In the countryside, dealing with a death can be a slow process.

It was forty minutes before the first policeman arrived on his little Velocette ‘Noddybike’ from the police house in Sennybridge and almost another hour before the coroner’s officer appeared from Brecon.

The constable had been phoned by the owner of the farm, Aubrey Evans, who had left the milking shed as soon as Shane Williams had arrived to gabble his news. He had immediately raced back to the barn in his old Bedford pickup truck, the boy bouncing up and down on the seat beside him.

When they reached the yard, the farmer had jumped out and run to the threshold of the big door. After a single glance, Aubrey had dropped to one knee alongside the still form and grabbed the nearest outstretched hand. A dour, practical man, he felt the deathly cold of the skin and knew that his mechanic was beyond any help.

‘Bloody fool!’ he muttered uncharitably to Shane as he looked at the massive treads of the tyre crushing the victim’s neck. The pile of large wooden blocks that had been propping up the back axle of the Fordson were scattered under the vehicle. ‘I told him to get this job finished, but not when he was half pissed!’

With a muttered command to his shaken apprentice to get the big door closed again and to stand guard, he jumped back into the pickup and clattered off to use their only phone, which was back in the farmhouse.

By nine o’clock the group outside the barn door had grown appreciably and soon the arrival of a black Wolseley 6/90 brought two more, a detective inspector and a plain-clothes sergeant.

The DI was a tall, thin man of an age approaching retirement. He wore a long fawn raincoat and a permanently miserable expression, perhaps because of his name. After almost thirty years in the police, Arthur Crippen had heard every variation of the joke and it had long been worn thin. He advanced on the group and fixed his mournful eyes on the coroner’s officer, PC William Brown.