The Thread of Evidence (20 page)

‘You were telling me about the hair,' said Pacey, dragging the other man's attention away from the picture.

‘Ah, yes – Collins said it was jet black, but she used to have it dyed. The real colour was mousey brown.' He handed the photograph and a negative over to Pacey. ‘As you can see, she was ash blonde when this was taken.'

‘What else do we know about her?'

‘Collins said that she never remembers her going to a dentist since she came to Cardiff, but that Julie had some fillings in her teeth. She's no idea which ones, of course.'

‘What about this Collins?' asked Pacey. ‘Are her present whereabouts known at all?'

The Cardiff detective smiled smugly. ‘She's still in the same job, in the same bar. She's got a smart little flat in the centre of town. The boys on the beat say they've had their eye on her place from time to time, but nothing definite is known about what she uses it for. I've heard a squeak myself that the club owner pays the rent.'

Pacey looked slightly pained at this recital of the seamier side of life in his capital city.

‘‘Yes, that's fine. But can we get out to see her this afternoon, d'you think? I want to call in Swansea on the way back, if there's time.'

Austin's grin got broader and even more self-satisfied as he lifted his telephone and spoke into it. ‘Send her up, Jim, will you?'

He put the receiver down and kept on looking pleased with himself. ‘I arranged for her to come here and meet you. She seems keen to keep on the right side of us, so she's been waiting downstairs for you.'

A tap on the door heralded a uniformed constable, who ushered in the former room-mate of the possibly late Miss Julie Gordon.

Edna Collins was a striking pink-rinsed blonde. Although just beginning to go to seed, she was still attractive in a brassy sort of way.

The eyes of the local detective made a rapid tour of appreciation, and he fumbled with the Windsor knot of his narrow tie as he asked her to sit down. Pacey dragged a chair forward for her and sat back to study her closely from under his shaggy brows.

Over-heavy make-up, over-false lashes and a bold pair of eyes gave her the look of an upper crust barmaid to perfection. She was overdressed, the weather being hardly cold enough for the black topcoat with an enormous white fur collar. She sat down and eyed the three men with the assurance of a woman who knows exactly the impression she makes with the opposite sex.

‘It's about Julie, you said?' she began, without any preamble. Her accent was unmistakably that of a Londoner.

‘Yes, Miss Collins. These gentlemen are CID officers from West Wales who would like to ask you a few things about her disappearance. I'm sure that you'll be willing to do anything to help us clear up the mystery about your friend.'

‘Has she turned up then?' Edna sounded incredulous.

‘No, not exactly,' Pacey answered evasively. ‘We think she may have been involved in an accident. We want to see if the girl we're interested in could be Miss Gordon.'

‘Well, couldn't I just go and see her? I'd soon tell you if it was Julie or not.' The hard voice suited her appearance.

‘No, I'm afraid we haven't got her to show you,' said Pacey, somewhat ambiguously. ‘We'll have to go about it another way.'

Edna loosened her coat, revealing a prominent bosom, tightly sheathed in a bright red dress.

‘I'll do all I can for you, I'm sure.'

Her powdered skin was stretched across her high cheekbones and, for a moment, Pacey was reminded of the skull from the lonely cliff.

‘I'd like to hear all about the disappearance again. I know it was a long time ago; over seven years. But I want to know everything that you can remember.'

Edna Collins spun her story out over a few minutes; but it boiled down to no more than the summary that Austin had given them.

‘What about the days immediately before she vanished? Anything odd about them, that you can recall?'

The pink head shook in reply. ‘No, I can't say there was.'

‘What about her friends – any particular ones you know of? Would she have been likely to have gone off with some man – or even got married on the hop?'

Collins threw back her head and laughed.

Not a very attractive laugh
, Pacey thought.

‘Married?' she exclaimed. ‘God no, not Julie. She had too much fun staying single – like me!' She caught the resident inspector's eye and smiled archly at him. ‘Anyway, she'd have told me, and I'm damn sure she wouldn't have left all her clothes behind at our place.'

Pacey fixed her with his eyes. ‘She left all her things behind, you say?'

‘Yes, that's right – and she thought the world of her clothes.'

‘Didn't she take anything at all, like a weekend case?'

‘No, not a single thing. Just what she was wearing when we closed on the Friday night.'

‘It doesn't say anything on the record about you telling us that she left all her stuff behind,' Austin said accusingly.

‘Hard luck, darling!' the hostess replied easily. ‘Blame your coppers then, because I told them all right.'

Pacey went back to his earlier question. ‘Any boyfriends – particular ones?'

‘Dozens of them! Everybody was Julie's friend. I always told her she was too easygoing.'

‘Yes, but did she have any particular boyfriend around the time she disappeared?'

‘Not for more than a week at a time,' grinned the woman.

‘Which one was it
that
week?' Pacey asked doggedly.

The garish fur collar jerked as she shrugged.

‘It's hard to say – she ran so many at the same time. I remember that there was a chap in the club several nights that week who seemed to be making quite a play for Julie. I remember him because I thought that I wouldn't mind getting to know him myself,' she added reflectively.

‘Why – was he good-looking, then?' Pacey asked shortly.

‘No, not really. I don't go for the film star type myself,' said Edna, airily, looking pointedly at Austin. ‘This chap wasn't ugly, not by any means. But he had character – you know what I mean?'

‘Know who he was?' demanded the superintendent.

‘Not a clue. He was only around for those few days. I don't think he came in after that Friday. I only remember him at all because I had a passing fancy for him myself. I wondered when Julie didn't come in on the Saturday whether or not she'd gone off for the weekend with him – bit of jealousy, I guess!'

She winked at Austin, who was the most appreciative member of her audience.

‘Would you know him again if you saw him?' asked Pacey.

Edna thought for a moment, her reddened lips pursed. ‘It was a long time ago, but – yes, I reckon I might recognize him. He was in the bar quite a bit that week, so I had plenty of time to get a good look at him.'

‘How would you describe him, then?'

The brassy barmaid pondered this a few seconds. ‘Well, I don't know how to put it in words – how do you describe anyone? He wasn't good-looking, as I've said; not a bad face, a bit thin. Brown hair, I think; just ordinary. Average height. He'd be about twenty-five to thirty, I suppose.'

Pacey restrained a groan. This was the standard description of the average man. Apart from the guess at the age, the account she had just given would probably have fitted sixty per cent of the males in Great Britain.

‘Did you speak to him?'

‘Only in passing, a couple of times. Not for want of trying. But Julie was working hard on him, so she didn't give me much of a chance. I seem to remember that his voice was a bit different, the little I heard of it.'

Her pencilled brows came closer together as she made an effort to remember.

‘What do you mean – “different”?' asked Pacey.

‘He certainly wasn't a local. I can't place what he sounded like now, but I've got an idea in the back of my mind that he might have been a German.'

‘A
German
!' exclaimed Pacey, looking across at Willie in disgust.

‘Only an idea, that is. I can't really remember,' the woman said coldly. ‘I can't trot out the descriptions of all the men that come into the club. There are thousands of them in a year.'

‘How did you manage to remember this one then?' Pacey demanded suspiciously.

‘Don't suppose I would have, only he seemed to be the current heart-throb at the time Julie pushed off. I wondered whether she'd hopped it for a weekend with him, as I've already said.'

‘I still don't see why you didn't tell the police about her things left behind in the flat, and about this man,' complained the Cardiff detective.

‘I probably did, and your bobbies forgot to put it down in their little books!' Edna countered sarcastically.

Pacey broke in on the developing wrangle.

‘Thank you very much for your help, Miss Collins. There's something else you could do for us which might help a lot to clear up the mystery about your friend.'

‘What's that?' she asked suspiciously.

‘I'd like you to take a trip down to West Wales and see if you can identify the man you saw with Julie Gordon during the week before she vanished.'

The blonde's eyes widened. ‘West Wales! Where there, for Pete's sake?'

‘Aberystwyth.'

Either she never read the newspapers or her geography was very poor, for she failed to associate the place with the recently notorious Tremabon.

‘That's a devil of a long way,' she complained. ‘When d'you want to drag me all the way down there?'

‘I'm not quite sure – probably within the next few days. We'll let you know in plenty of time. And, of course, you'll get your travelling expenses and a good allowance for your time and trouble.'

The woman looked doubtful, but the novelty of the idea began to play on her sense of importance.

‘Well, if you can fix it with Henry – that's my employer – I suppose it's all right with me.'

A few more minutes settled the details and the blonde swayed her way out of the room.

Pacey stood up, ready to leave.

‘Thanks a lot for your help,' he said to Austin. ‘We may need some more of it in a day or so, but I'll have to go back home and do some more spadework first.

The smooth inspector saw them out with a promise to give them any more assistance that they needed. The Cardiganshire men walked briskly back to their waiting car and set off for home.

‘We'll stop off at Swansea on the way back, Willie. I want to ask the professor a few questions.' He gave some directions to the driver and settled back in his seat.

‘Pardon me for asking,' said Rees with heavy sarcasm. ‘But what the hell is going on? What are we rushing back to do this time?'

As they sped along the A48, Pacey relented and unloaded his hunch on to Willie Rees.

‘I told you a couple of days ago that I thought this affair reeked of medicine, so to speak. So, just for the hell of it, I set to wondering what doctor could possibly be involved.'

‘There's only the Ellis-Morgans in Tremabon,' objected Rees.

‘Yes. Three of 'em! That's enough for a start. Now, any one of them could have both the medical know-how, and the local knowledge that this case is stiff with.'

‘Sounds bloody daft to me!' grumbled his assistant.

‘Look, just string along with me, Willie,' pleaded Pacey. ‘Just think of it as a mental exercise, eh? Now, which one of the three would you put your money on?'

‘None of them,' the inspector replied promptly.

Pacey sighed. ‘All right. Well, which one would you say is the most unlikely to be involved?'

‘The old one, of course. I can't see him knocking off a young bird like this … even if it is her – which I doubt very much. I still fancy the Bristol dame.'

‘OK, so it's one of the younger Ellis-Morgans. Which one?'

‘I don't know,' said Rees, irritably. ‘The whole idea is barmy. I'd never met any of them until a couple of days ago, so how would I know which one is a homicidal maniac?'

His sarcasm was wasted on the thick skin of the superintendent.

‘I didn't know anything about them, either, until the day before yesterday, when I went to the public library.'

‘What's that got to do with it?'

‘I looked them up in the Medical Directory. The old man qualified in nineteen twenty-five and has been in Tremabon since thirty-one. Gerald qualified in London in fifty-three. He did a year there as house surgeon, then came to work with his father. David passed out in Cardiff in fifty-two and did three years pathology there after finishing his house-jobs. That means he lived in Cardiff until fifty-six. Then he packed up pathology and came home to work with his dad.'

Willie looked suspiciously at Pacey. ‘So what? Just because a bloke lived in Cardiff for a few years, that doesn't make him a flaming murderer, does it?'

‘I agree, but we've got to start somewhere. And this seems as good a place as any.'

‘And is that the only reason why you're more interested in the Cardiff girl than the Bristol one – because that doctor lived here until fifty-six?' Rees asked incredulously. He had a sudden longing for the corpse to be the girl from Bristol, merely to be able to crow over the fat man sitting alongside him.

‘That's it,' Pacey replied calmly. ‘Now that we've started, we may as well follow it to the bitter end before handing in our cards.'

‘What do you mean by that?'

‘Our dear chief constable – bless him! – is letting us work out this first bunch of missing persons. And, if nothing comes of them, he's handing the case over to the Yard.'

‘And the best of British luck to them!' growled Rees. Both of them sat thinking for a moment, each knowing what was in the other's mind. The county forces were still reluctant to give up their big cases to the Central Office; they thought, sometimes with justification, that they could handle them just as well themselves. The Yard's main advantage was in obtaining the co-operation of
all
forces when widespread inquiries were needed – as some county constabularies seemed to engage in private vendettas with each other.