The Thread of Evidence Read online

  ‘There’s no manhunt involved, or prospect of a trial, now,’ added Pacey. ‘So the Press will soon lose interest.’

  ‘The sooner the better, for the sake of the family,’ commented Barton. ‘The young idiot could have saved a lot of distress if he’d acted sensibly seven years ago’

  Pacey grimaced. ‘All this from an hour’s guilty pleasure with some damn barmaid. But, even if he had owned up then, there’d have been a devil of a scandal!’

  The coroner nodded. ‘I can still hardly believe it – I’ve known old John Ellis-Morgan for years. As you say, this would have been a terrible splash, even at the time of the death. I don’t know that they’re not better off as it is at least it’s all over in one go. The other way it would have been “Local doctor sent for trial on passion killing” – headlines a foot high. It would have ruined old John and Gerald, as far as their practice went.’

  ‘Well, you can hardly say it’s done them much good as it is,’ the colonel said stubbornly. ‘What will they do now, I wonder?’

  The coroner answered this one. ‘I understand that the old man is going to give up right away – he’s only a year off retiring, anyway. Gerald says he is going to sell up the house as soon as possible and either go off to England with his father or even abroad altogether. They’ve got nothing to keep them here now, as Mary is putting her wedding forward and will be off to Cardiff to live.’

  Pacey sighed. ‘I suppose the whole affair will grow and mature into another Cardiganshire legend, like the sunken land under the bay there – Ceri Lloyd and his crew will have enough scandal to chew over in the bar for the rest of their miserable lives.’ The superintendent sounded bitter.

  There was a thoughtful silence for a moment, then the chief constable spoke almost chirpily. ‘Well, Pacey, if we’ve gained nothing else from this case, we’ve learned not to jump to conclusions and look for facts to fit to them, eh?’

  Pacey put a hand to his forehead to hide a scowl.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ he muttered. ‘We have, haven’t we!’

  Powell grinned at the detective. ‘You mean a string of beads and a couple of old pennies don’t make a seven- year-old corpse become thirty-three, eh?’

  Pacey grunted, quite unamused.

  ‘But surely,’ asked the coroner, ‘if that body had been found, say a year after death, you could have said that it couldn’t possibly be twenty or more years old – so he took a dickens of a risk, didn’t he?’

  ‘It was Hobson’s choice, I suppose,’ answered the professor. ‘He was stuck with a body. He knew, probably from talking to her, that she had no immediate family to miss her, so this Mavis Hewitt lark was a second line of defence. He hoped that no one would find the body, in his lifetime, but if they did, after a few years, they would be foxed into thinking it was, firstly, too old to be connected with him. And, secondly, was Mavis Hewitt. And he almost succeeded, too, we must give him credit for that, if “credit” is the only word we can use.’

  Pacey added his own postscript. ‘If that X-ray and bit of Terylene thread hadn’t turned up, we might have clapped old Hewitt into jail for the rest of his natural.’

  He paused.

  ‘All the same, I’d give a lot to know what really did happen to Mavis Hewitt.’

  THE END

  The Sixties Mysteries

  by

  Bernard Knight

  The Lately Deceased

  The Thread of Evidence

  Mistress Murder

  Russian Roulette

  Policeman’s Progress

  Tiger at Bay

  The Expert

  For more information about Bernard Knight

  and other Accent Press titles

  please visit

  www.accentpress.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain by Robert Hale Ltd 1965

  This edition published by Accent Press 2015

  ISBN 9781682991381

  Copyright © Bernard Knight 1965, 2015

  The right of Bernard Knight to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  The story contained within this book is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers: Accent Press Ltd, Ty Cynon House, Navigation Park, Abercynon, CF45 4SN