the doctor coming across the lawn towards them.

  Slight of build, with kindly twinkling eyes, his sparse hair plastered back over his head to give the maximum coverage, he looked ten years younger than his sixty-four years. As Peter watched, it occurred to him that he had never seen this man dressed in anything other than the baggy grey tweed suit that he was now wearing; probably, he thought, he’ll turn up in it at church next year to give his only daughter away in marriage.

  Pulling up another chair for the older man as he joined them, Peter asked, ‘What was all
that about? Mary has been hinting at something horrific!’

  ‘Well, so it was, in a way,’ the doctor replied in his staccato North Walian accent. ‘It could turn out to be quite nasty, I suppose. The two chaps who have just left are on holiday from Coventry, here in the village. This afternoon, it seems, their kids come galloping home from a jaunt on the cliffs brandishing a human femur. One of the men thought he recognized it for what it was and brought it to me for confirmation.’

  ‘A human femur! That’s the thigh bone, isn’t it? Where the devil did they find it?’

  ‘Picked it up in a cave, they said, but it’s more likely to have been an old mine working. The cliffs are riddled with them. There’s no doubt about the bone being human, though.’

  ‘There, Peter darling,’ Mary said consolingly, ‘you’ve got your precious headlines at last: – “How I found the missing link!”.’

  Peter grinned at her. ‘The Morning News doesn’t go much on archaeology, I’m afraid. But it might be worth a try.’

  ‘You can forget about archaeology,’ the doctor interrupted. ‘The bone’s old, but not all that old.’

  ‘How old, then?’ Peter asked with quickening interest.

  ‘Twenty – fifty – a hundred, perhaps. I’m no expert in such things, but it’s certainly not a museum piece.’

  ‘Then it’s a police job, eh? Have you told Wynne Griffith?’

  ‘I’ve just phoned his house, but he was out. His wife promised to get him to ring back as soon as he comes in.’

  ‘How much of a body do you have to find before it becomes of interest to the law, I wonder?’ Mary asked thoughtfully.

  Her father shrugged his shoulders. ‘Don’t ask me,’ he said. ‘Forensic medicine is way off my beat as a country GP – I’ve forgotten all I ever mugged up for the exam as a student. Presumably, the bit must be big enough, or vital enough, to suggest that death has occurred. I don’t suppose a little finger on its own would interest a coroner, but a thigh bone could only come either from an operating theatre or a corpse.’

  Mary thought of her two brothers, the other members of the medical practice that the Ellis-Morgans ran in this quiet seaside village on the west coast of Wales.

  ‘A pity that Gerry and David aren’t here this evening,’ she said. ‘Gerry is supposed to be the local police surgeon – and, the only time that anything has ever happened, he’s down in Swansea on a cricket weekend.’

  ‘They’d have liked to have been in on it, no doubt,’ agreed their father. ‘But the police are sure to get their own forensic expert up to look at it before very long.’

  They sat discussing the discovery while the autumn sun slid down the sky towards the west.

  Mary lay back most of the time, listening to the men. She saw that her fiancé was getting more and more fidgety as the time went by.

  ‘Oh, Peter, for goodness’ sake, stop looking at your watch!’ she scolded. ‘PC Griffith isn’t going to get home any quicker for you twitching with impatience!’

  Peter forced his tall body back into his chair in an effort to look relaxed.

  The doctor’s eyes twinkled behind his big horn-rimmed glasses.

  ‘There you are, my boy; you’re being nagged already. You’d better give up working for that newspaper in Cardiff – she won’t let you go out late at night when you’re married!’

  Peter grinned sheepishly. ‘I’m supposed to be on holiday and this breaks on the second day. I don’t know if it’s good or bad luck.’

  John Ellis-Morgan tapped his pipe bowl on the chair frame with quick nervous movements. Peter thought again how bird-like he was, his sudden jerky movements and his pattering walk being like those of a lively little sparrow.

  ‘May be nothing much in it, Peter,’ warned the doctor. ‘So don’t get your notebook out yet – though I can’t imagine how a femur could get into an old lead mine without some funny business being involved somewhere.’

  Peter rose to his feet restlessly and stood with his hands in his pockets, staring up at the green cliff which almost overhung the house above the surgery.

  ‘These mines are up there somewhere, are they?’ he asked.

  Mary’s father jabbed the air with the stem of his pipe. ‘Yes, but a fair way along the top from here – there are more on that side, too.’

  He waved towards the opposite side of the large garden, where an almost identical fern-covered hill reared up into the evening sky.

  Carmel House, the Ellis-Morgans’ home, was built in the narrow valley where a stream cut its way through the rampart of cliffs that formed the coastline of Cardigan Bay. The village of Tremabon lay a quarter of a mile further inland, abreast the main road that ran from Aberystwyth to Cardigan. The steep green slopes that Peter Adams was so impatiently studying were the landward buttresses of the plateau that fell almost sheer into the sea on the other side.

  Mary leant forwards and jabbed a sharp finger into her fiancé’s ribs.

  ‘If there’s any reporting to be done, you can count yourself out, my lad – you’re mine for a fortnight, remember? The South Wales Morning News can go to pot until then.’

  Any retort that Peter may have intended was frozen by the sound of the telephone ringing in the house. The doctor hopped up and began pattering across the smooth grass.

  ‘That will be Griffith now, I expect,’ he said unnecessarily over his shoulder.

  Peter hesitated, then began to follow. A firm tug on the back of his sports coat brought him up short.

  ‘Oh, no you don’t! You sit down and be nice to me. If I’m no match for a dirty old bone, you’d better have your ring back!’

  The determination beneath her flippant words was plain, and Peter flopped back into his chair with a sigh.

  ‘All right, Ginger, you win.’

  ‘I’m not ginger – it’s auburn,’ pouted his girlfriend. ‘But seriously, pet, do you think this bone business could be important – I mean, you know, criminal or anything?’

  ‘Bones only get buried in queer places when the death has been unusual,’ replied Peter. ‘If it turns out only to be the one bone there, then there may be some innocent explanation.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I remember a devil of a fuss when I was in college because a medical student left an ear from the dissecting room on the top floor of a bus. And the fellow I shared my digs with always had bits of his skeleton scattered about the house. But, apart from that sort of thing, I can’t see how a thigh bone could turn up in a lead mine unless someone had deliberately hidden it there.’

  Mary still looked doubtful.

  ‘But there are some ancient barrows on the cliffs, too. Couldn’t this be some sort of old ritual burial?’

  Peter shook his head. ‘Not in a lead mine, sweet. I don’t know much about them, but I think the oldest only go back to Roman times.’

  ‘Perhaps it was a mining accident,’ Mary said hopefully.

  Peter smiled affectionately at her.

  ‘You’re determined to do my paper out of a sensation, aren’t you? Your father said that he thought the thing wasn’t all that old – so it’s no good you trying to push this business back to the dawn of time.’

  On the telephone, John Ellis-Morgan was having trouble of the opposite kind, trying to repress the local constable’s enthusiasm from getting out of hand.

  ‘Now, now, Wynne, go easy until we’ve found out a bit more about it,’ he soothed in Welsh. Griffith had already excitedly offered to call in everyone, including Scotland Yard and Interpol.

  ‘You come over here now and we’ll go up to the cliff with these children,’ he went on. ‘There may be something else up there, if they’re not pulling our leg – though I can’t see where they’d get a femur from.’

  Griffith hurriedly agreed and the doctor hung up.

  Over in the police house on the other side of the village, the constable slammed the telephone down and darted back into the living room, where his wife and small son were having tea.

/>   ‘Pass me my jacket, love, quick,’ he said with feverish haste. ‘I’ve got to get over to Dr John’s right away!’

  His wife looked at him calmly.

  ‘What’s all the rush, Wynne – have the Russians landed on Tremabon beach or something?’

  His son gazed at his father as the policeman struggled with his blue coat. Griffith was normally a calm, stolid man; and this sudden activity was unusual enough to make the five-year-old stare at him wide-eyed, a spoonful of jelly poised before his mouth.

  ‘Well, what’s it all about, I said?’ repeated his wife sharply.

  ‘Some boys have found a human bone up on the south cliff and taken it to the doctor. I’m off now to see what it’s all about – might be the biggest thing I’ve ever had!’

  He dived into the tiny hall and pushed his large upright bicycle through the front door. His wife watched impassively. Motoring offences, hayrick fires and human bones were all one to her.

  Griffith leapt onto his machine and rode off down the hill into Tremabon. The white house with the blue ‘Police’ sign over the door was on the outskirts of the village on the road north to Aberystwyth. To reach Carmel House, he had to go down to the crossroads in the centre of the hamlet and turn off into the lane that led down to the beach through the gap in the cliffs.

  A man in his middle thirties, he was a good officer, steady and reliable. Like many country policemen, he was professionally frustrated. The most heinous crimes that normally came his way were the absence of lights on pedal cycles and the failure of farmers to dip their sheep at the specified times. Rare events like the theft of the vicar’s rose bushes or the fatal collapse of Mrs Hughes at the bus stop were milestones in his career. The present prospect of a human bone on his ground was the greatest event since he’d had his helmet. At least it means an inquest, he thought, and – dare he hope? – the possibility of criminal proceedings.

  While the constable was furiously pedalling through the lanes in a turmoil of anticipation, John Ellis-Morgan had telephoned the guest house nearby and asked the fathers to bring their small sons across.

  By the time PC Griffith arrived, a little group had formed on the wide gravel drive of Carmel House, ready to meet him.