The Thread of Evidence Page 11

  ‘I’d also like to thank ex-inspector Matthews for tearing himself away from his roses in New Quay, to come up and help with what he remembers about the case in twenty-nine,’ concluded the colonel. The retired police officer nodded silently.

  Barton turned to the pathologist. ‘Perhaps you would like to start, Professor. To get straight down to brass tacks, we all know now that the best candidate for this body is Mavis Hewitt – she certainly leads the field so far, at any rate. Now how far can the medical evidence go towards proving this?’

  Leighton Powell leaned forwards in his chair and rubbed his hands together thoughtfully.

  ‘I don’t know much about the real Mavis yet – I’m hoping to learn a lot more here this morning. But this is what she’ll have to measure up to, to fit in with our skeleton.’

  He began to tick off the points on his fingers.

  ‘One – a woman between the ages of twenty-two and thirty. Those limits are quite definite. But I’d be inclined to think that she’s at least a couple of years above the lower figure, say twenty-five. I couldn’t be as dogmatic as that in the witness-box – but God preserve me from ever having to do that!’

  He prodded the next finger.

  ‘Five foot four in height. But, if Mavis was known to be an inch different either way, I’d accept that. All the same, if she was more than five-five or less than five-three, I’d rule her right out.’

  Pacey broke in with a question: ‘Can you say anything about her probable build? You know, fat, thin or indifferent?’

  ‘No, sorry. The bones are just the same in either case. The only other thing I can tell you is that she was free from any bone disease, or deformity. There’s the hair, of course, but Inspector Meadows can tell you more about it than I can.’

  He settled back in his chair as if to indicate that he had shot his forensic bolt.

  The chief looked at the laboratory liaison officer.

  ‘Perhaps you’d like to carry on from there, Meadows.’

  The inspector had his own sheaf of papers to ruffle through.

  ‘We’ve not had nearly enough time to do anything but a very sketchy examination, sir. It will take a couple of weeks to do everything properly, but I can tell you a few things already that might be quite helpful.’

  His manner slipped back into the formal stilted speech of the witness box. ‘Several coins were examined, as follows: a florin, dated nineteen twelve, a nineteen twenty-seven shilling and three pennies, dated from nineteen twenty-one to six. There was also a plain brass purse clasp with no features of any use in tracing its origin.’

  The colonel stopped him with a raised finger. ‘What about fingerprints?’

  Meadows looked slightly shocked. ‘Oh, no, sir, not a hope! All the metal objects had a thick layer of corrosion on them. No dabs would survive that amount of time and ill-treatment.’

  The colonel accepted the mild rebuke gracefully and Meadows carried on. ‘One part of a shoe was compared with our records of costumes and with the collection in the National Museum. It was typical of the decade nineteen twenty-five to thirty-five. It had a pointed toe in leather, with, a button-strap across the instep. If we really push it, we might be able to get some manufacturer to give us a closer date on the time it was made.’

  ‘How will that help?’ asked Powell.

  ‘Well, if it was made in thirty-one, it can hardly be Mavis. The next stuff we looked at was the jewellery. The glass beads are characteristic of a style common in the same period as the shoe. It’s impossible to date it more accurately. That goes for the wooden beads, too.’

  ‘And the wedding ring,’ added the colonel.

  ‘Yes, a plain twenty-two carat gold band. Hallmarked in London in nineteen twenty-three. Nothing else special about it.’

  ‘Twenty-three, that’s a bit early, isn’t it?’ objected Pacey. ‘She was married in twenty-seven, wasn’t she?’

  Meadows shrugged. ‘Either it was second-hand, or had been hanging about the shops or wholesalers for a couple of years. I’ll make inquiries about it, if you like, but I don’t think it would sink our theory just by being too old.’

  ‘What about the clothing – and there was a bit of chain, too?’

  ‘The chain was plated – rolled gold on brass. I’ve hawked it around to a goldsmith, but he couldn’t help much. He said that they’ve made that stuff in the same way for years. The clothing was pretty tatty – pieces of brown linen and part of what could be a cambric blouse, which was white once. This had mother-of-pearl buttons, some loose and some still sewn on to the cloth. They are genuine mother-of-pearl, which is very unusual these days. Now they’re all synthetic.’

  ‘What are you going to do with these things – get some more work done on them?’ asked Barton.

  ‘Yes, some stuff has already gone off. The research labs of the big textile firms are very helpful. They’re hot stuff at recognizing fibres – they might be able to date this cloth and even say where it was made. That goes for the buttons, too. We’ve sent one off to see if the commercial experts can give us any information about it.’

  ‘Professor Powell said you had something to tell us about the hair – is that right?’

  ‘Yes, I was coming to that next. There was a hair clasp, too. I almost forgot that. Again it was a genuine old tortoiseshell. They’re all plastic these days. The hair itself – well, that was auburn, natural colour, no dye in it. It had been artificially waved, though only a trace was left in it by the time we examined it. As the professor has said, the funny thing was that all the ends were cut ends – no roots present at all.’

  Pacey frowned. He leant back in his chair until it creaked dangerously and stared fixedly at Meadows.

  ‘What’s that mean? That whoever did her in, also cut off all her hair as well?’

  Powell came back into the discussion:

  ‘He might well have done – we’ve got the partly sawn-off arm, remember; that was one attempt at concealment. He might well have started to cut off all the hair with some notion of delaying, or defeating, identification.’

  ‘Wouldn’t there be signs of the hair roots left in the scalp?’ asked the colonel.

  ‘No, I would be very surprised to find any recognizable roots with the soft tissues destroyed as completely as they were. If the head were cropped short of hair, the roots would have vanished when the scalp rotted.’

  Pacey came back to the sawn arm bone. ‘We haven’t heard much about this sawing, Professor – what are your ideas about it?’

  ‘Not much to it that helps. The bone was sawn half across, as you saw, about three inches below the shoulder joint. Alongside it was a small cut, presumably an abortive attempt before the other.’

  ‘And you think that this was an abandoned attempt at dismembering the body before trying to dispose of it?’

  Powell inclined his head. ‘Yes, sawing up corpses is almost a classical occupation amongst murderers! Ruxton was the most wholesale “cutter-upper” of recent years, but plenty of others have had a go at it. This chap seems to have given it up as soon as he saw what a mess he was making. Even though there’s no circulation in a corpse, the blood tends not to clot after death, so there would still be an embarrassing lot of blood about.’

  The dapper colonel folded his hands neatly on his blotter. ‘Then we agree so far, that there is nothing in the medical evidence to rule out Mavis Hewitt?’

  He looked around the ring of faces and collected the nods and grunts of assent.

  ‘Now, Mr Pacey, what can you tell us about the other side of things? As this skeleton could be Mavis Hewitt, have you anything to suggest that it really is her?’

  Pacey produced an envelope, which he handed across the desk. ‘Inspector Rees interviewed her sister yesterday. She’s now sixty-one – which is about four years older than Mavis would have been now – always assuming she’s dead!’ he added mischievously.

  ‘There are two letters in the envelope, which she gave to the police at the time they reported he
r missing. Presumably, they figured in the report that was made at the time – by the way, sir, there’s no trace of that anywhere, so we can give up any hope of seeing it now. Inspector Matthews here is our only link with nineteen twenty-nine, except for the bit in the station Occurrences book.’

  Colonel Barton was scanning through the large immature writing on the faded blue notepaper.

  ‘Most of this is sheer rubbish, but some parts are good evidence of really bad feeling between the two Hewitts,’ he commented. ‘If this is true, there was certainly some physical disagreement during the weeks before she vanished.’

  Pacey wagged his large head. ‘Especially that bit where she says that Hewitt threatened to stop her seeing Lloyd, or anyone else, for good.’

  ‘Still, this doesn’t make the old boy out to be a murderer,’ complained the chief. ‘These bits like “… when he got mad at me he punched me on the floor …” and “… I lost my temper and then he bruised me and tore my dress …” – they are fine for establishing the state of mind between the husband and wife. But, without definite evidence of identity and some suspicious actions on Hewitt’s part, we’d never be able to charge him with murder.

  ‘We’ve just got to keep scraping around until we accumulate enough circumstantial evidence to satisfy the DPP that a charge of murder might be made to stick. I’m inclined to think that those letters ring true. It’s not really the sort of thing she’d concoct as a preliminary to bringing a divorce action.’

  Barton looked across at the retired inspector, who had sat silent and attentive until now.

  ‘Inspector Matthews, can you throw any light on the business from what you remember?’

  ‘I was a sergeant at Aberystwyth in those days, sir,’ he answered in a deep firm voice. ‘Not the station sergeant, but we all knew most of what went on from day to day. This Hewitt business was quite a fuss for a time, but it soon died down after the papers lost interest. That Sunday paper was the cause of a lot of interest. It ran an article on the case a few weeks after it was reported – sensational type of thing, nothing new in it at all.’

  ‘Do you remember seeing the sister?’

  ‘Oh, yes, she was in and out of the station like a hopping jinny for a few days. She stayed here for a bit, making a damn nuisance of herself, asking why we weren’t doing anything to find Mavis.’

  ‘What was being done, anyway?’

  ‘The inspector there went out to see Roland Hewitt several times, as the sister was pestering him. Hewitt just kept telling him that he knew nothing at all about his wife’s disappearance, and that he cared even less. He came into the station one day for the inspector to take down a statement from him. But, as far as I heard, his story was always the same. His wife, he said, used to go off with other men and that, as far as he knew, that’s where she was then.’

  ‘He seemed quite indifferent, then, to the fact that she had left him?’ asked Pacey.

  ‘I only had it second-hand, of course, but that was the impression I had. And he kept saying that she hadn’t vanished; for all he knew, she might come back the next day. This was all within a couple of weeks of the sister coming there to play the devil about it, you see. I had the feeling that Hewitt had had just about enough of his wife and wasn’t fussy about having her found at all. He never made any move to do anything, or even to ask us how we were getting on with our investigations.’

  The colonel looked at Pacey and raised his eyebrows significantly.

  ‘Had you ever seen Mavis Hewitt yourself?’ Pacey asked hopefully.

  ‘No. Tremabon was way off my track, Superintendent.’

  ‘What was done by your inspector, to look for the woman?’ inquired the colonel.

  The old police officer frowned in an effort to remember. ‘The usual. We notified all local stations. Then, of course, we circulated her description to the other Welsh police forces and, I think, to Liverpool and the Metropolitan boys.’

  The colonel turned back to Pacey.

  ‘What about this Sunday newspaper – have we traced that?’

  The burly detective produced a photostat from his own pile of documents. ‘Here it is – dated a month after the one in the Aberystwyth paper – nothing at all in it. Just an over-embroidered rehash of the first story, with the same picture of Mavis and a photo of Bryn Glas Farm.’

  ‘That was the place where they lived at the time, was it?’ Meadows threw in this question as he craned his neck to look at the picture.

  ‘Yes, it’s almost opposite the place where he has a cottage now, only on the other side of the road.’

  ‘I had a look at it yesterday,’ said Morris. ‘It’s way off the main road up towards the cliffs. The track to it carries on up past it until it peters out in the moorland … not a hedge or house between it and the place where the bones were found.’

  There was a moment’s silence while this was digested.

  ‘Again, that means nothing in itself,’ the colonel said briskly, ‘I’ll admit there are a lot of suggestive circumstances here – but nothing yet that would induce the Director of Public Prosecutions to touch it with a bargepole. Now, Rees, what have you got to tell us about your visit to Liverpool, apart from these letters?’

  The lanky inspector gave an account of his meeting with Jessie Randall. ‘She definitely identified the ring and all the jewellery as belonging to Mavis. But, personally, sir, I wouldn’t give tuppence for her evidence. She was as biased as she possibly could be. All she wants is old Hewitt’s blood. She’d perjure herself from here to hell and back to see him charged with Mavis’s murder. I don’t think we should put much reliance on anything she says.’

  ‘I quite agree,’ supported Pacey. ‘The only useful things she did were to hand over these letters and the photograph.’

  ‘What are we going to do with that photo, Pacey?’ said Barton. ‘You said something about asking Professor Powell about it.’

  The forensic pathologist wriggled himself up in his chair. ‘Yes, I’ve had a chat with our photographer here, and he’s going to knock up a superimposition for us. The picture is far better than that one from the newspaper. Again, it’s nothing like conclusive. But it may at least disprove the identity – it can never actually prove it, I’m afraid.’

  The colonel looked puzzled. ‘I’m not quite with you here, Professor. What exactly are you going to do?’

  ‘The constable here is going to make a full-plate enlargement of the photo of Mavis. Then he’ll print a photo of the skull we found on transparent film, enlarging it to exactly the right degree, to correspond with the picture of the face. Then we put the skull film on top of the photo and staple it in place, with as exact an alignment as we can manage. Then we will be able to see how well various features, like nose, eyes and chin, will correspond.’

  ‘Sounds an excellent idea to me,’ enthused the colonel.

  The photographer was less optimistic.

  ‘It’s difficult to get exactly the same angle on the skull as the photo was taken. This one’s not so bad – it’s almost dead full-face. But, still, it’s a rough-and-ready business.’

  Powell confirmed this, emphasizing the faults.

  ‘Yes, this is only a rough guide. It can give the main proportions of the features – distance between the eyes, width of the cheekbones and things like that. But, of course, we can never know exactly how much must be allowed for the soft tissues on the face. If they are utterly unlike, we can say that it’s unlikely to be Mavis. If they are alike, well, then, it could be her – but no more than that.’

  ‘I seem to remember this being done in a famous murder case before the war,’ observed the retired inspector.

  ‘Yes, the Ruxton case,’ said Powell. ‘A doctor threw the dismembered pieces of his wife and maid over a bridge. The superimposition method was helpful there. And, ever since, pathologists have been trying to repeat the success, without much being achieved, I’m afraid.’

  The conference seemed suddenly to have run dry of inspiration, and th
e colonel canvassed for more ideas.

  ‘Anything else, anyone? What about you, Superintendent?’

  ‘Nothing that matters. We’ve been through the village, and there’s nothing useful there. Plenty of gossip, but no hard facts. The old inhabitants who remember Mavis are unanimous in calling her a “fast baggage” but they still think that Hewitt did her in. Some say that she had it coming to her, carrying on with Ceri Lloyd as she did, and having dirty weekends up in Liverpool!’

  Pacey’s manner had a slightly flippant air about it and his chief’s eyebrows came down in a frown.

  ‘What about this man Lloyd? Don’t think he’s involved, do you?’

  ‘Shouldn’t think so for a minute. Anyway, we are going to have a hell of a job to nail this on to old Hewitt with the amount of evidence we’ve scraped together so far, let alone try to incriminate Lloyd – we’ve got nothing at all against him.’

  The colonel was undecided as to whether or not Pacey was gently needling him. He switched his questions to Rees.

  ‘Inspector, you’ve been looking into the “missing persons” angle, I believe. Any other possibilities there?’

  ‘No, sir, not much joy. There was no central information about missing persons then. But I’ve checked all our county records, and there was no one else besides Mavis Hewitt reported missing between nineteen twenty-eight – the latest date on the coins – and nineteen thirty-two, who could possibly fit the range of age, or size, of our skeleton.’

  ‘The body could have been brought from some other county,’ objected the colonel.

  Pacey grunted and shook his head. ‘I doubt it, sir. And, even if it was, there must have been some close tie-up with the locality. Either the murderer, or the deceased, must have been from the area. Otherwise they wouldn’t have known about the ideal place for hiding the body – that lead mine, facing out to sea, with a convenient ledge to park the corpse, was no accidental find. And, as the body got there around the late twenties or early thirties, my simple mind can’t help stringing all the facts together into the conclusion that Roland Hewitt is the chap we want. Convincing a jury is another matter, of course.’