Myrddin Evans had closed the gate again and advanced on them, the skirts of his grubby raincoat flapping, even though he had several turns of binder twine wrapped around his waist. He came near and glowered at the two policemen.
‘Don’t tell me there’s another tip-off about rustlers! I’ve got all my ewes up in the pound behind the house, so there’s no chance of them being pinched!’
He spoke in Welsh, but with a few choice English obscenities mixed in. Meirion always thought that the expression ‘swear like a trooper’ was nonsense, as they couldn’t hold a candle to farmers when it came to foul language.
‘Nothing to do with that, Mr Evans,’ said Parry, placatingly. ‘We called to ask about your van, that’s all.’
The weather-beaten face registered surprise. His mouth opened, revealing totally toothless gums.
‘I haven’t got a bloody van! I use a Land Rover with a big trailer these days.’
Meirion Thomas hauled out a piece of paper from his breast pocket and held it fluttering in the cold wind.
‘According to the Vehicle Registration people, you’ve got a green Ford thirty-hundredweight, number EJ 2652.’
‘Oh, that old thing! It’s not been on the road for years. The crankshaft went and the body’s so rusty it wasn’t worth fixing. What d’you want to know for?’
‘Have you still got it?’ asked the sergeant.
The farmer waved a hand vaguely in the direction of a row of stone-built cowsheds on the other side of the yard. ‘Bloody thing is rotting away behind there. I keep fence posts and rolls of wire in it.’
‘Is it the one you bought from Jaroslav Beran down in town?’
Myrddin Evans’ bewilderment became more obvious.
‘Yes, that foreign bugger sold me a pup; I paid forty quid for a heap of rust. Didn’t last more than a year before the engine blew up. What’s all this about, anyway?’
‘That man you bought it from was a crook, Myrddin. We’re looking into some of his past activities, for which he may have used the van,’ said Meirion evasively.
‘Needn’t tell me he was crooked,’ growled the farmer. ‘He sold me that heap of rubbish for a start!’
The DI started to walk across the yard. ‘Let’s have a look at it, then.’
Behind the grey-slated roof of the cowshed, they found a green van nestling in a patch of dead nettles. All the tyres were flat and it seemed to be sinking slowly into the Welsh countryside. The rusted bonnet was against the wall of the building, so that the back doors were accessible, being kept closed by yet more binder twine being wrapped around the handles.
‘Want to look inside?’ demanded the owner.
‘Yes, it may be that we have to take the whole van away for examination. But let’s see what it’s like first.’
Evans reluctantly unwound the hairy cord that bound the handles together and with a squeal of rusty hinges, dragged the two doors apart. Inside, the detectives saw a layer of six-foot fencing posts on the floor, covered with rolls of pig-wire and spools of barbed wire. Both being from farming stock, they saw nothing odd in old vehicles being used in this way. The countryside was peppered with old railway wagons, which made cheap and useful shelter for animals, feedstuff and equipment.
They advanced on the old Ford and looked at as much of the floor as was visible. Then they trampled through the nettle stems and dragged open the side doors to look at the sodden, rotting upholstery of the seats.
‘Think forensic can do anything with this?’ asked Parry.
The DI shrugged. ‘Amazing what they can find, sometimes.’
He turned back to Myrddin Evans, who was regarding them with a scowl at this waste of time.
‘Have you ever carried meat in this — or killed any animals in it, chickens and the like?’
He shook his head. ‘No, never! I used to collect feed sacks from the Farmers’ Co-op in it — and sometimes hauled a few sheep or pigs. But never slaughtered in it, I was never into black-marketing, not like some I could mention around here.’
Meirion had his doubts about that, but he was not interested in that now. ‘We might have to either take this van away or perhaps have a team of experts up here to examine it. We’ll let you know.’
The farmer’s scowl deepened. ‘Bloody nuisance! Any compo in it for me?’
Meirion pleaded ignorance on that one, but before they left he had one last question.
‘Do you know if this chap Beran is still around?’
Myrddin pushed his cap back on his head to scratch his grey bristles with a forefinger. ‘He was keeping that old shop he had in Vulcan Street when I bought that damned van off him. But I did hear later that he lived somewhere out of town. Bow Street, I think it was.’
After failing to find Beran in the telephone directory, the legwork that followed was delegated by Meirion Thomas to a couple of detective constables. They were sent to comb the Electoral Roll and question the Rates Department in the County Hall for any address of the elusive Czech. Nothing at all was found in the name of Jaroslav Beran and by mid-afternoon, the DI had sought the advice of the Deputy Chief Constable, David John Jones.
‘How the hell did a fellow with a name like that ever come to be in Aberystwyth?’ demanded Jones.
His senior — and only — ranking officer in the CID looked down at his boss.
‘At the trial that sent him down for eighteen months, it was said that he was a member of the Free Czech Army during the first part of the war, but he was invalided out in ’forty-two, on account of being accidentally shot in the foot.’
‘Did it himself, I’ll bet,’ grunted the DCC. ‘That’s an old dodge. But someone must know where the damned man is?’
‘He’s certainly not around here. That farmer who has his old van thought he had moved to Bow Street, but there’s no mention of him being there in the county records. I’m waiting to have a call back from someone in the Parole Board in Swansea. They must surely have kept tabs on him, or he’d be back behind bars by now.’
When he went back to his own cubbyhole of an office, there was indeed a call from Swansea, with interesting information about the missing man.
‘He changed his name, that’s why you can’t find him,’ said a man identifying himself as Beran’s probation officer.
‘Can an ex-con do that?’ demanded the DI.
‘Yes, he can these days. He claimed that his foreign name was a hindrance to him getting a job and like many of his Czech and Polish ex-forces friends, he wanted an English-sounding name. As long as we could still keep track of him, we had no reason to object, so now he’s officially called James Brown. We’ve got an address for him, it’s Gelli Derwen, Llancynfelyn, near Borth.’
The detective inspector almost fell off his chair with astonishment. Llancynfelyn was within bowshot of the part of Borth Bog where the body had been buried. In fact, it was there that the police vehicles had parked when they went to dig it up.
He hurried back to David Jones’ room with the news.
‘This fellow has to be involved, somehow! It’s far too much of a coincidence that the tattooed bloke drove Beran’s van years ago in some crooked scheme involving stolen goods from houses robbed by Midland gangsters.’
The DCC, usually a placid man more concerned with staff rosters and overtime claims, became almost animated.
‘You’re right, bach! But why the hell would he go back to live on the edge of the bog?’
‘Morbid interest or a guilty conscience?’ suggested Meirion. ‘So what do we do now? Bring in Birmingham — or even the Met?’
David Jones scowled. ‘Nothing those London blokes can do that the Midlands and ourselves can’t. Best tell Birmingham straight away — and you’d better get the forensic people to go over that van you told me about.’
Once again, Meirion beat a retreat downstairs, where he first phoned the liaison officer at the Home Office Forensic Science Laboratory in Llanishen, on the outskirts of Cardiff. They already knew about the case, as they had dealt with some of the material from the bog exhumation, but Meirion explained the new developments and the DCI who acted as a go-between between police forces and the lab, promised to come up next day with one of the scientific officers, to have a preliminary look at the old van.