Bernard Knight - Grounds for Appeal

The next hour was spent blissfully in the outbuildings, where Louis had his equipment and the storage for his wines. Though some of the vats, presses and other arcane machinery looked old, the place was almost clinically clean.

‘I brought most of this over from France later,’ said Louis, with a sweep of his hand around the sheds. Though becoming bewildered with an overload of information from both father and son, Richard listened to the explanations of all the processes with fascination, determined that in a year or two, he would be doing the same thing on a much smaller scale.

The high point was a wine tasting in a small room which was almost a laboratory. Emily Dumas came out to join them with a plate of plain biscuits, so that they could enjoy several different wines from the previous year’s vintage.

‘Of course, we only make white,’ said Victor. ‘As I said, I don’t think this climate is the right one for reds.’

It was almost dusk when, reluctantly, Richard left them, happy that his afternoon had been so pleasant and informative. As he drove home through the dark lanes and then the busier main roads, he felt that his odd, almost obsessional interest in vines had been greatly strengthened, in spite of the rather pitying way in which his friends and colleagues seemed to humour him over the idea.

‘A man has to have a hobby,’ he muttered to himself, as he stared down the tunnel of his headlights. ‘Especially when he has such a damned morbid job as mine!’

He rather envied the Dumases’ way of life at that idyllic estate, though he still had the impression that there was some sort of serpent in that Garden of Eden that prevented them from being totally contented.

Just as the orders to investigate the pickled head had cascaded down through the Birmingham police hierarchy, the fact that it had been found climbed back up the same route. When it reached the ACC early that afternoon, he called in his chief superintendent, Simon Black, and asked him what they were going to do about it.

‘Is it a murder or not?’ he demanded. ‘So far, we have no evidence at all to show that this head belongs to this body in Wales.’

The CID chief agreed. ‘But the Welsh corpse has to be a murder, according to the local force. Their pathologist down there says the chap was strangled… and anyway, who’s going to bury a headless corpse unless it was unlawfully killed?’

‘What does this fellow who kept the head in his shed have to say about it? Has he coughed as to its identity?’

The chief super shrugged. ‘The DI started on him this morning, but in view of the strange nature of the whole affair, he decided to refer it up here to see how we wanted to play it.’

‘What do you think, Simon? Do you want to handle it yourself or send a DS or a DCI down there?’

Simon Black shook his head. ‘The local DI, Trevor Hartnell, is a sound man, plenty of experience. And he knows his own patch best. It would be a pity to take it off him now, at least until we know where we are with it.’

‘Getting that damned head examined is the obvious priority, to see if it does belong to that corpse in sheep-shagger country.’

His chief detective agreed. ‘Seems most sensible to ask the same pathologist to come up and have a look at it. He’s in the best position to know if they match.’

The orders went out, one down to Hartnell telling him to get on with grilling Olly Franklin and the other to the police in Cardiganshire, informing them of the latest developments and asking them to arrange for Doctor Pryor to come up to Birmingham at his earliest convenience.

In Aberystwyth, David John Jones called Meirion into his office as soon as he had put the phone down.

‘They’ve found the head! Good thing Gwyn Parry’s brother-in-law has such good contacts. It had been in some pub as was suspected, but turned up in the licensee’s shed, of all places.’

‘What happens now?’ asked his detective inspector.

‘Birmingham suggest, quite sensibly, that Doctor Pryor goes up there to examine it, so can you ring him and fix a time. You’d better be there yourself, I think, to keep up to date on our behalf. The head is being taken to the central mortuary behind the coroner’s court in Newton Street, so they said.’

This sparked a question in Meirion’s mind. ‘Which coroner will have to deal with the death, I wonder?’

The DCC turned up his hands in doubt. ‘Beats me! We’ve got the biggest bit — that’s assuming they belong together. I still can’t understand how they came to be a hundred miles apart!’

Meirion Thomas made for the door, going back to his office to start phoning around. Then he stopped for a last question.

‘What about the Yard? Do we have to tell them?’

David Jones growled something under his breath, then sighed. ‘Have to, I suppose. Maybe they won’t bother to come back here, if a big force like Birmingham is involved.’

When his DI had gone out, he swung round in his chair and glowered through his window at the inoffensive Irish Sea outside.

‘Why the hell should the damned English use our bog as a cemetery?’ he muttered.

In the police station in Winson Green, DI Hartnell and his sergeant were hard at it, trying to prise information out of Olly Franklin. A night in the cells had done little to soften his stubborn truculence, but Trevor Hartnell had been flattered by the trust his seniors had shown in his abilities and was determined to get something out of the ex-publican, even if it meant reaching down his throat.

They sat in a dismal interview room, with damp-stained green walls looking down on a bare table and chairs.

Tom Rickman sat alongside his ‘guv’nor’, notebook and pencil on the table before him, as Hartnell began all over again.

‘Look, Olly, whatever happens, you’re in the shit over this. But if you come clean, it’ll be in your favour, right?’

‘You don’t want an accessory-to-murder charge slapped on you, do you?’ contributed the sergeant. ‘So far, you’re up for concealing a death and obstructing the coroner, but they’re not exactly hanging offences. Why don’t you keep it that way?’

‘I don’t know nothing — well, hardly nothing,’ growled the red-faced man opposite. ‘There was just this old drum in the pub cellar and I got stuck with it.’

‘You could have gone round the nick next day and reported it,’ snapped Hartnell.

Franklin sneered at this. ‘Oh yes, I’m likely to have done that, after Mickey Doyle told me to hang on to it. That would earn a beating or even a shiv across my face.’

‘Well, you’re here in the nick now, so you may as well cough for us,’ snapped Hartnell. ‘Why did Doyle want you to keep the thing?’

Olly stared down at the scarred table-top for a long moment, then sighed and leaned back in his chair.

‘OK, I’ll tell you what I know, but it ain’t much, honest. And it was years ago now.’

Rickman opened his notebook and poised his pencil in anticipation, as the other man began to speak.

‘Look, you know as well as I do that Mickey Doyle was a villain — and he ran a gang of villains. You knocked off a few of them now and then, but others just popped up in their place.’

The DI nodded. ‘We know that, what’s your point?’

‘He was into all sorts of things — theft, protection rackets, running tarts, illegal gambling — though I never heard he was into drugs. Then until things eased off after the war, black market was the big earner and Doyle was a big player in that.’

‘Thanks for the lecture, Olly,’ said the sergeant sarcastically. ‘Now tell us something we don’t know!’

The chippie scowled at him. ‘I’m getting to that, ain’t I? There was one thing about Mickey, he was a stickler for discipline among those who worked for him. He was a big bugger and I’ve seen him punch a guy to the floor in the pub, just for some fault in working the rackets. I even heard he had some guy’s legs broken years ago, for holding back some of the loot in a black-market scam.’