The Thread of Evidence (25 page)

‘We tested that for stains yesterday – there were none. How did you manage that?' asked Pacey.

‘So you did suspect me? Why?'

Pacey added a moment or two to his valuable delaying tactics by explaining this, then asked about the blood again.

‘There was almost no bleeding by the time I moved her. I covered the wound in the arm with an adhesive surgical dressing, then – wrapped an old plastic mackintosh around it under the sheet. I brought them both back and dumped them in the mortuary, like the other stuff.'

David Ellis-Morgan sounded almost too anxious to talk, thought Pacey. The words were tumbling out of his mouth as he stood alone in the red telephone box in Tremabon. He knew as well as Pacey that the time he had left before the patrol car reached him could be measured in minutes. He talked in a rush now, the mental purging flowing like a breached dam – a dam that had held firm against communication with even a single person for the last seven years.

‘I drove back to Tremabon that night, took the car past Bryn Glas Farm and up the track to the cliff. I put the lights out for the last bit across the moor and got within a few hundred yards of the cave before the going got too bad for the car. Then I carried the bundle to the cave – and left it on the ground, well inside. I had to chance it being found before the next morning, when I went back there. I drove the car back to the road and then deliberately ran into a gatepost to buckle the front wing.'

Pacey was puzzled at this, curiosity getting the better of his constant study of his watch.

‘I was shaken and it was late. I had to have some excuse for turning up at home after midnight, shaking like a leaf. I said I'd had a slight accident – that covered up well enough.'

‘Did you tell Gerald anything about all this?'

‘No! He knows nothing – nothing at all.' The voice cracked sharply and emphatically over the wire. ‘He didn't come up to Cardiff to stay again – I made excuses and, as soon as I could, I left the job and came back home.'

Pacey began stalling. ‘You said that you left the body on the floor of the cave. How did it get up on the ledge?'

‘I went for a walk from the house next day. There was nothing unusual in that; I often did when I was home for a weekend. I went straight up to the mine, put the body up on the ledge – I knew it was there from explorations as a kid. Then I bricked it in with stones and went home. If it wasn't for that fall of roof, it would be there still.'

It was nine minutes since Rees had notified the patrol car. Pacey searched for something intelligent to say to keep Ellis-Morgan talking.

‘Look, you'd better talk to your brother – hang on, I'll get him from the other room.' He motioned to Rees to do what he had said and the inspector sprinted away.

‘There may not be time for that, Mr Pacey. And I don't think I want to talk to him – what could I say?'

‘You could say you're sorry for rushing off and leaving him here to carry the can for you, for a. start,' Pacey said, almost roughly. ‘And then you could tell him that you're coming back here right away to get things sorted out. You silly ass, if you'd have gone to the police at the time, you would have walked away with a plea of manslaughter, with a defence of provocation like that. And you've a very good chance of doing it yet, if you come back here and act sensibly.'

There was a sad, humourless laugh from the other end, a laugh with more than a hint of hysteria in it.

‘Keeping me talking, Mr Pacey? Unfortunately, I'm in a phone box at the bottom of the lane leading up to Bryn Glas and the cliff, with a view of almost a mile of the main road in both directions. Your patrol car hasn't appeared, not yet. When I hang up, you can assume that it has!'

‘What are you going to do, man? Don't be a damn fool! Come on in. Wait for the car and come back with the officers. I tell you, you'll get away with manslaughter in a case like this.'

‘And what do I do when I come out of prison in five years' time, become a bricklayer? No thank you, Superintendent.'

‘You can't get away. Don't be idiotic.'

Pacey knew how Ellis-Morgan was going to get away, but he was unable to admit it, either to himself or to the doctor.

‘Sorry, I know what I'm doing. I've been on the verge of it more than once, in the first year or two – and then I thought I might have gotten away with it.'

Twelve minutes. The door opened and Rees hurriedly shepherded a worried and mystified Gerald into the room.

‘Here, come and talk to your brother, for God's sake! Make him see sense – he's threatening to kill himself. He was the one responsible for the death of the woman in the cave – Julie Gordon.'

Gerald almost fell down with shock. He groped for the telephone which Pacey held out for him and sank onto the chair as the detective made way for him.

He looked up at Pacey for a moment, his face almost green, then put the receiver to his ear.

‘Dave – Dave, this is Gerry. Dave, Dave! Hello, David!'

He rattled the button and almost shouted David*s name a few times, then looked fearfully up at the superintendent.

‘He's hung up – Dave's hung up!' he whispered.

Chapter Nineteen

A double inquest was held in the church hall at Tremabon on the following Monday.

The small building was packed with newspaper reporters and morbid spectators from far and wide. If the case had made very few headlines while it was being investigated, it was certainly making up for lost time now that it was all over …

The first case was that of Julie Gordon. The main evidence came from Pacey, who had been the only witness to the oral confession of Doctor David Ellis-Morgan. Professor Powell, a senior scientific officer from the Swansea laboratory and Edna Collins gave other confirmatory facts and the coroner's very imperative directions to his jury ensured that a verdict of murder by David Ellis-Morgan was brought in with a minimum of the dilly-dallying so beloved of coroner's juries …

The disposal of the woman was followed by the inquiry into the death of the doctor himself.

Two county mobile policemen described how, in answer to an urgent radio call from Detective-Superintendent Pacey, they went at high speed from Llanmaes to Tremabon, with orders to take into custody the occupant of a telephone box at the junction of the main road with the lane leading up to Bryn Glas farm and the open moorland beyond.

As Pacey, sitting in the front of the court, heard the dry official description from the patrol sergeant, his mind translated it into the real scene, so abruptly cut off from his room in Aberystwyth by the deadening of a telephone line.

As the black police car appeared almost a mile away, racing along at something over seventy miles an hour, David must have slammed the telephone down and run out to his waiting car. The police saw nothing of the Austin-Healey until it broke from the cover of the hedges of the lane and went bumping out onto the moor. They lost precious seconds by stopping at the telephone box. It was only then, with their own motor cut, that they heard the roaring acceleration of the doctor's powerful engine going up the lane. Until then, they had no idea that he was still in the vicinity. Racing after him in their heavier and slower saloon, they were a good quarter of a mile behind when they, too, broke from the hedges of the lane onto the open rough ground.

The two cars, bouncing and jerking, headed straight up the long slope that formed the back of the cliffs. Though the two mobile officers did not know it at the time, the Austin-Healey was retracing the route the doctor had taken seven years before in his Ford estate car. But on that occasion, he had stopped short of the head of the little valley down from the crest of the cliff past the old lead mine. This time, the red sports car entered the neck of the gully at thirty miles an hour and plunged, rocking and swaying, down the seaward side. By the time it reached the place where the grass ended and the scree slopes began, it was doing almost sixty. The gravelly scree ended in a sheer two hundred-foot wall and the car shot out in a long parabola into the air above the breakers below. Pacey saw in his mind's eye, the car slowly turning over and over as it fell, far out beyond the rocks at the foot of the cliff.

The police car, unfamiliar with the sudden change from moorland to cliff, rocked and skidded dangerously to a stop just in time to avoid following the Austin-Healey down the valley. The policemen ran down the track of crushed ferns and muddy wheel tracks to the edge of the precipice.

Far below, they could see nothing at first. Even the great splash of a few moments before had been swallowed by the restless waves. But, soon, a rainbow patch of motor oil appeared and two foam rubber seat cushions floated free from the drowned car.

The body, firmly held by a safety belt, was recovered at low tide, twisted and broken like the car itself.

Little other evidence was needed and the jury again speedily returned their verdict, one of ‘suicide while the balance of his mind was disturbed,' the last part having more of a traditional than a logical significance. After the formalities were over, and the reporters had trooped off to their telephones and typewriters, the chief constable, Pacey and the professor went into the little side room used by the coroner for a last few words.

‘A sensible jury, for once – didn't try to make a meal out of it,' observed the coroner.

‘I suppose the papers are bound to splash it for a day or two – they always do when it's a doctor or a clergyman involved,' said Colonel Barton.

‘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