Crippen continued to stare at the inert body lying on the stained concrete floor. He slowly rubbed his face, pushing his sallow cheeks into even deeper wrinkles as he tried to make up his mind.

‘Shall I get the tractor jacked up again, so that we can get the poor sod out?’ asked John Nichols. The sergeant was quite young, a slim, fair man with a narrow Clark Gable moustache.

Crippen came to a decision and slowly shook his head from side to side. ‘I don’t think we will, John,’ he grunted. ‘Like Billy here, I feel we need to be cautious about this one.’

Aubrey Evans broke away from the group still standing in the yard and came up to the policemen. ‘Are you going to leave him there much longer? It doesn’t seem very respectful.’

The senior detective didn’t answer him directly but countered with another question. ‘What was he doing, to be under there like that?’

‘I’m not sure. It’s Jeff who mostly looks after the repair side – I do the farming.’ He turned and called across to his cousin, who ambled over to join them.

‘What was Tom doing with this Major?’ he demanded.

‘Fitting new brake shoes,’ replied Jeff Morton. ‘He should have finished them yesterday morning, but the idle bugger didn’t turn up until midday.’

Crippen ignored the lack of respect for the dead but filed the comment away for later enquiry. ‘So he had to have the tractor jacked up for that?’ he asked.

‘Yes, one side at a time. Get the wheels off, then open the drums to change the shoes.’

‘But the wheels are on now?’ objected Crippen.

‘Yes, but the shoe clearance would have to be set by using a spanner on the adjusters behind the drums. Each side would have to be jacked up again for that.’

‘Is putting a pile of wooden blocks under the axle a safe way of doing that?’ demanded the sergeant.

Morton shrugged. ‘We’ve always done it – and so does every other farm repairer. Never had trouble before.’