Bernard Knight - Grounds for Appeal

Emily began to weep, Louis tried ineffectually to restrain his younger son and Richard wished the ground would open up under him, so that he could avoid witnessing this highly embarrassing family feud. He was glad that Angela was already in the car, hunkering down and pretending that she was unaware of what was going on.

The row escalated rapidly, as Victor closed with Pierre and tried to drag him away from his mother and father. Although the visitor had kept silent until now, he resisted Victor’s physical force and told him to behave himself.

This further inflamed the aggressor, who began shouting at him to go and continued to pull at his arm. Pierre shook him off, his self-control obviously weakening under the provocation. The climax came when Victor swung a punch at the other man, catching him on the shoulder. Pierre pushed him away, in a last attempt to distance himself, but this made things worse, as Victor followed up with a heavy blow in the stomach, which made Pierre grunt with pain. This was too much for his self-restraint and he landed a fist squarely on Victor’s nose, which immediately began to bleed profusely. He staggered back and almost fell into Richard’s arms, as the pathologist had decided that he had better try to dampen down the rumpus.

His first reaction was to pull out his handkerchief and offer it to Victor, who automatically clapped it to his nose, then thrust it back as he pulled out his own.

‘I’m going and I’ll not be back while that impostor is here,’ he screamed emotionally, though it was somewhat muffled as he staunched the dribble from his bruised nose. Without another word, he almost ran to his car and sped away in a shower of gravel.

Angela was about to get out of the Humber, her better nature overcoming her reluctance to becoming embroiled in a family fracas. She thought she had better see if there was any female comfort she could offer the distressed Emily Dumas, but Richard, after a quick word with her husband, came back to the car and slipped into the driving seat.

‘Louis says it would be best if we left them to cope with their embarrassment alone,’ he explained and with some half-hearted waves from the group at the door, they left the unhappy house with a rather guilty sense of relief.

It took Angela almost the whole of the next day to put the samples through a wide battery of grouping tests and Sian and Moira had left by the time she went into Richard’s room with a sheaf of papers in her hand. He looked up from his microscope, where he was going through some slides prepared by Sian that day.

‘Have you worked your magic to a satisfactory conclusion, Doctor Bray?’ he asked, being in one of his frequent whimsical moods.

Angela sat on a stool alongside him and waved the forms at him. ‘I don’t suppose you want all the details, as I know you have never grasped the beautiful logic of genetics.’

He grinned back at her. ‘It’s a blind spot in my otherwise powerful intellect! Could never fathom all these blood groups with fancy names — Rhesus, MNS, Lutheran and all the rest of them. Just give me the answer, lady!’

She dropped the papers on the desk in front of him.

‘Right, if that’s what you want. Firstly, Pierre Fouret or Maurice, or whatever you want to call him, is certainly not eliminated as being the biological offspring of Emily and Louis Dumas. In fact, in terms of probability, there’s about an eighty-five per cent likelihood that he is their son, given the congruity of various subgroups.’

Richard gave a thin whistle. ‘Well, well! I wonder what Victor will say when he learns that? Point out that there’s still a fifteen per cent chance that Maurice is not his older brother?’

He stopped, as he saw that Angela was looking at him with an odd expression on her handsome face.

‘Remember that handkerchief you gave him yesterday, when Victor had the punch on the nose? Well, I took it from the dirty-clothes basket this morning and ran a few simple ABO tests on the bloodstains.’

He stared at her, wide-eyed. ‘You’re not going to tell me what I think you’re going to tell me, are you?’

She nodded slowly. ‘I am indeed, Richard! There’s no reason why Victor’s mother can’t be Emily Dumas — but Louis Dumas certainly isn’t his father!’

Richard reached out and laid a hand on her reports as he spoke. ‘Louis hinted that their marriage had a rough patch when they came back to Paris from Indo-China. Are we going to tell them?’

Angela looked at him sternly. ‘No way! We were hired to determine whether Maurice was their son, not Victor.’

She slid the top report from under his fingers and carefully ripped it into a dozen pieces and then dropped them into the waste-paper basket.

‘That’s the best place for surprises like that, Doctor Pryor!’

It was another month before the next big surprise came their way, this time a much more welcome one.

Moira brought in the day’s mail when they were sitting in the staff room for their elevenses and amongst the few envelopes for Richard was one with a Bristol postmark. Embossed on the back flap was the familiar name of a solicitor’s firm.

‘Let’s hope this is a cheque for our fees and expenses,’ he said hopefully. ‘Though it usually takes months, even after umpteen reminders.’

He opened it and as he studied the few typed paragraphs on the single sheet of headed paper, his eyebrows seemed to climb up his forehead.

‘Good God! I can hardly believe it!’

‘So it’s not a cheque, unless they’ve given us a couple of thousand,’ said Angela drily.

‘No, but it’s from Douglas Bailey. Just a preliminary note to let us know that someone else has confessed to killing Arthur Shaw — and that it’s expected that Millie Wilson will be released in the near future!’

The three women were agog with surprised excitement, as they had all been outraged by the rejection of Millie’s Appeal in January. Even the usually reticent Angela demanded more details.

‘How did that come about? Bailey must surely say who did it?’

‘He says it was one of the other lodgers in that house, a layabout called Roscoe Toms, who was one of those in the poker game that night.’

‘Not the man who found the body next morning, was it?’ asked Sian excitedly. ‘In detective stories, it’s usually the finder who did it!’

Richard shook his head and told them the rest of what the solicitor had written.

‘At least this fellow Toms won’t hang… because he’s already dead! That’s how it came to light a few days ago. He was in a drunken fight in some other back-street poker game in St Paul’s and got his neck slashed in a knife fight. He bled to death at the scene, but made a dying declaration in the presence of a local doctor and a police officer, in which he confessed to killing Arthur Shaw. It happened at two o’clock in the morning during a row over an accusation of cheating in the poker game, in which Roscoe lost a lot of money to Shaw.’

‘Will that be enough to exonerate Millie Wilson?’ asked Moira. ‘What’s this “dying declaration” business?’

‘I’m a bit hazy myself,’ admitted Richard. ‘It’s a rare event, but as far as I recall, a person must be dying and know that he has no hope of survival, when it’s assumed that he would have no motive for not telling the truth. In those circumstances, any statement he makes in the presence of more than one witness is admissible in evidence.’

‘At least that’s more than ours was at the High Court!’ remarked Angela, rather bitterly.

Moira nodded sagely. ‘And it gives a new twist to the meaning of “natural justice” that we were talking about last month!’