The Nine-Spoked Wheel, page 5
‘Yes, he was exceptionally neat and tidy – a great help in a party like this, when not everybody bothers where he puts things,’ Armitage replied.
‘Well, I shall have to collect his belongings for his next of kin, when we find out who it is. Can you give me a hand to get them to the car? I’ll give you a receipt for them. Then I’d like a word with the rest of the party, if that isn’t awkward for you.’
‘They’ll be just about finishing tea. We’ll go across to the Mess.’
It took only a few minutes to put Clayton’s few possessions in the car, and Revers wrote out a receipt. In the Mess, Armitage knocked on one of the tables, and announced, ‘The Inspector would like to ask one or two questions about Paul Clayton. I’ve told him that we’ll all help in any way we can.’
‘I’ve only got two questions at the moment,’ Revers said. ‘First, do any of you know anything about Mr Clayton’s relations, and secondly, can anyone say what time it was that he went out last night?’
There was a buzz of worried, low conversation, and then one of the men said, ‘We’re sorry, sir, but I don’t think any of us knows much about Paul personally. He was always friendly, but we talked mostly about the dig. Bill Summers was working with him, but he’s not here – he’s had to go to hospital. He may know of some relations, but I’m afraid we don’t.’
‘From what we’ve been able to find out so far,’ said Revers, ‘he doesn’t seem to have had many relations, but we have to go on making inquiries. Now, what about the time? Let’s try working backwards. Who has the bed next to his?’
‘I do,’ said another of the men. ‘I went to bed soon after ten o’clock, and dropped off pretty quickly. He wasn’t in the sleeping hut then – in fact, I think he was still in the Mess.’
‘Yes, he was,’ said the girl called Sara. ‘We were listening to a programme on the radio, and I’m sure he was with us.’
‘Which of you was the last to see him?’
Nobody could say. The radio programme ended at 10.30, and those who had not already gone to bed went off soon afterwards. There was a general impression that they’d left Paul sitting in the Mess, but no one could say more than that. Did anyone remember seeing the Mess in darkness? Yes. There was a box for posting letters by the office hut – the postman collected letters when his van brought incoming mail in the morning. One man remembered that he’d forgotten to post a letter, and he’d gone out to do so just before turning in – that might have been about a quarter to eleven. He’d walked past the Mess hut, and he thought the lights were out: he couldn’t swear to it, but he thought he’d have noticed if they’d still been on.
Revers had not expected much, and on the whole he was pleased with the information they’d managed to piece together.
‘You’ve done very well,’ he said. ‘There was no reason why you should take any particular notice of last night.’ He thought what a wholesome bunch of youngsters they were – alert, obviously ready to work hard, very different from the too-prevalent conception of students fostered by the posturings of their lunatic fringe.
Revers had still some routine work to get through at his office, and it was nearly nine o’clock before he got home. It had been a long day. He wondered, not for the first time, at his wife Diana’s cheerful readiness to put up with it.
*
A few minutes after he got to the office in the morning his telephone rang. It was the police surgeon, Dr Mortimer. ‘We’ve done the autopsy on that young man from Avebury,’ he said. ‘You’ll be getting the report, of course, but I thought it might be helpful if I came over and gave you a summary of things beforehand. Are you free now?’
Revers thought, ‘As free as I’m ever likely to be.’ He said, ‘Yes, it will be a great help. I’ll stay here till you come.’
*
Revers had seen violent death in various forms, but privately he still found it sometimes shocking, sometimes grotesque, always pitiful. He rather envied the medical ability to be detached and matter-of-fact. ‘It was an interesting job,’ the doctor said, ‘because there were so many injuries that it was hard to say precisely what caused death. I got over Professor Santikell, from Oxford, and what I’m telling you represents his findings as well as mine. One obvious cause of death was a broken neck, but there were appalling head injuries as well, and we can only say that he died from multiple injuries. What we’re not absolutely satisfied about is precisely how they were caused.’
‘A twenty-ton block of stone falling on you would seem to account for most things,’ Revers observed.
‘Yes, but you yourself pointed out that he was lying flat on his face. The main crushing force of the stone was on the back of his head, which was dreadfully damaged, as one would expect. But there was also extensive injury to the right side of the skull, extending to the right temple, with severe bruising round the temple. It is not easy to account for this.’
‘But surely the weight of the stone crushing his head to the ground would account for almost anything.’
‘Yes and no. The human skull is remarkably well-engineered and tough. It was crushed from the back, and the nose and upper jaw were broken, in the same way as they might be broken by a powerful frontal blow from a heavyweight boxer. That implies that they received a frontal blow from the ground as the stone crushed the face against the ground. It is difficult to see what could have caused such extensive injury to one side of the skull, particularly as the other side was not similarly crushed in. Indeed, you could say that the shape of the skull and the strong frontal bones of the forehead in a way protected the sides of the head.’
‘Well, obviously they didn’t. Is there any evidence to suggest a separate injury to the side of the head – a bullet wound, for instance?’
‘No. The injuries are all consistent with a severe blow from a heavy stone: the puzzle is the apparent angle of incidence of the blow to the side of the head.’
‘God knows,’ said Revers. He’d been unhappy about this case from the start, and he had been hoping that the autopsy would remove at any rate most of his doubts. It had simply made things worse. The doctors couldn’t say anything definite – they’d just produced another problem for him.
‘Can you estimate the time of death?’ he asked.
‘Not very exactly. Between six and eight hours after his last meal.’
‘That was probably about six o’clock in the evening – which would make it between midnight and two in the morning.’
‘That would seem reasonable enough. It would fit in with the body temperature when we got him to the mortuary – at least, within acceptable limits. But these things are notoriously difficult. You policemen ask for time of death as if life were a clock that just stopped. You must know that there is considerable argument nowadays about what precisely is the point of death.’
‘Come off it,’ said Revers. The doctor smiled. ‘I know I’m adding to your troubles, but really I can’t help it,’ he said.
‘Well, perhaps you can actually produce facts on a few things. What was the general condition of the body?’
‘Apart from the injuries, that of a well-nourished, healthy young man in his early twenties – under twenty-five at any rate.’
‘Any evidence of drugs or alcohol?’
‘None whatever. We can say categorically that he was neither an alcoholic nor a drug-taker.’
‘The Coroner wants to open the inquest tomorrow morning. What are you going to say to him? Do you want Professor Santikell to give evidence as well as yourself?’
‘That’s for the Coroner to decide. Personally, I think he should be called, though we can only confirm each other.’
‘Are you going to say that you’re puzzled by some of the injuries?’
The doctor considered. ‘If either of us is asked,’ he said, ‘we shall have to say so. But I don’t see why we should be asked. The law, at any rate at this stage, doesn’t want our uncertainties: it wants factual medical evidence on injuries and cause of death. That we can give quite readily. I take it the inquest will have to be adjourned: you must still have masses of inquiries to make.’
‘Yes, it will have to be adjourned. We don’t know yet why the stone fell, nor – though in a legal sense this is less important – what Paul Clayton was doing there at that time of night. Maybe we shall never know. But we’ve got to try to find out. I’ll have a word with the Coroner – I don’t suppose he’ll want more than formal evidence.’
‘Well, I hope you get to the bottom of it. Santikell’s and my uncertainties are pretty marginal, really. It’s like a bad car crash when bodies are frightfully smashed up – there are often particular injuries that you can’t logically account for. The tremendous forces involved may do all sorts of things.’
*
Revers’s next job was to see Sergeant Grey about last night’s house-to-house inquiries in the village. ‘We didn’t get much,’ the sergeant reported. ‘One woman said that she heard an owl hooting over towards Silbury at midnight, and that when a Silbury owl hoots at midnight it means the death of a king. I asked if this applied to a queen as well, and she got quite cross. “You mark my words young man, just mark my words,” she said. Well, I’ve reported them to you, sir, but if you ask my opinion I think she was half-mad. Everybody else except for one man said they were asleep and didn’t hear a thing – they seem to sleep well there. The one man who wasn’t asleep has a sick wife, and he had to get up at two o’clock to give her some medicine. He did hear something, but whether it’s any use to you I don’t know. Anyway, I took a statement from him.’
The sergeant opened his notebook and read out, ‘My name is Samuel Wilkins and I live at 6, Ring Cottages, Avebury. I am a tractor driver at Hill Farm. At two a.m. – actually I think it was a few minutes before two o’clock –Agnes woke me to say her pain had come on again and she’d better have one of her pills. I got a glass of water and gave her a pill. While I was doing this I heard what sounded like a noise of a power-takeoff from a tractor. I can’t say where it came from, but it might have been somewhere over by the Stones. I thought, “Funny time for a tractor,” but I didn’t think much of it, and went back to bed. The noise didn’t last long. Just before I went back to sleep I think I heard something like a tractor or Land Rover revving up and driving off. I can’t say for sure – I wasn’t that interested.’
‘I was able to see the wife. She’s had an operation and isn’t at all well, but actually she’s a better witness than her husband. She said she didn’t like waking him up because he starts work at six and has a long day, and lay awake for some time herself before doing so, She doesn’t recall hearing any sort of car drive up, but she did hear the tractor noise described by her husband. She doesn’t recall hearing a vehicle drive off, but explained that she wouldn’t have heard it anyway, because her pill acted pretty quickly and sent her off to sleep. I didn’t bother her with a formal statement, but she said she’d make one if we wanted it. I’m afraid that’s about the lot.’
Revers thought for a bit. Then he said ‘There are so many cars about nowadays that one car more or less during the night doesn’t mean much. A tractor noise at two o’clock in the morning is a bit different. I suppose any heavy vehicle on the Swindon road could make a noise like a tractor, but the man’s a tractor driver and he may be able to distinguish one sort of noise from another. It’s useful to have the statement, and you did very well to get it. Look, Sergeant, I’ve got a hell of a lot to do this morning and I’ve got to go to Avebury again this afternoon to do some more digging in the presence of that archaeologist. It hasn’t rained since the night before last. Can you go back to Avebury now and see if you can find any tractor or Land Rover marks on the ground near the fallen stone? The most obvious place is where the fire brigade lorry drew up off the road. I’m afraid that may have churned up the ground a bit; the ambulance was there, too. But it’s just possible there may be something, and I’d be glad if you’d have a look as soon as possible. Take a photographer, and photograph everything that’s there. Then have a look at the tyres of the fire lorry and the ambulance, so that we can rule them out – you’d better get photographs of them, too. Remember, the tracks of any vehicle that could possibly concern us must be underneath, or crossed by, the tracks of the lorry and the ambulance. Anything superimposed on those tracks doesn’t matter.’
Sergeant Grey went off, and Revers telephoned the Coroner, making an appointment to see him later that morning. With an hour or so in hand, he got a sheet of paper and drew up an estimated timetable of Paul Clayton’s last hours on earth. He began with tea at the South Down Camp, which he reckoned would have finished around 18.00. He wrote down:
18.00–22.30
In Mess, chatting and listening to radio
22.45 (?)
Set off for Avebury
02.00
Killed by falling stone?
05.00
Found by Boyce family
It was a thin record of fact – and much of it wasn’t fact, but only guesswork. Still, even an estimated framework of times was a starting point for trying to reconstruct what had happened between those times. The dead man couldn’t have left the camp before 22.30 because he was seen in the Mess until then. He might have left later than 22.45, but probably not much later: he didn’t appear to have gone into the sleeping hut, and it was unlikely that he would have stayed on in the Mess with the lights out. What time would he have got to Avebury? Assuming he had walked there direct, he had about a mile to go – in darkness. Twenty minutes? It couldn’t have taken much longer. Allowing for uncertainties about the actual time of his leaving the camp, Revers estimated his time of arrival at Avebury at about 23.15.
He had died, or so the medical evidence seemed to indicate, around 02.00: that left nearly three hours from his time of arrival at Avebury. What on earth was he doing? And why had he gone there, anyway?
Revers had no evidence to suggest the time at which the stone had fallen: he had estimated its fall at 02.00 because that was about the presumed time of Clayton’s death. The stone couldn’t have fallen before dark, or somebody would have noticed it. It had certainly fallen by 05.00, when the Boyces came upon it. Why had nobody in the village heard its fall – surely it must have made a great crash? Revers thought about this more closely, and decided that there need not have been a particularly loud noise. The stone had rolled over rather than fallen, it had landed on relatively soft turf, and there would have been, perhaps, more of a rumble than a crash. Could the noise heard by Mr and Mrs Wilkins during the night, and taken by them to have been a tractor engine of some sort, have been in fact the noise made by the falling stone? It seemed unlikely – an engine noise is not easily mistaken for anything else; least of all by a man who was himself a tractor driver. But it was about the right time. Could the tractor noise have masked any noise made by the falling stone? That was possible, certainly. But if there had been a tractor to make a noise there must have been somebody with the tractor: would he not have heard the stone fall, or, although it was night time, have seen the sudden change in silhouette of the Great Stones standing on Avebury Mound? If so, why had he done nothing about it? Revers was glad that he’d sent Sergeant Grey to look for traces of the tractor: if there was a vehicle there at about that time, they must certainly try to find it.
Revers had a sudden, sickening sense of futility: why was he bothering with this at all, using police time and manpower to accomplish – what? There was no evidence of any crime. There were puzzling features, certainly, about Clayton’s death and about the fall of the stone, but had not the doctor really diagnosed them away when he talked about the unexpected happenings in car crashes? The collapse of a twenty-ton sarsen boulder was enough to explain anything . . .
But it couldn’t explain what Paul Clayton had been doing there at that time of night. Revers sighed, and set off to make his call on the Coroner. On the way he thought of something else: wouldn’t a man on any expedition in the middle of the night have carried a torch? There had been no torch found by the body, and there had been nothing but the wallet, a handkerchief, a pen-knife and a few loose coins in the pockets of his clothes.
III
The Cremation Urn
THE CORONER WAS both shrewd and gentle; although he had been conducting inquests for over twenty years he was still sensitive to the suffering that brought people to his court, and tried never to add to it by moralising or pontificating on human folly. But he could be sharp with witnesses whom he suspected of negligence or lack of concern for others. ‘This seems a queer case you’ve got for me, Inspector,’ he said. ‘Are you going to be able to say what caused the stone to fall?’
‘No,’ said Revers, ‘and that’s why I wanted a word with you before the inquest. There are some puzzling matters that will take time to unravel. We have still a great many inquiries to make, both about events connected with the stone, and about the deceased’s reasons for being there apparently in the middle of the night.’
‘Then I shall take evidence of identification and medical evidence only, and adjourn the inquest until you are in a position to proceed. Have you any reason to suspect foul play?’
