The Thread of Evidence Page 17

  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.’

  The sergeant managed to blind the other with a bit of science and got his permission to borrow the Ford until the next day. He had a driver in the police car, who took it back to Cardigan while he drove the Ford himself. He parked it in the headquarters yard and arranged for the forensic experts to come up early next morning to go over it for bloodstains.

  He was back in Pacey’s office in time to be grabbed by the superintendent and hustled back out through the door.

  ‘We’re going to Cardiff, me boy. Willie, hold the fort and carry on with all that “bumf” – I’ll be back later on today, with a bit of luck,’ he called over his shoulder as he poked the protesting Mostyn in front of him, his usual aloof manner punctured by indignation.

  ‘I’ve only just this minute got back with that car of the doctor’s. I haven’t even had any lunch yet. Where have I got to go now?’

  ‘We can have a bite to eat on the way. I’ll tell you all about it then.’

  Over a pint and a cheese roll in a roadside public house, Pacey briefly explained the set-up to his sergeant.

  ‘I told you before that we’re thinking that this Julie Gordon woman might be our skeleton – and I expect you’ve gathered that we’ve got David Ellis-Morgan even more tentatively lined up as a suspect.’

  Mostyn nodded. ‘Inspector Rees gave me the general idea.’

  ‘Well, in that case, you’ll probably know that the doctor spent a few years as a hospital pathologist in Cardiff – where the missing Julie came from. Well, the Cardiff CID have been hot on the trail for us since I asked them for help. They’ve got a spiv-type DI there who looks like a barrow boy, but he’s hot stuff on getting things done. He’s dug up a pal of the missing girl – found that she has had a blood group done at some time. And, now, he’s tracked down the flat where Ellis-Morgan lived when he was working there.’

  ‘What help is that to us?’

  ‘The resident pathologist, so this DI told me on the phone just now, used to live in a flat in a house near the hospital. The place hasn’t been used for living in for a few years now, so this Cardiff rozzer – Austin, his name is – went snooping around there yesterday. I don’t know what yarn he spun to the hospital authorities, but he got in and had a good look around. In the old bathroom, he found some stains on the floorboards under a join in the lino. He took a scraping to the Cardiff forensic lab – and it turned out to be good honest blood!’

  Mostyn had his doubting Thomas expression fixed well into position. ‘That doesn’t mean much – perhaps someone had been cutting their toenails too close after a bath.’

  ‘Maybe. But it’s worth a trip to see for ourselves.’

  ‘Was it human blood?’

  ‘We don’t know that either, yet. But I can’t see what other sort it’s likely to be in a bathroom – as the days of illegal pig-slaughtering are over. The Swansea lab is going to handle that part of it, as the only possible connection is with our case. Meadows is going to meet us at this flat.’

  It turned out to be the whole attic floor of four rooms in an old house immediately opposite the hospital. The ground floor was still used as a fracture clinic; the first floor was a dumping ground for discarded hospital equipment; and the flat itself was half full of old record cards and patients’ case notes.

  The ever-keen Inspector Austin, wearing a too-blue suit and a hand-painted tie was waiting with Meadows in the bathroom. A police photographer, with a tripod and a resigned expression, was leaning against the passage wall outside.

  ‘I’ve pulled the lino right up,’ said Austin. ‘You can see the stains. I’ve had them photographed already.’

  Pacey and Mostyn looked into the small room and stared at the floor.

  A double line of tin-tacks showed where the linoleum had been fixed across the centre of the room. Between the lines, level with the centre of the bath, was a brown stain. It stretched between the tacks for six inches, running along the middle of a board. Then it spread out into a dappled circle, the edges of which vanished down the cracks between the adjoining planks.

  ‘That’s where I took a splinter out with a knife,’ said Austin, pointing at a fresh scar in the wood. ‘Real one hundred per cent blood!’

  Meadows dropped to his knees and looked closely at the stain.

  ‘Quite old, that’s for sure. I’d better prise up the whole plank. There’s a join in it halfway, thank the Lord!’ He produced a long, flat chisel and with a couple of strong wrenches and a squeal of tortured nails, had the six foot board out in a moment.

  ‘What are the hospital people going to say about this?’ asked Pacey, as he watched Meadows slip a large plastic bag over each end of the plank.

  ‘They can say what they bloody well like. I’ll square the secretary with some yarn for the time being,’ said the local detective.

  Pacey bent down and looked into the dusty hole left by the removal of the floorboard.

  ‘No stains or anything else in here. What
else can you do for us, Meadows?’

  The liaison officer looked carefully around the room. ‘Inspector Austin says he’s looked at all the other rooms. At least as well as he could with all these bundles of paper lying around. If there’s nothing there, the only other hope is that bath.’

  Pacey looked at the grimy enamel doubtfully.

  ‘You’d never get anything from the sides of that, surely? Even if it did have blood in it, it would have been washed and wiped a hundred times since then.’

  ‘The bath itself, yes … but I’m wondering about the waste pipe and the trap underneath. It doesn’t look as if it’s been removed since nineteen fifty-five.’

  Pacey turned to Austin.

  ‘Do you know anything about the history of this place?’

  ‘Ellis-Morgan lived here from fifty-three to fifty-six. Then his successor, a Dr Jones, came. He was only here for about eight months before they closed the flat up. The house is supposed to be demolished to make way for an extension to the hospital. They just use it as a store for the time being.’

  Pacey thought for a moment, then spoke to Meadows.

  ‘Will your lab be able to give me any idea how old these stains are?’

  ‘No, not a hope. We can tell you if they’re human and probably let you know the main blood groups, that’s all.’

  The hefty policeman made up his mind and slapped the side of the bath.

  ‘OK, let’s have the waste pipe off, then. God knows what the hospital will think. I hope you can fix them, Austin. If any whisper of this gets to the Press, my chief constable will give me the Death by a Thousand Cuts!’

  ‘How are we going to get it off?’ demanded Meadows, ‘Can we get a fitter from the hospital?’

  Pacey looked as if his trousers had suddenly been filled with soldier ants. ‘Flames, no! Let’s keep this to ourselves as much as we can.’

  With the aid of the tool kit from a police car, they managed to prise off the bath panel and unscrew the short U-bend from the bath outlet – which Meadows reverently put into one of his endless supply of polythene bags.

  Pacey and Mostyn left Inspector Austin to explain to the hospital the loss of floorboard and waste pipe, and made their way back to West Wales, while Meadows took his ‘trophies of the chase,’ as he called them.

  Pacey, Rees and their sergeant spent the next morning at Tremabon, in a fruitless round of inquiries amongst the villagers.

  Pacey had little hope of learning anything new; but he thought that he had better go through the motions of asking about any strange young woman who had been noticed in the village within the last few years.

  ‘A flaming waste of time!’ he growled on the way back. ‘This is a holiday place – dozens of strange folks come here every summer. And, if I know anything about it, our girl came here for the first time when she was stone dead! And probably in the middle of the night, as well.’

  That afternoon, Pacey moped about his office, unusually jumpy and short-tempered. Willie Rees diagnosed the signs as those of indecision. He was right. The senior man was uncertain whether to go ahead with his hunch and bring the girl up to identify Ellis-Morgan. The alternatives were either to do nothing at all – but to carry on with the endless job of sifting through more lists of missing persons – or to go to the chief constable and dump the whole lot in his lap, with a recommendation to call in the Yard.

  A telephone call from Swansea eventually helped him to make up his mind. It was Meadows, with a report on the bloodstains.

  ‘We’ve tested the stuff on the bathroom floorboard,’ he said. ‘It’s human all right; no doubt about it. The precipitin tests are good enough to use as pictures in a textbook!’

  Although this was what Pacey had expected – what else, he thought, but a human would ever be in a bathroom? – the definite evidence prodded him to take a chance on making a fool of himself.

  ‘OK? I’ll risk it. I’ll get that girl up tomorrow. Anything else to tell me?’

  Meadows’ voice came tinnily over the line. ‘The group of the blood was A. But, as you’ve no idea what group your girl was, it doesn’t help much.’

  ‘No, blast it! If only we had found a blood donor card, or something like that – but that only happens in books, I suppose. What about that bit of pipe?’

  Meadows chuckled at the other end. ‘I was waiting for you to ask that? Yes, we got a good, strong, positive benzidine test out of the whole length of the pipe – so it is quite probable that a lot of blood passed down it at some time.’

  Pacey sat up and his voice showed that his interest was aroused. ‘That’s worth hearing. Tell me more!’

  ‘Not much more to say,’ Meadows answered cautiously, ‘We can’t even be definite that the reaction is due to blood, as a few other things also give a positive. The confirmation that this is human blood is out of the question, of course.’

  ‘And you can’t even say if this blood in the pipe is Group A, like that on the floor?’

  ‘No, not a hope. You see, this benzidine test will pick up one part in three million, it’s as sensitive as that. So even the fact that we had a strong positive doesn’t mean that there was enough blood left to do fancy tests like grouping and human precipitin reactions.’

  Pacey was a little crestfallen but was impressed sufficiently by the results to have made up his mind about his future actions. ‘Anything come out of the examinations of that Ford estate wagon?’ he went on.

  ‘No, sorry. The boys almost tore it apart – had the floor out from the back and tested every square inch. But there wasn’t a thing anywhere.’

  Rees came in as Pacey was replacing the telephone on its rest. ‘That was Meadows, Willie – he rang to say that the pipe from the bath was positive for blood and that the stains on the floor were human – but there was nothing in the Ford.’

  Rees hovered around expectantly. ‘So what are we going to do now?’

  ‘I’m taking a chance on it, Willie, and getting that blonde tart up here tomorrow. Let’s hope that our Doctor Jones didn’t really cut his throat shaving in that bathroom. And, if he did, that he wasn’t Group A!’

  Chapter Seventeen

  On the following afternoon they stood waiting anxiously in a first floor room in the police station at Aberystwyth.

  ‘This seems a very weak excuse to get him to come up from Tremabon,’ objected Willie Rees.

  ‘Only way I could do it,’ answered Pacey, going to the window and looking out anxiously.

  The problem had been to get David Ellis-Morgan to the station without raising any embarrassing questions in the quite likely event of Pacey’s hunch fizzling out. Eventually, the superintendent had hit on the idea of asking him to sign a completely unnecessary statement to the effect that he was present and helped at the examination of the bones as they were removed from the mine. As Gerald and his father were also involved, Pacey had been obliged to extend the farce to them as well. He had called in at Carmel House that morning, after making sure that the sons were out, collected the father’s signature and arranged for the two younger doctors to call in at the police station in the afternoon, having already fixed up for Edna Collins to be there.

  ‘He should have been here by now – I said half past two.’ muttered Pacey, looking for the twentieth time at his watch.

  Willie Rees went to the window and looked down into the station yard.

  ‘Here he is now. At least, here’s a red Austin-Healey. That’s sure to be his!’

  ‘Aye, that’ll be David – his brother has got a green Rover, as far as I remember.’ Pacey hurried to the door. ‘I’ll see if that girl is lined up for her job.’

  He looked out into the corridor. Sitting on a chair outside the room next to theirs was the hostess from Cardiff. She had a uniformed policewoman sitting alongside her for effect and held a woman’s magazine ready to camouflage her face. Pacey was glad to see that she was dressed less conspicuously than the last time he saw her.

  ‘That’s fine, Miss Collins. Just try
to look as if you weren’t there! All I want you to do is to have a crafty look at the man as I bring him along to that room, and again when he leaves. We’ll only be a couple of minutes. Listen to his voice as well, if you can.’

  He went down the stairs to the charge room where he found David Ellis-Morgan inquiring for him.

  ‘Sorry to drag you up here just for this, Doctor, but we’re getting all the documents together in this case and we wanted yours and your brother’s statements for continuity. It won’t take a minute.’

  David seemed to be quite incurious. He followed the detective up the stairs and along the corridor where the two women sat. As they passed Edna Collins, Pacey carefully engineered things so that she would have a chance to hear the doctor speak.

  ‘Will your brother be coming along as well?’

  ‘Yes, he said he would. He’s got a call on the outskirts of the town, so it’ll be quite easy for him to pop in.’

  Pacey opened the office door and they went in. Pacey read over the simple statement to him, and David signed it, the whole process taking only a couple of minutes.

  Again, on the way out, Pacey started a conversation in the corridor.

  ‘This sort of thing should be right up your street, sir. I heard that you were a pathologist at one time.’

  ‘Yes, but all hospital work; none of this blood-and- thunder forensic stuff. We “straight” pathologists leave all that to the more cranky members of the profession.’

  They passed down the stairs and Pacey saw him off on the steps of the police station.

  ‘Mind if I leave my car in your yard for a couple of minutes?’ asked David. ‘I want to nip across the road and buy some collars and things.’

  He strode off down the street, and Pacey almost ran back up the stairs to hear what Edna Collins had to say.

  Willie had taken her into the office by the time he got up there.

  ‘Well, what do you think?’ he asked, breathing heavily after dashing up the two flights.