Bernard Knight - Grounds for Appeal

Angela smiled at him, rather fondly.

‘You always get hot under the collar over this, don’t you, Richard?’ she teased. ‘I’ve heard you thumping the table before. Next, I suppose, you’ll be blaming Spilsbury and the other old fossils in your profession!’

Her partner had the grace to look a little sheepish.

‘Sorry, but it riles me to hear these chaps pontificate as if what they are claiming is the gospel truth, when it’s really only speculation. My motto is, if you can’t prove it, don’t claim it, especially when someone’s neck is at risk!’

‘So what have we got as a baseline of fact?’ asked Priscilla, still firmly identifying herself as a member of the team even though she was only with them for a short time. Richard tapped his papers with a forefinger.

‘Millie Wilson had one of her frequent quarrels with Shaw in the early evening of a Saturday in June last year. Then she cleared off to the pictures with a woman friend at about seven o’clock. Plenty of other witnesses, as well as the friend, to prove where she was until ten thirty, when she arrived back home.’

‘Presumably, Arthur Shaw was known to be alive during that time?’ asked Angela.

‘Absolutely! He was gambling in the kitchen all evening with three others who lived in the house. They all saw her come home at half-past ten. She came into the back room where they were playing poker and said something insulting to Shaw, about the bruising he had earlier caused to her face. They had a short slanging match and she went upstairs to their so-called flat.’

‘What happened to the poor woman then?’ demanded Priscilla, who, like Sian, was quick to sympathize with another female who was being ill-treated by some aggressive lout.

‘Shaw, who had been drinking as usual, became angry and left the game to go upstairs, saying that she needed to be taught a lesson. There was a devil of a rumpus for a time, but as usual, the residents took little notice. Then Millicent came down with a swollen eye and a bleeding cut on her lip. She screamed some abuse back up the stairs and shouted that she was going to her sister’s and was never coming back, then ran out of the house. This was at about eleven o’clock, give or take a few minutes, as the other occupants were also probably half-drunk and not too bothered about noticing the exact time.’

‘And he was found dead in the morning?’ concluded Angela.

‘Yes, at seven thirty, by one of the other men in the house, Don O’Leary. He and Arthur both worked in a car-breaker’s yard a few streets away. When Shaw didn’t appear at their usual time to go to work, O’Leary went up to wake him, as he knew that Millie wasn’t there. He got no answer, but found the door unlocked and Arthur Shaw lying dead on the floor, with a knife wound in his chest. So the times are pretty well established to within minutes.’

‘Are there any photographs?’ said Priscilla.

Richard went to the back of the file and pulled out two police albums, containing half-plate black and white glossy prints stapled between cardboard covers.

‘One is of the scene, the other the post-mortem. Not the greatest pictures, but they give the general idea.’

The two women took an album each, then swapped when they had looked at each photograph.

‘Stabbed almost in the middle of the chest,’ observed Angela. Richard nodded. ‘Got him straight through the right ventricle of the heart.’

‘Not much blood about,’ said Priscilla, holding up a picture of the victim lying on the floor of an untidy living room.

‘It’s often the case with a single chest wound, especially if the body lies on its back afterwards. He bled internally, filling the bag around the heart so that it couldn’t fill properly.’

‘That’s what you call a cardiac tamponade, isn’t it?’ said Angela, showing off some of the knowledge she’d accumulated from many years’ experience in London.

‘Yes, it wouldn’t cause immediate death, but he would have been rapidly disabled and could die within a few minutes.’

‘What about this blood on her sleeve?’ asked Angela. ‘Is this the picture?’ She held up the last photograph in the scene album. It was of a pale bolero type jacket, laid out on a table.

‘Yes, you can see a few small spots on the outside of the right sleeve, just above the cuff.

The two biologists looked at the photographs again, spending most time on the pictures of the scene, especially ones of the dead man lying on his back on the linoleum in the rather squalid living room, whose sagging furniture was decorated with empty beer bottles and overflowing ashtrays.

‘Any blood elsewhere in the flat?’ queried Angela.

‘Nothing mentioned in the statements. It looks as if he was stabbed at or near the point where he fell. The only other room is the adjacent bedroom and there was nothing of interest found in there. The police searched the rest of the house, but again nothing significant turned up.’

‘So how did the pathologist arrive at such a tight estimate of the time of death?’ demanded Priscilla.

Richard shrugged. ‘Using the old routine — temperature of the body, rigor mortis, post-mortem lividity, amount and state of the stomach contents… the same old mumbo-jumbo. Pick some figures from the air, then take away the number you first thought of!’

Angela smiled to herself at his forceful tone. She had heard this particular tirade several times, as time of death was one of Richard’s hobby horses.

‘So you think you can challenge that for the Appeal?’ asked Priscilla.

‘Damn right I can — and I will, given the chance!’

The Borth Bog investigation had run completely out of steam by the middle of the following week. There were only a few days left before the December page appeared on Detective Inspector Meirion Thomas’s calender, a rather racy one from a local garage, depicting a fluffy blonde wearing more eyeshadow than clothes, sitting provocatively on the bonnet of the new Ford Zephyr Zodiac.

He looked at the dates glumly, thinking that his only murder investigation for the last five years had run into the sand and that its pathetically thin file would soon end up at the back of the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet.

Though he knew it was traditional in detective novels for senior officers and the Chief Constable to come breathing fire down the neck of the failing investigating officer, he had to admit that the two men above him in their small police force had accepted the dead-end philosophically. They had seemed relieved that the two rather supercilious men from Scotland Yard had gone home and that the Press, after a brief frenzy, seemed to have forgotten all about the case. But being a conscientious man, Meirion would have liked to have nailed someone for such a nasty crime. Failing that, it would have at least been satisfying to have identified the body.

With a sigh, he pulled a wad of papers towards him and settled down to devising night-observation rotas for the painfully few men he had available. Sheep rustling had become fashionable again and several irate farmers near Tregaron were demanding some action from the police, backed up by their insurance companies. This issue was of far greater concern to the inhabitants of Cardiganshire than one solitary, if bizarre death that probably occurred long ago.

Yet as he pulled out his Parker 51 pen, the previous year’s Christmas present from his wife, the strange force of serendipity was working on someone he knew well, a hundred miles away in Birmingham.

‘Not a bad pint, this!’ said Gwyn Parry, studying the amber liquid in his glass, pulled from a barrel of Atkinson’s Bitter. He was sitting in the snug of the Red Lion in Moseley, a southern suburb of Birmingham. He had been taken there for a pre-lunch drink by his wife’s brother-in-law, Tony Cooper. The detective sergeant from Aberystwyth was spending two days’ leave in the Midlands, bringing his wife to stay with her sister, who had just come out of hospital after an operation on some obscure part of her female anatomy. He was leaving Bethan there for a couple of weeks to help look after her, as Tony had to work shifts, being a sergeant in the Birmingham City Police. He was not in the CID like Gwyn, but was a custody officer in one of the central police stations.