‘You making joke? This was in war still, nobody did those damn things. I just paid cash in the hand.’
The local DI nodded. ‘OK, have it your own way. Your shop was in Vulcan Street, wasn’t it? We can soon ask around that area, plenty of people can still remember ten years back.’
Brown shrugged and stayed silent.
‘How long have you lived here?’ asked Hartnell.
‘Since before end of war — except when I was on holiday in Swansea.’ Again the attempt at humour fell on deaf ears.
‘Where were you before that?’
‘In army, Czech battalion. I got invalided out, now live on little pension.’
Meirion seized on this straight away. ‘I looked up your Probation Service records. You left the military in 1942, but you didn’t come here until 1944. So where were you in between?’
James Brown looked from one to the other, in a troubled, hunted fashion.
‘I was here and there… travelling to get job.’
Trevor Hartnell took a chance.
‘You were in Birmingham, weren’t you? Ever heard of Mickey Doyle?’
‘I was in Midlands sometimes, yes. Who this Doyle fellow?’
From then on, the Czech stubbornly refused to admit anything, denying any knowledge of Birmingham gangs or any involvement in organized crime. Eventually, the two detectives decided they were wasting their time until they had better evidence and left the cottage, with a promise — or a threat — that they would be returning, probably the next day.
Their farewell from Brown was a final bellow at the whining dog, then the door was slammed behind them.
‘Nice chap!’ remarked Trevor, as they walked back to the car. ‘I’ll bet he was up to something back in my manor in Birmingham. I’ll get a check run on him now that we’ve got a name.’
As Meirion drove away, he looked down at the bog, where there was still a muddy scar where the body had been hoisted from the peat.
‘Too much of a coincidence for this fellow to be here, within spitting distance of where we found Batman,’ he said ruminatively. ‘And we still haven’t even got a name for him!’
‘You haven’t put the heart in formalin, doctor,’ admonished Sian. She was looking over his shoulder as he sat at the big table in the bay window of the laboratory, where the light was strongest.
He had a large stainless-steel tray in front of him and, wearing a pair of rubber gloves, was using a forceps and scalpel to cut small postage-stamp-size squares of heart muscle and coronary artery. These went into pots of formaldehyde-saline, to fix the proteins in the tissue, ready for Sian to process them into sections for viewing under his microscope.
‘No, and I’ll tell you why in minute, Sian. Meanwhile, can you get these blocks processed and give me fibrin stains, an acridine orange and a PTAH, as well as the usual H and E stains, please.’ These were special stains, intended to reveal different defects in the heart muscle.
‘What’s the problem with this case, doctor?’ said the technician, being as insatiable as usual in her search for knowledge.
‘There’s a thrombus in the descending branch of the left coronary artery and I’m anxious to know how long it’s been there. The family are claiming that the shove in the chest that this poor man suffered was the cause of his coronary episode and hence his death.’
‘And was it?’ she demanded, always ready to take the side of the downtrodden masses, even though this particular victim was a rich brewer with a very expensive Alvis motor car.
‘Well, his coronary artery disease certainly wasn’t, as it must have been there for years. And I don’t think the thrombus was either, as he died within an hour of the squabble. But I’d like to know if his heart muscle was already damaged from lack of blood supply, which is why I’ve got the heart in this tray.’
Sian looked at the organ phlegmatically, unlike Moira, who though she had got used to typing descriptions of unpleasant things, was not keen to view them in the flesh.
‘Why have you already sliced across it?’ she asked.
‘I want to try some new techniques that I’ve read about in the pathology journals, mainly from the other side of Europe,’ he explained. ‘The trouble with conventional histology is that it can’t show the very early stages of cell death in the heart muscle, just by staining fixed tissue.’
Sian was already ahead of him. ‘You’re into histochemistry, then. But we haven’t got the equipment. You need frozen sections and all sorts of fancy reagents.’
He nodded, pleased at her quick mind and wide knowledge of what was going on in the technical world.
‘There are some cut-price methods being tried, where a large slice of tissue, as opposed to little bits for the microscope, can be processed for enzyme content.’
She settled on a stool next to him and put her chin in her hand, prepared to listen to his explanation.
‘We’re doing enzymes now in my biochemistry course. But how can that help you with this problem?’
Richard settled back to give a lecture, always ready to impart knowledge to those who wanted to hear it.
‘Muscles need energy and they get this through turning carbohydrates and other nutrients in the blood into carbon dioxide and water, using enzymes, especially the dehydrogenases.’
Sian nodded, in a slightly superior manner. ‘Yes, the Krebs cycle and all that!’
‘Well, those enzymes are inside the muscle cells, but if those get killed or injured by cutting off their blood supply, as with a coronary thrombosis, then the enzymes leak out through the damaged cell walls.’
Again his technician was ahead of him. ‘That’s the basis of the SGOT tests we used to do in the hospital. The enzymes became raised in the serum, because they were leaking out of the heart.’
Richard gave one of his impish grins. ‘I don’t need to tell you anything, do I, Einstein? So you’ll appreciate that if the enzymes increase in the blood, they must decrease in the muscle — and that’s where these tests are useful.’
At this point, Angela came in from the office clutching a sheaf of papers, but she diverted to the window area to hear what was going on.
‘I’m getting taught some biochemistry by Sian here,’ said Richard. ‘Damned good she is, too!’
The young blonde made a face at him, but she flushed with pleasure at his praise.
‘How’s it done, then?’ demanded Angela.
As she joined the audience, he explained. ‘As you said, it can be done now on a microscopic scale using live tissue in frozen sections, but we haven’t got the equipment. The same can be done using the same reagents on big slices like these, but it’s prohibitively expensive to use large volumes of stuff like nitro-BT. However, recently there have been attempts to use cheaper chemicals, which is what I’m going to try.’
Intrigued, Angela wanted to know what they were.
‘According to some chaps in Czechoslovakia and Germany, potassium tellurite and TTC can react with dehydrogenase enzymes and show up deficiencies. I messed about with tellurite a bit just before I left Singapore, but it was too unreliable to be of much use, so I turned to TTC. That’s why we’ve got some here. I brought it back with me.’
‘What’s TTC?’ demanded Sian, determined to be able to show off the next time she went to her biochemistry session.
‘Triphenyl-tetrazolium chloride,’ he replied. ‘A long name, but relatively cheap stuff.’ He reached across the table and picked up a small bottle containing white powder and placed it in front of Sian.
‘If you would be kind enough to make up a one per cent solution in a slightly alkaline phosphate buffer and — if we can borrow space in Angela’s incubator for half an hour — we’ll see what happens.’
As soon as Trevor Hartnell got back to the police headquarters in Aberystwyth, he sat in an empty office offered by Meirion Thomas and did some urgent telephoning. First, he rang his wife to say he wouldn’t be home that night, but would be staying in a bed and breakfast place on the seafront, organized by the local CID. He wanted to be on hand if the forensic report, promised by next morning, added any weight to their enquiries, so it was not worth trekking back to Birmingham, only to have to return. After assuring his wife that he would do all he could to be back home before Christmas Eve, to go shopping for presents for their two kids, he spoke at length to his Chief Inspector in Winson Green. He brought him up to date with the visit to the derelict van and the interview with the former Czech soldier, then asked for some digging into the antecedents of ‘James Brown’.