The Thread of Evidence (7 page)

‘Yes, all the bits of body, anyway. The other stuff is Inspector Meadows' pigeon.'

Pacey turned to the man from the Home Office laboratory, an oldish inspector with slicked-back white hair. His function was to act as the link between the scene of crimes and the actual scientific work. ‘I'd better get my story word-perfect for the chief,' Pacey said wryly. ‘Otherwise, he'll have me doing fatigues as if he was still running his damn battalion. Now, Meadows, what have we got there altogether?'

The liaison officer went through his list and checked it against the collection of plastic bags, cellophane envelopes and glass jars, all of which were neatly labelled.

‘Clasp of an old-fashioned purse, no fabric left on it. Five coins – a florin, shilling and three pennies – all dated from nineteen twelve to nineteen twenty-seven. A narrow, plain gold wedding ring, with hallmarks.'

Meadows paused while he peered through some of the bags to see what was inside.

‘Oh, yes, this is hair – in a devil of a mess, mixed up with mud and slime. But it looks brownish-red in colour.'

‘I'd like to have a look at a bit of that, if I can,' asked the pathologist.

Meadows handed him a small polythene packet.

‘You can have this, sir. I divided the hair into three lots.'

‘What else have you got?' persevered the superintendent, being intent upon finishing his aide-mémoire.

‘This big bag has got parts of the skirt – looks like a skirt to me – linen, I would say. This one is the remains of a blouse. There are a couple of pearl buttons on it and a few lines of embroidered stitching.'

Pacey scratched away in his notebook.

‘A couple of pieces of shoe in here,' went on Meadows. ‘Pointed toe and a strap over the instep. No soles left, but they'd do all right for the styles of the Roaring Twenties, from what I remember of them.'

Leighton Powell reached out for the bag and inspected the pathetic remnants of shoe.

‘Looks exactly like the blasted things my teenage daughter wears now – “winkle-pickers” they call 'em, don't they?'

‘What's in those little bags there?' demanded Pacey. ‘I've lost track of where half the stuff was put.'

‘This one is a broken necklace; gilt-on-brass chain, by the looks of it. This one is a hair-clip, with another bit of hair still stuck in it – a definite reddish colour this time.'

‘Anything else?'

‘Um, just these. Three big wooden beads, pretty rotten, and half a dozen glass ones.'

‘And that's the lot?''

‘Yes – unless the boys up on the cliff have found any more by sieving the last of the muck on the floor.'

Pacey looked at his watch.

‘Morris should be down soon. He said they would finish by half two, or three. Oh, I forgot one thing, Professor. What about the teeth? I seem to remember that they have been important in many identification problems in the past.'

Powell looked ruefully at the detective.

‘They certainly are important – but this girl's are a wash-out. Though if you ever get a possible candidate for this body, even the negative evidence might help.'

‘Why is it such a dead loss here?'

‘All the teeth that are left in the jaws are perfectly healthy – no fillings or extractions – so that it's unlikely that any dental records exist anywhere to give a clue as to the owner.'

‘You said “the teeth that are left”. Where are the others?'

The doctor shrugged.

‘God only knows – they're missing from the sockets. They tend to come loose after death and fall out. Perhaps your men will find a few in their sieves, if we're lucky – not that it will help much, unless there's some dental work done on them.'

Pacey looked at his watch again.

‘I'd better ring the Old Man, I suppose. I expect Miss Ellis-Morgan would let me use her phone to save me from going all the way over to the police house.'

The burly policeman got up and went to the door. He turned and made a last appeal to the pathologist and laboratory man.

‘So there's no more you can tell me? This is the skeleton of a woman in her middle, or late, twenties. No cause of death apparent, but one arm partly sawn through. The clothing, ornaments and coins suggest that she died in the nineteen twenties or early thirties. Is that right?'

There was a murmur of assent and Pacey left the surgery to telephone the chief constable – who insisted upon being informed personally of any serious crimes in the county.

Colonel Barton seemed to be quite impressed by the results of the first few hours' investigation. Pacey was pleasantly surprised at the lack of searching questions which the ‘Old Man' usually fired at him on these occasions.

He went back to the surgery and helped Powell and Meadows to load the remains into the professor's Jaguar, which stood outside the front door of Carmel House. The pathologist was taking Meadows back to Swansea and Pacey waited on the drive to see them leave.

‘I'll let you know as soon as I get any more gen,' Powell called through the window as he let in the clutch. ‘Probably be tomorrow afternoon.'

The car moved off, the boot stuffed with the last mortal remains of the unknown young woman.

Morris had not yet come down from the cliff with his digging team and Pacey decided to go up and meet him. He looked up from the garden at the steep cliff path opposite and wished that he were a few stone lighter.

With a sigh, he set off; but, as he reached the gate, a blue-uniformed figure came down the lane from the village, perched on a tall bicycle.

PC Griffith squeaked to a halt in front of the detective, hopped off and saluted.

‘Excuse me, Super, I hope I'm not speaking out of turn. But, living in the village, like, I thought I'd better let you know.'

Pacey stared at him. He had never met Griffith before that day, but had sized him up as a sensible, reliable man.

‘That's all right. What's on your mind?'

Wynne looked a little embarrassed.

‘Well, it's only village gossip, see, but the place is buzzing with it today. I should have known earlier, but I was up on the cliff all night.'

Pacey nodded his understanding and waited for the police constable to come to the point. He knew only too well that no outside detective could know the feeling of the district as well as the bobby on the spot.

‘It's the old people, sir. They're putting the poison about. First I've ever heard of it, see – I was in my cradle when this happened.'

Griffith leant over his handlebars towards the superintendent and spoke earnestly for five minutes.

There was some discussion. Then he jumped back on to his ponderous machine and rode back towards the village, leaving a very thoughtful detective staring after him.

Chapter Five

In spite of Peter Adams being involved right at the outset of the affair, it was his uncle who heard the first accusing whispers from the village.

Peter had stayed to lunch at Carmel House. If any of the doctors had picked up any scandal on their morning rounds, they kept it to themselves.

By the time he got back to the cottage at teatime, he found that his uncle had had two callers, both of whom were assuming that Roland already knew of the gossip.

The first was the postman, who went up with the late delivery. He was too young to have remembered the thirty-year-old scandal, but he had made up for it on his early round that morning.

The second caller was the dairyman from Aberystwyth, who came twice a week to collect eggs from Roland's poultry. He had picked up the gist of the story from his other calls, like the postman. Both of them were quite ready to talk about it with the old man, but they found him brusque and short-tempered, quite unlike his usual self. Both the men were also openly incredulous about the whole business; and the dairyman, in particular, thought it a big joke. Roland refused to be drawn into saying anything more than a curt ‘damn nonsense', so the men had to leave without gleaning any more juicy bits to pass on to their next calls.

When Peter got back, he found his uncle sitting by the kitchen fire, poking it with unusual ferocity. The dog was crouched in a corner of the room, head on one side, looking warily at his master. Once again, Peter sensed that something was radically wrong with his usually placid uncle.

Roland threw the poker into the fender with unnecessary violence.

‘Peter boy, have you been into the village?'

‘No. I've been down with Mary most of the day – since early this morning, anyway. Why d'you ask?'

Roland Hewitt jumped out of his chair and went to the window. He stood staring out at the paved yard and garden beyond, his back to his nephew. Peter noticed that he hadn't bothered to shave, or even put on a collar and tie.

‘So you haven't heard the talk, eh?'

His voice was harsh and his fingers trembled as he passed them through the grey stubble of his hair. He turned and began to pace up and down, until Peter stood in his path to block his agitated wandering.

‘Look here,' began Peter. ‘There's something worrying you, isn't there? Something to do with these blasted bones?'

Roland stared up at him, then seemed to crumple. His thin body drooped and went as limp as a punctured tyre.

‘Sit down there, boy, and listen.' He sank back wearily into his own big chair and stared into the embers of the fire that he had just wrecked.

‘I may as well tell you the whole story now. You'll be hearing it soon enough from other places, no doubt.'

Peter stayed silent, letting the old man feel his way.

‘I don't know how much your mother told you about my affairs. But, knowing the family, I expect they did their best to keep it quiet.'

That's true enough
, thought his nephew. When he was a child, Uncle Roland had been a name that the grown-ups used to whisper in front of the young ones.

To them, he was the black sheep who had gone to Canada. Any questions about him from the children were either ignored or evaded with such persistence that, eventually, he came to be a legend on a par with Santa Claus.

Peter's mother kept up a sporadic correspondence with Roland; but the rest of the family elders seemed to have denied his existence.

‘Your mother was the only one who ever had any time for me, bless her! She was the only one who bothered with me after I came back – apart from you, boy.'

Roland spoke in a dull monotone, staring into the ashes.

‘I shouldn't have come back. But I wanted to see the old place and have a few years here before I went.'

He slipped back into speaking Welsh and Peter followed suit.

‘What's this got to do with the gossip you're on about?' he asked, gently trying to prompt his uncle to get to the point.

‘They're saying in Tremabon that this body up on the cliff is that of my wife – your Aunt Mavis,' he said bleakly. ‘That I killed her all those years back and hid her up there.'

Peter experienced a curious sensation. He knew that he should be appalled and shocked, yet he realized that this was what he must have been expecting. He had connected the two events, the bones and his uncle's strangeness, in his subconscious mind; but only now had Roland's bald statement thrust it into the front of his thoughts.

His knowledge of his aunt was almost nil – he had been brought up to accept the fact that she had ‘run away' from Uncle Roland, but the hint was left that he was not all that blameless himself. The whole affair was one of the unmentionable subjects in the family, like sex and cancer. He and his sisters had been brainwashed from infancy not to have any interest in it.

‘But that's absurd – ridiculous!'

He heard himself speak the words and realized how banally inadequate they were.

Roland, now that he had started, plunged on with his story:

‘I was a lot older than Mavis when we married. That was another mistake, like coming back here to live. She was pretty – by Heaven she was! – but she was a bitch. A real little bitch, boy! We fought all the time, me trying to keep her respectable and her laughing in my face.'

Peter saw his uncle's bony fists clenching and opening spasmodically as his mind flew back over the years. His thin face was grey with anguish at the memories.

‘We stuck it for the best part of two years. Then things came to a head, and she went. God only knows where to. I never saw her again.'

‘Why did you quarrel so much?'

‘She was a little tart. I should have seen that long before I ever married her, I suppose.' Roland replied bitterly. ‘But I was as silly an old fool then as I am now. I was too flattered to realize it, but of course she only married me to get out of working as a parlourmaid. I was left the farm by my uncle when I was thirty. So I was a good catch for a girl in service in those days – she made herself mistress of a hundred acres freehold. But that wasn't all she was mistress of, not by a long way.'

‘Does Ceri Lloyd come into this, by any chance?' Peter asked quietly.

His uncle nodded. ‘Indeed, he does. He was the main cause of the trouble – though, to be fair, if it hadn't been him, there would have been someone else in the village. She would have found another man to amuse herself with. I found out, afterwards that they had been pretty thick before we got married. And she didn't let the wedding stop her fun. Ceri wasn't well off enough for her to want to marry him instead of me – he worked in his father's shop then, long before he had the Lamb and Flag.'

‘So the cause of the trouble between you was her carrying on with Lloyd?' concluded Peter.

‘That was one part of it – but there were other men besides him, I'm sure. She took to going home to Liverpool for weeks on end. I know she had a good time up there when she went, and she only came home when her money ran out. Then she'd be nice to me for a bit. And, like a fool, I'd fall for it.'