The Thread of Evidence (15 page)

‘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 the 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.'

After this long speech, he settled back in his chair as if to indicate that his case rested and the others could take it or leave it.

‘Mmm. Put like that, I'm inclined to agree with you,' said the colonel, playing with his inkstand. ‘But are we going to get enough to charge him? Professor Powell, do you think that any further work on your part will get us nearer to proving that this was actually Mavis Hewitt?'

‘Not a lot, Colonel. Tying up loose ends may narrow down the range of her age a little. But I can never prove that it's Mavis. The teeth might have been a way of doing that. But as there's no dental work on the teeth of the skull, and we've no dental record of the real Mavis, that's a washout.

‘And does that hold for your laboratory too, Meadows?'

The liaison officer looked as doubtful as Powell.

‘I'm afraid so. All we can do is narrow down the date of death by investigating the objects found with the body. We can never get a positive identification; there was nothing distinctive enough to be recognized by anyone.'

Colonel Barton fingered his moustache thoughtfully. ‘Well, Pacey, where do you go from here?'

The superintendent noticed that the ‘we' had changed to ‘you', as the trail appeared to have petered out. He was being passed the buck, now that it was stone dead.

‘I think we're stumped as far as substantive evidence goes,' he said. ‘The scent has gone cold – thirty years cold! The only hope of getting on now – unless you think it's worth chancing our arm on this circumstantial stuff – is to get the old boy to confess. Or, at least, to work him over until he gets so harried and flustered that he drops a clanger.'

The colonel looked pained.

‘I think your choice of words is unfortunate, Mr Pacey. We have to be very careful in our methods these days. Relations with the public are not too good, as it is. This proposed Chicago-style third degree sounds most unsavoury to me.'

‘Yes, sir,' Pacey said meekly. He couldn't be bothered to argue.

The chief constable stood up to indicate that the meeting was at an end.

‘Well, thank you, gentlemen, we'll have to wait now for some more developments, either from the laboratory or from Superintendent Pacey's efforts.'

The meeting broke up and eventually, Pacey found himself back in his own bare office with Willie Rees. He flung himself into his protesting swivel chair and began stuffing coarse tobacco into a pipe.

‘Willie, the chief is a good stick, but sometimes he gets on my wick! All that guff about not interfering and then niggling about me wanting to get stuck into old Hewitt. I'd better get up there again this afternoon, I suppose. A pity, really. I quite like old Hewitt, even if he did try to saw his wife's arm off!'

‘If you're going to work him over,' Rees said dryly, ‘I'd better put the bright lights and rubber hosepipe in the back of your car!'

Chapter Eleven

Once again, Peter was out when the police called to see his uncle for the second time. Pacey and Rees spent an hour at the cottage on this occasion, the superintendent making Roland go over and over the events of the weeks before Mavis vanished, until the old chap's head was buzzing.

Persistently repeating his questions, Pacey harried Hewitt without a pause, trying to catch him out in some fact or to goad him into saying something that could be construed as incriminating.

Although, by the end of the hour, Roland had reached such a state of confusion that he hardly knew himself what he was saying, the detectives had to go away having made no real progress at all.

Pacey's only hope was that his badgering and insinuations, with half-veiled promises of new information just around the corner, would work on the old man's mind so much that their next session of questioning might be more fruitful.

‘That didn't get us very far, Willie, did it?' he said ruefully as they bumped down the track away from the cottage.

‘He's got such a simple story to stick to, hasn't he?' replied the inspector. ‘He says he doesn't know what happened to her. She went out one day and never came back – end of story! Nothing to trip him up on at all.'

Pacey swore under his breath. ‘But, damn it, he
must
have done it, the old fox! There can't be any other answer. They have rows and fights – no one disputes that – she vanishes, and a body uncommonly like hers turns up not a mile away from the farm! No one else could or would want to do her in. I've got a feeling that unless he cracks and spills the beans next time we see him, we've had it. The DPP won't indict him on the evidence we've got so far, even though it is good solid circumstantial stuff.'

The two disappointed policemen drove away, missing Peter's car at the entrance to the lane by only a couple of minutes.

He got back to the cottage to find his uncle in a desperate state of agitation, marching up and down the kitchen floor, mumbling to himself.

As soon as his nephew appeared, he rushed towards him, hands outstretched. ‘They've been here again, boy – the police!' he almost babbled. ‘Hours and hours, they've been at me – questions, questions, questions – I've had enough of it! As good as told me they know I killed her, they did.'

Peter tried to calm him down, but Roland had worked himself into a state of panic.

‘They'll be coming for me any time now, boy,' he said desperately, his watery eyes rolling behind his glasses. ‘“New evidence”, they said they were waiting for – the fat one told me that. They'll arrest me as soon as they've got it, you wait and see, boy.'

‘Look, I've told you before, Uncle, this is all part of the police game – to frighten you into saying something that will incriminate you. And, as you've got nothing to say, you'll be all right.'

‘I don't know, boy. I don't know! I'm frightened, that's for sure. I should never have come back here. I should have stayed in Canada.'

Roland calmed down after a few minutes gentle talking-to and a cup of the inevitable tea. Peter sat down with him in the kitchen and began to talk seriously about what should be done.

‘I think you were right yesterday, it's time we had a lawyer in on this – if only to protect you from the police overstepping the mark with their questions.'

‘But they can do what they like, boy. They as good as said they knew I was the guilty one when they were here.'

‘Don't you believe it, Uncle, I fancy that Pacey has gone too far already. They depend on people not knowing their rights. There are things called Judges' Rules that stop the police from questioning people once they expect to arrest them, and then as soon as they do arrest them, they have to caution them that they needn't say any more if they don't want to.'

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Peter saw that he had said the wrong thing. Roland became excited and slapped the table with his hand.

‘Well there, boy, you're saying yourself now that they're expecting to arrest me. They must know that this here skeleton belongs to Mavis, otherwise they wouldn't be making such a dead set for me.'

Peter tried vainly to make up the ground he had lost, but Roland became progressively more jumpy and nervous. He started meandering around the room again, rubbing his hands.

‘Perhaps I'd better go back to Canada. I've got enough money. I could go tomorrow, out of the way,' he said wildly. ‘They'll have me if I stay here, I know they will.'

His nephew began to fear for the old fellow's sanity for a moment. Roland had always been slightly eccentric, isolated and withdrawn. Peter had assumed that this was a result of living for most of his life alone and away from his home and family. Now that this crisis had burst upon him, Peter was afraid that the combination of his oddness and his age might unhinge him altogether.

‘I'll tell you what I'm going to do, Uncle,' he said firmly,

‘I'm going down to Carmel House and ask Doctor John or one of the boys to come up and see you. You need something for your nerves – or something to give you a good night's sleep at the very least.'

Roland subsided into a limp pathetic figure, slumped into his chair. ‘All right, boy, there's nothing I can do, except wait for those police to come again.'

‘And, first thing in the morning, I'm going to see that solicitor of yours in Aberystwyth and get his advice.'

Peter stayed with his uncle for an hour or so until Roland had settled back into a gloomy but calmer frame of mind. Then he drove down to the doctor's house and told Mary of the old man's distress.

‘I'll ask Daddy to go up and see him after supper. You can leave him long enough to stay with us for a meal, can't you?' she pleaded.

Peter thought that his holiday, intended to be a couple of weeks of blissful idleness with his fiancée, was turning out to be a nightmare. He was torn between leaving Roland alone and spending some time with Mary; but, salving his conscience with the thought that one of the doctors would be going up to see the old man, he agreed to stay to supper. Mary's father and both her brothers were in for the meal, which, as was to be expected, turned into a discussion about Roland's troubles.

‘I suppose Pacey is only doing his job, but he's pushing Uncle Roland a bit too hard to be legitimate, I think,' said Peter, as they were having coffee.

‘But they can never prove that it is Mavis's body, surely?' objected David, his pointed chin jutting out in indignation. ‘However much they think it is, they've a devil of a job to prove it. And, until they do, your uncle can't possibly be charged with murder, or anything else, can he?'