‘What does Squires say about this?’ asked Richard out of sheer curiosity, as it was no part of his medical brief.
‘He readily admits that he couldn’t stand Bulmer, who he claims was officious and overbearing, treating him as if he was a raw recruit rather than an experienced NCO who was only one rank below him.’
Bannerman added to this litany of dispute. ‘Squires reckoned that Bulmer treated him with contempt in front of the trainees and often countermanded Squires’ orders to the men. We couldn’t get any confirmation from any of the officers, but a sergeants’ mess is well known to be adept at keeping their own affairs under wraps.’
‘So the allegation is that Squires took the opportunity of the firefight in the plane to put one in the back of Bulmer’s head?’ suggested Richard. When he was in the army himself, he had heard rumours of similar ‘accidents’ to junior officers or senior NCOs, when they were up at the head of a patrol.
He picked up the photographs again and studied them, even fishing a small lens from his pocket to look closely at the ones showing the head injury.
‘A pity they’re such lousy photos,’ he muttered.
‘Can you tell anything from them?’ asked Bannerman.
‘It’s a big wound, slightly ragged around the edges, as far as one can tell. What weapons were being used?’
‘Bulmer and the trainees had standard-issue Sterlings, but Squires used a Thompson sub-machine gun. God knows where he got it from, but some of these Special Forces types insist on having their favourite weapons.’
‘There’s no doubt, I suppose, that the fatal shot came from his gun?’ hazarded Richard.
Bannerman shook his head. ‘None at all! The Al Tallah police have virtually no forensic facilities, but they didn’t need to. A Sten gun uses nine-millimetre ammunition, but the Thompson fires forty-fives.’
‘So there was no microscopic matching of the bullet to the weapon?’ asked Angela. Although she was not a firearms examiner, a lot of knowledge had rubbed off on her during her years at the Metropolitan Police laboratory.
‘No point, even if Al Tallah were able to get it done,’ said Paul Bannerman. ‘No one else there had a weapon of that calibre.’
‘Did they keep the bullet after the investigation was over?’ asked Pryor.
‘It’s still available in Al Tallah, as far as I know. Did you want to see it?’
Richard rubbed his chin, still staring at the photographs. ‘It’s possible, so perhaps you could make sure that they don’t chuck it away. What about his clothing? Did they keep that?’
Bannerman looked nonplussed. ‘Clothing? I’ve no idea. Gordon, do you know anything about that?’
The solicitor shook his head. ‘We can find out from the major out there. He’s still in Al Tallah. We sent a pair of NCOs out to replace Bulmer and Squires.’
The show must go on, thought Angela cynically – especially if the War Office is getting a nice fat fee for the training.
‘So we don’t know if he was wearing a hat of any sort,’ continued Richard.
Bannerman pursed his lips. ‘Again, I don’t know. The usual kit for that part of the world is a khaki tunic and shorts and a bush hat with a floppy brim. Does it matter, doctor?’
‘It might if the shot went through the hat. For a start, it might help with determining the range, if there was burning or propellant soiling from a close discharge.’ He looked again at the photos. ‘There’s no chance of seeing anything like that on these fuzzy pictures.’
‘Why do think it might have been a close discharge?’ asked Gordon Lane.
‘The wound is large and split, as far as can be made out. A direct distant shot wouldn’t do that, but a near-contact one could. The gases from the muzzle can be forced under the scalp and, because there is unyielding skull underneath, it causes a blowback which can split the skin.’
The prim Mrs Wright paled a little at the description she had to scribble on her notepad.
‘Is there any eyewitness evidence as to how close the two men were when the shooting started?’ asked Angela.
The two War Office men looked at each other uncertainly.
‘Not really. There are fairly sparse statements from the trainees. Some of them hardly speak any English and, given the hectic turmoil of the moment, I doubt their testimony would be of much help.’
‘It’s only now that these issues have blown up into such importance,’ said Lane. ‘Before, it was a tragic accident three thousand miles away. Squires was put through the grinder when he was brought back to the depot, but of course he would quite naturally avoid saying anything that was to his disadvantage.’
‘It’s only since the wife and her stroppy lawyer came on the scene that we’ve had to sit up and take notice,’ confessed Bannerman. ‘Is there anything you can do or suggest that might take us further forward?’
‘Have you got the post-mortem report from Al Tallah there?’ asked Richard. The colonel delved into his black bag again and brought out a single sheet of paper. When he handed it to Richard, he saw it was poorly typed on a printed pro forma with ‘Al Tallah Police Department’ at the top.
‘Pretty skimpy, but we get them just as bad in this country,’ he commented as he began reading.
The brief report described a well-built man six feet in height. There was no mention of clothing or a hat. A fulsome description of rigor mortis and lividity was unhelpful, given that the time of death was known to the minute, but the actual head wound was given scant attention. It was described as being on the ‘back of the head’, and its dimensions were stated as ‘about one and a half inches by one half-inch’. There was no mention of burning of hairs or the blackening of surrounding skin.
The rest of the body was dismissed in a few repetitions of ‘NAD’, an overworked acronym meaning ‘nothing abnormal detected’. At the end was a terse summary: ‘Death was due to skull fracture and brain damage due to a gunshot wound to the back of the head.’ At the bottom, it was signed ‘Dr Pradash Rao’.
‘Pretty uninformative,’ grunted Richard, always annoyed by skimped workmanship. ‘He offers no opinion as to whether it was a close or distant discharge.’
‘Is there anything you can tell us that might help us in challenging this claim?’ asked Bannerman. ‘They are saying that the army was negligent in not ensuring that the trainers were competent enough to avoid such incidents – which rather cuts across their other allegation that Squires deliberately shot Bulmer out of malice, though they also claim that the antipathy between the two men should have been known to senior officers and that the two men should not have been posted to the same place, especially if the opportunity arose to escalate their quarrel through the use of firearms.’
Richard shrugged. ‘I’m afraid the legal complexities are outside my remit. But a couple of things occur to me about the gunshot wound.’
He turned to Gordon Lane. ‘There’s absolutely no doubt that the fatal shot came from Squires’ weapon, which fired a forty-five-calibre bullet?’
When the solicitor confirmed this, Richard tapped the photographs with a finger. ‘Then I’m surprised that if a man was hit in the back of the head at close range with a forty-five, there was no exit wound. It’s by no means inevitable, but a big slug like that fired from a few feet away – or even much nearer, for all we know – usually causes a through-and-through track across the skull, with a messy exit wound on the other side.’
‘Why didn’t this happen in this case, doctor?’ asked Bannerman.
‘As we’ve got only lousy pictures and an uninformative post-mortem report, I can’t tell. If it was a long-range discharge, the bullet may have been at the end of its trajectory and lost much of its energy, but this can’t be the case here, inside an aircraft. One other reason can be that the bullet hit really dense bone inside the skull, but that’s all in the base and this impact is too high for that.’