‘I agree. He seemed very calm and calculating about the whole affair,’ said the detective inspector. ‘It was quite a detailed note, but the gist of it was that he didn’t want any further suspicion to fall on anyone else.’
‘I think your veiled threats about one of the family possibly facing the gallows made up his mind to end the investigation,’ commented his sergeant. Arthur nodded, sending his half-smoked cigarette spinning over the fence.
‘He also told us that he was suffering from prostate cancer, and his doctor had told him he wouldn’t last another year. The family didn’t know, as he had refused any treatment.’
‘So did he actually say that he’d killed Tom Littleman?’ asked Richard.
‘He described it in some detail!’ replied the DI. ‘He found out about the man’s sexual adventures last week, when he came across his daughter-in-law crying in the house one day. She confessed to having allowed him to seduce her, though he’d dumped her by then. She was dead scared that her husband would find out.’
‘So what did he do about it?’
‘He wrote that he wanted to keep it from the others at the farm, so he waited until he knew his son and nephew had gone off to their NFU meeting, then went down to where Littleman was putting in his overtime to finish that tractor. He was in a rage to start with, but he says that the mechanic told him to piss off and mind his own business.’
‘Not the right thing to say to a big bloke like Mostyn,’ said John Nichols with a wry smile.
‘No, especially when the silly bugger boasted that not only had he been knocking off Betsan but Rhian as well,’ growled Crippen. ‘Mostyn says in his letter that he was already in a high temper and that made him lose it altogether. He grabbed Littleman around the throat to give him a good shaking before he “punched the lights out of him”, as he described it. But the fellow immediately went limp on him and dropped to the ground, stone dead!’
‘Is that possible, doctor?’ asked the sergeant. ‘I thought they struggled for a time and went blue in the face and all that!’
Richard shook his head. ‘That’s only if the air supply is cut off first. It’s well known that in some cases a sudden pressure on the arteries at the side of the neck can stop the heart instantaneously. Squeezing the neck, even in fun, is a dangerous thing to do.’
‘So it could have been a manslaughter rather than a murder?’ suggested Crippen.
‘Sure, the defence would certainly plead that, and I’d have to agree with them about the mechanism of death. It makes it less premeditated than squeezing for five minutes with the victim’s eyes popping and the tongue sticking out!’
Crippen lit up another Player’s Navy Cut, his preferred smoke.
‘The rest of his story followed what we thought all along. When he saw the fellow lying dead, his temper evaporated, he says. He didn’t want to bring down a murder hunt on the farm – and he didn’t particularly want to go to jail or even the gallows himself. So he decided to fake a hanging and hoisted Littleman up on a length of rope. He locked up the barn and went home. He has his own entrance and even staircase to his room in the farmhouse, as it used to be divided into two cottages, so no one was ever sure of his comings and goings.’
‘This must have been a long letter,’ observed Richard. ‘I suppose he wanted to clear up everything so that there would be no question of Aubrey or Jeff getting any blame.’
‘There were quite a few pages of it, yes. He ended by telling us that he couldn’t resist going down the barn well after midnight to check on the scene. Then he saw that the bruises on the man’s neck were all too obvious under the rope and that he would have to do something different. So he hauled him down, put the rope away and laid the body under the tractor wheel, which was already jacked up. Then he hit the blocks away with a post and closed up again.’
‘If it hadn’t been for you, doc, he might have got away with it,’ said Nichols.
‘That’s flattering, sarge, but it was pretty obvious what had happened,’ said Richard deprecatingly. Even so, he felt gratified at the compliment. Pathologists rarely got thanks from their ‘patients’, not like his physician and surgeon colleagues, who were given bottles of whisky and chickens at Christmas!
Two hours later the penultimate act in the sad drama was played out, the last one to be an inquest in a few weeks’ time. At the dismal mortuary behind Brecon Hospital, Richard Pryor confirmed all that was anticipated from the circumstances.
The gunshot had not caused an exit wound on the back of the head, as the small cartridge from a four-ten had not had the power to send lead shot and gas through the thick bone of the upper spine and base of the skull and still have enough force to penetrate the back of the head.
‘Was it a contact wound, doctor?’ asked Nichols, airing his forensic knowledge gleaned from his inspector’s course.
Pryor looked closely at the front of the neck, below the chin.
‘Yes, near enough, though there’s a bit of soot and burning at one side, so there was room around the muzzle for the gases to escape sideways. But pretty tight, all the same, as there’s a partial muzzle mark on the skin.’
The coroner’s officer handed him the tape measure and Richard stretched it out from the wound down to the tip of the index fingers of each hand.
‘Thirty inches from muzzle to trigger, doc,’ quoted the constable from his notebook.
‘That’s OK, then, he could easily discharge it with these long arms.’
When Richard opened up the body, he found ample evidence of the prostate problem, with secondary growths beginning in several bones. The interior of the neck and the base of the skull had been shredded by the shotgun blast, and the skull bones at the back of head were widely fractured.
‘I’ll save a few lead shots for the lab, just in case anyone ever wants to check that they are the same as the ones that would have been in the spent cartridge in the gun,’ he said.
‘Doubt we’ll need that, doc, but as you say, just as well to do things by the book,’ agreed Crippen.
After he had sewn up the body and cleaned it as well as the basic facilities allowed, it was seven o’clock. After a decent wash in the hospital itself and a cup of tea and some sandwiches in the dining room, he was ready to set off for home in the advancing dusk.
‘Thanks for everything, doctor,’ said DI Crippen as the officers saw him off from the hospital car park. ‘We’ll see you again at the inquest, no doubt.’
As he drove the Humber across country, he felt rather sorry that tonight he could not expect to be greeted by Moira with a good meal and a warm welcome.
THIRTEEN
Monday was a routine but busy day for all those in Garth House, except for Jimmy Jenkins, who mysteriously disappeared, as he often did. Richard knew that he gardened for other people in the valley and, given the minuscule weekly pay that he received, Pryor had no complaints as long as he did what was needed here. Sian was happy playing with a new EEL colorimeter that had arrived, which, though a relatively simple instrument for measuring colours from chemical reactions, added a few more analyses to their repertoire.
Angela had come back from her weekend in a buoyant mood, which Siân and Moira put down to the shopping spree she told them about in Oxford on Saturday. Wartime austerity was rapidly fading, though it was only a couple of years since the end of rationing, and excursions to the big shops was now Angela’s main indulgence. When Richard returned from Chepstow mortuary later in the morning, he put his head around the laboratory door but retreated quickly when he heard a three-sided conversation about A-lines, pencil skirts and peplums.
Back in the safety of his own room at the back of the house, he opened his notes and drew the telephone towards him.