He slid the photograph to one side and displayed a single sheet of typewriting, beneath an official letterhead that bore the logo of a crowned lion over crossed swords.
Richard and Angela bent over the form with their heads almost touching and read through the somewhat terse report. The pathologist skipped the preliminaries, then read out the significant part aloud.
‘“The item submitted was a.45-inch-calibre bullet consisting of a copper jacket over a lead core. It was badly damaged from impact and had a discoloured streak on one side consistent with a glancing impact during its trajectory. Metallurgical analysis of this artefact indicated that it was an alloy of aluminium, containing copper, magnesium and manganese, commonly known as Duralumin.”.’
Richard looked up at Bannerman and grinned. ‘Looks as if that clinches it, colonel!’ he said.
Following a good lunch, Angela could not resist another hour’s delay for her to investigate Clifton’s main shopping street, where there were several smart boutiques. Her partner stayed in the hotel lounge, where he treated himself to a leisurely pint of bitter while he read The Times and the Telegraph. After they left Bristol, they were fortunate with the ferry at Aust and arrived back at Garth House before Moira and Siân had left for the day, both anxious to hear what had transpired.
Deciding that this justified an extra cup of tea, Moira brought a tray into the staffroom and they settled down to listen to Richard’s explanation. He briefly recapped the story for Siân’s benefit, as she had not had Moira’s knowledge of the War Office call.
‘It’s all about the family’s claim that this warrant officer’s death out in the Gulf was either due to negligence or even might have been deliberate,’ he began. ‘There’s no doubt that the fatal shot came from his sergeant’s weapon during this practice assault in the fuselage of an old aircraft, but it’s the way he was shot that has given rise to all this controversy.’
‘How did the widow come to start this claim?’ asked Siân.
‘I suspect she went to a solicitor to see about demanding compensation and he started the hare running. He got a medical opinion but really didn’t understand what sort of expertise was needed. A hospital surgeon may know a lot about treating wounds, but he’s not the best person to decide how they’re caused.’
Angela nodded her agreement. ‘I’ve seen this in the forensic science business – there are too many instant experts around. They know a bit about everything, but not enough about the issue in question.’
Siân still looked dubious. ‘But you say that no one is claiming that the sergeant didn’t shoot the poor chap! It was his gun, so what’s the controversy about?’
Richard took a Marie biscuit from the tea tray. ‘The widow, or rather her lawyer, is claiming that the shooting was deliberate, under cover of the exercise. The alternative is that it was caused by negligence on the part of the sergeant – and perhaps also by the army itself for having faulty procedures.’ As he bit into his biscuit, it was Moira’s turn to question him.
‘Why on earth should the sergeant want to kill him?’
‘Because it’s admitted that there was bad blood between the warrant officer and the staff sergeant. They had even come to blows not long before, over disputes about how to run the training programme and claims that the senior NCO was bullying the sergeant.’
‘So he took the chance to aim one of his shots in the wrong direction?’ summarized Siân. ‘It seems a damned dangerous business to me, firing off guns inside an aeroplane.’
Richard shrugged. ‘War and fighting terrorists is a dangerous business. You can’t learn it from a book, that’s why the War Office hired these chaps to this place in the Gulf, to train their own fellows.’
Moira wanted to get down to the denouement. ‘So how did you sort it out, Dr Pryor?’
She was already proud of him, even though he hadn’t yet explained anything.
‘Having studied the original post-mortem report and the poor photographs, the medical expert the family had hired was convinced that the wound on the back of the head came from a direct shot at close quarters. He based this on the large size of the hole, claiming that a more distant discharge would have made a small round hole, but that because it was much bigger it must have been due to the gases from the end of the gun barrel bursting into the tissues.’
‘Is that right, doctor?’ asked Siân, determined to see fair play.
Richard nodded. ‘Up to a point. The gun would have to be very close indeed, so that the hot gas blasts through the skin, hits the hard skull underneath and bounces back, splitting the skin. It can’t happen over soft areas, like the belly.’
‘So why do you disagree?’ demanded Siân, determined to be devil’s advocate.
‘There was no burning or propellant residue on the hair or skin which you would get with that close a discharge, though I admit straight away that if he had been wearing a bush hat covering that part of his head, it would have filtered off any of those signs.’
‘But they didn’t mention a hat in the Al Tallah reports, and no one there thought to keep the clothing, so we don’t know one way or the other,’ explained Angela, determined to get a little forensic science into the discussion.
‘So where’s the proof to the contrary?’ demanded Siân, doggedly. Richard thought she would have made as good a lawyer as she was a technician. He held up three fingers and ticked them off with the index finger of his other hand as he spoke.
‘First, the scalp wound didn’t look right for a gas burst. It was roughly oblong and the edges weren’t torn badly enough. There was a gouged slope at one end and I felt that the bullet hadn’t penetrated nose first but had hit sideways on. Second, there was no exit wound – the bullet hadn’t gone right through the head and was still resting against the inside of the skull on the left side.’
He tapped his third finger as he made his last point. ‘And though badly distorted, the bullet had this pale streak down the one side.’ He held up a copy of the photograph that Bannerman had given him at lunchtime.
‘Those bullets have a copper jacket, but the laboratory confirmed that this pale stripe is mainly aluminium, with traces of other metals which make up the alloy Duralumin.’
Siân and Moira looked blankly at their employer. ‘So what does that tell you?’ demanded Siân.
Richard held up another photograph, a view down the length of the Dakota’s interior, with the foreground slightly out of focus but showing a double row of rather dilapidated seat frames, partly covered with the remains of ragged upholstery.
‘Nearly everything you see is made of aluminium alloy. It’s been shot up by repeated previous exercises, but the walls of the fuselage, stripped of their lining, are Duralumin, as are the seat frames. I’m convinced that one of the bullets fired by the staff sergeant must have hit a seat frame with a glancing impact and ricocheted away to hit Bulmer in the head.’
‘Why a seat frame and not the walls of the plane?’ asked Moira.
‘The skin of the plane is so thin it would probably have gone straight through. The seats are much more substantial,’ he replied.
‘Does that fit with the nature of the wound?’ asked Siân.
Richard Pryor nodded. ‘It explains it very well. The bullet would have been knocked off its direct trajectory and would probably have started tumbling, perhaps end over end. It hit the scalp sideways on, and even the scuffing at one end of the wound suggests that it was a tangential impact.’
‘Anything else?’ asked Moira.
‘The bullet didn’t go right through the head, probably because it had lost much of its energy by hitting the seat frame. Even high-velocity missiles like that can get stopped inside the skull if they strike the thick bars of bone in the base, but this one hadn’t done that. It just didn’t have enough momentum to break out at the front of the head.’