‘That’s Shane Williams,’ said the coroner’s officer. ‘Sort of an apprentice mechanic. He was the first to find the body.’
The lad shuffled uneasily. ‘I’m not a proper apprentice,’ he mumbled. ‘Just working here, while I’m waiting to be called up for National Service.’
For the next five minutes the detective inspector dragged what little information he could from the four men about their scanty knowledge of ‘the occurrence’, before going towards the barn to look at the scene. Billy Brown and his sergeant walked each side of him as they went up to the big Fordson, where the coroner’s officer carefully removed the tarpaulin and put it to one side.
‘They shouldn’t really have put this on,’ he said. ‘But I suppose they didn’t want to leave him exposed until we came.’
Arthur Crippen stood for a long moment looking at the scene.
The tractor was on an almost even keel, its offside back wheel resting squarely on the neck of the corpse, the head hidden by the massive tyre. A few spanners lay scattered around, amid the rough wooden blocks, which appeared to be sections sawn from a railway sleeper.
‘Why shouldn’t it be an obvious accident, guv?’ murmured Sergeant Nichols.
‘Bloody daft thing to do if you’re a proper mechanic, putting your head under a jacked-up wheel!’ objected Billy Brown, who felt obliged to justify his calling out the CID.
Crippen continued to stare at the inert body lying on the stained concrete floor. He slowly rubbed his face, pushing his sallow cheeks into even deeper wrinkles as he tried to make up his mind.
‘Shall I get the tractor jacked up again, so that we can get the poor sod out?’ asked John Nichols. The sergeant was quite young, a slim, fair man with a narrow Clark Gable moustache.
Crippen came to a decision and slowly shook his head from side to side. ‘I don’t think we will, John,’ he grunted. ‘Like Billy here, I feel we need to be cautious about this one.’
Aubrey Evans broke away from the group still standing in the yard and came up to the policemen. ‘Are you going to leave him there much longer? It doesn’t seem very respectful.’
The senior detective didn’t answer him directly but countered with another question. ‘What was he doing, to be under there like that?’
‘I’m not sure. It’s Jeff who mostly looks after the repair side – I do the farming.’ He turned and called across to his cousin, who ambled over to join them.
‘What was Tom doing with this Major?’ he demanded.
‘Fitting new brake shoes,’ replied Jeff Morton. ‘He should have finished them yesterday morning, but the idle bugger didn’t turn up until midday.’
Crippen ignored the lack of respect for the dead but filed the comment away for later enquiry. ‘So he had to have the tractor jacked up for that?’ he asked.
‘Yes, one side at a time. Get the wheels off, then open the drums to change the shoes.’
‘But the wheels are on now?’ objected Crippen.
‘Yes, but the shoe clearance would have to be set by using a spanner on the adjusters behind the drums. Each side would have to be jacked up again for that.’
‘Is putting a pile of wooden blocks under the axle a safe way of doing that?’ demanded the sergeant.
Morton shrugged. ‘We’ve always done it – and so does every other farm repairer. Never had trouble before.’
‘Can’t you use a proper trolley jack?’ asked the coroner’s officer.
‘We do, to get it off the ground. Then we stick the blocks underneath and take the jack away. It’s always being needed for other jobs.’ He swept his hand around the barn, where half a dozen other vehicles were in various states of disorder, some up on their own blocks.
Crippen returned to staring at the man lying dead at his feet.
‘Would any sensible mechanic trust his head underneath more than a ton of tractor?’ he asked.
‘Tom Littleman wasn’t what you’d call sensible, officer,’ said a deeper voice, as Mostyn Evans had walked up to stand behind them. ‘He was a lousy mechanic, if the truth be told. I told the lads that when they employed him – and I was dead against them taking him into partnership with the repair business.’
‘What was wrong with him?’
‘He was far too fond of the booze, for one thing,’ growled the older man. ‘Lost a lot of working time, and when he was here he was often half-cut. I’m not all that surprised that the stupid sod ended up like this.’
Aubrey murmured something to his father in Welsh, but Mostyn Evans shook his head. ‘No, it’s got to be said, son! Tom was a liability and a disaster waiting to happen. Now it has happened.’
The detective inspector seemed to have made up his mind. He turned to Billy Brown. ‘Has a doctor been here to look at him?’ he asked.
The coroner’s officer shook his head. ‘I left a message with Dr Prosser, the local police surgeon. He was out on his rounds, but I left a message for him to come here as soon as he gets back for his morning surgery. I doubt he’ll do more than certify death,’ he added rather caustically.
Crippen did some more face-rubbing, which seemed to aid his decision-making. ‘I want a pathologist to have a look at this, before we write it off. Any chance of getting one up here this side of Christmas? I suppose we’ll have to go through the forensic lab in Cardiff.’
His sergeant shook his head. ‘There was a circular from headquarters last week. The Cardiff man is away, so a new Home Office chap from the Wye Valley is standing in for him.’
Crippen shrugged. ‘I don’t care if he’s from Timbuktu as long as he clears this up for us. Get hold of him, then shut that barn door and leave the PC here on watch.’
He loped back to the waiting police car and ordered the driver to take him back to Brecon. ‘I’ll come back when the pathologist is due,’ he called through the window.
TWO
When the call came through, Dr Richard Glanville Pryor was drinking a mug of Nescafé in the staffroom of Garth House. This was an Edwardian villa perched above the road that meandered through the Wye Valley, one of Wales’s prime beauty spots along the border with England. ‘Staffroom’ was rather a pretentious title, as there were only three other people in the house and the room was his late uncle’s old study, situated between the kitchen at the back and his partner’s office at the front.
He sat in an armchair with sagging springs, part of the furniture left in his aunt’s house when he had inherited it almost a year earlier. Opposite, his secretary-cum-cook, Moira Davison, shared a more modern settee with Siân Lloyd, a lively little blonde who was their laboratory technician. On his right, Dr Angela Bray, his partner – solely in the professional sense – occupied a new Parker-Knoll easy chair, as she had declared that if she had to spend most of her life perched on a laboratory stool, at least she intended to be comfortable at other times.
When the phone rang in the corridor outside, they were talking about the news on the wireless that the first independent television channel was to open later that week, but as they had no television set the discussion was rather academic.
‘I’ll get it, I’ve got to go to the kitchen anyway,’ offered Moira, taking her empty cup and saucer with her. A moment later she put her head around the door and beckoned to her boss.
‘It’s the police in Brecon, doctor. Sounds as if they’re calling you out.’
‘Your fame is spreading quickly, Richard!’ chaffed Angela.
It was only a few weeks since Pryor had been put on the Home Office list of forensic pathologists, primarily to stand in for other areas when the designated doctor was not available.
He uncoiled his lean body from the deep chair and went out into the passage, which ran from the front hall to the kitchen at the back. Though Post Office Telephones had recently installed extensions in their office opposite, as well as in Richard’s room, the original instrument was still on a small table in the passage, an old Bakelite model with a tarnished dial.