Grounds for Appeal by Bernard Knight Page B

experience in London.
    â€˜Yes, it wouldn’t cause immediate death, but he would have been rapidly disabled and could die within a few minutes.’
    â€˜What about this blood on her sleeve?’ asked Angela. ‘Is this the picture?’ She held up the last photograph in the scene album. It was of a pale bolero type jacket, laid out on a table.
    â€˜Yes, you can see a few small spots on the outside of the right sleeve, just above the cuff.
    The two biologists looked at the photographs again, spending most time on the pictures of the scene, especially ones of the dead man lying on his back on the linoleum in the rather squalid living room, whose sagging furniture was decorated with empty beer bottles and overflowing ashtrays.
    â€˜Any blood elsewhere in the flat?’ queried Angela.
    â€˜Nothing mentioned in the statements. It looks as if he was stabbed at or near the point where he fell. The only other room is the adjacent bedroom and there was nothing of interest found in there. The police searched the rest of the house, but again nothing significant turned up.’
    â€˜So how did the pathologist arrive at such a tight estimate of the time of death?’ demanded Priscilla.
    Richard shrugged. ‘Using the old routine – temperature of the body, rigor mortis, post-mortem lividity, amount and state of the stomach contents . . . the same old mumbo-jumbo. Pick some figures from the air, then take away the number you first thought of!’
    Angela smiled to herself at his forceful tone. She had heard this particular tirade several times, as time of death was one of Richard’s hobby horses.
    â€˜So you think you can challenge that for the Appeal?’ asked Priscilla.
    â€˜Damn right I can – and I will, given the chance!’
    The Borth Bog investigation had run completely out of steam by the middle of the following week. There were only a few days left before the December page appeared on Detective Inspector Meirion Thomas’s calender, a rather racy one from a local garage, depicting a fluffy blonde wearing more eyeshadow than clothes, sitting provocatively on the bonnet of the new Ford Zephyr Zodiac.
    He looked at the dates glumly, thinking that his only murder investigation for the last five years had run into the sand and that its pathetically thin file would soon end up at the back of the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet.
    Though he knew it was traditional in detective novels for senior officers and the Chief Constable to come breathing fire down the neck of the failing investigating officer, he had to admit that the two men above him in their small police force had accepted the dead-end philosophically. They had seemed relieved that the two rather supercilious men from Scotland Yard had gone home and that the Press, after a brief frenzy, seemed to have forgotten all about the case. But being a conscientious man, Meirion would have liked to have nailed someone for such a nasty crime. Failing that, it would have at least been satisfying to have identified the body.
    With a sigh, he pulled a wad of papers towards him and settled down to devising night-observation rotas for the painfully few men he had available. Sheep rustling had become fashionable again and several irate farmers near Tregaron were demanding some action from the police, backed up by their insurance companies. This issue was of far greater concern to the inhabitants of Cardiganshire than one solitary, if bizarre death that probably occurred long ago.
    Yet as he pulled out his Parker 51 pen, the previous year’s Christmas present from his wife, the strange force of serendipity was working on someone he knew well, a hundred miles away in Birmingham.
    â€˜Not a bad pint, this!’ said Gwyn Parry, studying the amber liquid in his glass, pulled from a barrel of Atkinson’s Bitter. He was sitting in the snug of the Red Lion in Moseley, a southern suburb of Birmingham. He had been taken there for a