According To The Evidence

FIFTEEN

Early on Wednesday Richard Pryor was up at the crack of dawn again to catch the Beachley-Aust ferry across the River Severn, as he had to give a nine o’clock lecture to the medical students in Bristol. A weekly event during the Michaelmas term, it was sometimes difficult to arrange when attendance at court or an occasional police call interfered with the timetable. Thankfully, the pathology staff, in whose lecture allocation the forensic topics resided, were flexible enough to swap their hourly slots to accommodate his problems.

As he drove towards the medical school on the hill high above the Bristol Royal Infirmary where the Norman castle once stood, he savoured the task of talking to an audience who were keen to hear what he had to say. Students never showed any reluctance to attend forensic lectures, due to their intrinsic interest and the often gory slides that Richard showed to illustrate his teaching. In fact, with some of the more bloodthirsty or salacious topics, he knew that more than a hundred per cent of the class was facing him, as some students from other faculties crept in at the back. However, unlike some of his colleagues in other universities, he did not strive to be shocking or outrageous, but the very nature of the subject seemed to fascinate most people. He tried to tailor his talks to practical matters, especially the legal obligations of doctors, as he knew full well that probably not one of his audience would ever become a forensic specialist, the vast majority ending up as family doctors. Today was an example, as he was speaking about medical negligence, ethics and the General Medical Council, subjects of far greater relevance to doctors than cut throats or shootings, even though they were unlikely to attract any gatecrashers from the engineering or music departments. As he drove home in the late morning after the lecture, he wondered if Dr Pradash Rao had ever been taught much about gunshot wounds, as his report on the warrant officer was woefully inadequate. However, Richard sympathized with him, as he probably was a general-duties medical officer in the hospital, pushed into this extra job with little or no forensic experience.

He got back to Garth House just in time for one of Moira’s welcome lunches, this time a pair of fresh trout from the nearby Wye, which Jimmy had produced, tapping the side of his nose to indicate that no questions should be asked as to how he had come by them.

‘I wonder when you’ll hear from abroad?’ asked Siân as she sat on the other side of the old table with her sandwiches and fruit.

‘Give it a chance. It’s only been two days,’ chided Angela.

‘I can’t imagine anything getting here from America in under a week, even if they use airmail. Germany should be quicker, I suppose.’

‘Couldn’t they telegraph it?’ persisted their technician. ‘I’ll bet they didn’t wait a week during the war when there was military stuff to communicate.’

‘If it’s a scientific paper, it would be a hell of long telegram,’ said Richard. ‘And they couldn’t include graphs and diagrams and things like that.’

‘The newspapers send photographs by wire,’ said Siân stubbornly. ‘I don’t see how written material is any different.’ She was the keenest of the lot to see her chief getting his teeth into something that might save the vet from hanging.

‘I know the Met used to get copies of fingerprints by wire from police forces overseas,’ said Angela. ‘But I’ve no idea how they did it.’

This topic exhausted, the conversation moved on, over a creamy rice pudding, to current events. Siân, an avid cinema fan, had been particularly upset by the news on the wireless that James Dean had been killed in car crash in California, especially as fellow actor Alec Guinness had met him less than a week earlier and had announced his premonition of Dean’s death. Angela preferred discussing the new fashions in her latest Vogue.

Afterwards, they went back to work, Richard to his microscope and Siân to her fume cupboard, where she was digesting tissue in nitric acid to look for diatoms. Ever since their first success in helping the police with a homicidal drowning some months earlier, she had taken a great interest in these microscopic algae and was trying out different methods of extraction, described in some journals that Richard had passed on to her.

Angela was involved in a new procedure – at least new for the Garth House partnership, though she had dealt with hundreds at the Met lab. A solicitor had sent in an item of a lady’s undergarments, provided by a suspicious husband seeking a divorce. An alleged stain was claimed to be evidence of adultery, and Angela had to determine whether it was, in fact, seminal and, if so, whether or not it came from someone with a different blood group from that of the husband. Like the growing trade in paternity tests, it opened up a new avenue for increasing their revenue, and she was keen to get a reliable report out as soon as possible to encourage the lawyer to recommend her to his colleagues in the divorce business.

Several days went by in the same pattern. Richard had post-mortems in Monmouth and Chepstow, as well as being asked to go to Hereford for a ‘special’ case. This was a death under anaesthetic, which had to be reported to the coroner if it occurred within twenty-four hours of an operation. It was customary for the coroner to ask an outside pathologist to conduct the examination, rather than the resident pathology consultant, in order that no suggestion of a cover-up could be made.

In this case the issue was straightforward, as Richard Pryor found that the relatively young patient had severe coronary artery disease, which had been symptomless and impossible to foresee as a fatal complication – even a preoperative electrocardiogram had shown no abnormality.

On Friday still no word had come from Stow-on-the-Wold about receipt of the reports from abroad, but Richard was diverted by the arrival of a British Railways Scammell lorry. The three-wheeled ‘mechanical horse’ laboured up the drive to the back yard, where the flat-capped driver waved a delivery form at Jimmy Jenkins, who came out of his shed to see what was making the racket. By the time he and the driver were dropping the tailboard, Richard had appeared, beaming with anticipation.

‘Your grape plants have arrived, doctor,’ announced Jimmy ungraciously as he helped lift off the first of six large boxes from the lorry. As soon as the truck had gone, Richard insisted that they prise off the thin slats and inspect the contents.

‘Bit small, ain’t they?’ growled Jimmy, holding up a foot-long twig with a piece of sacking wrapped around the root.

‘They’ll grow like crazy once they’re established,’ said Richard with a confidence born of inexperience. ‘They’ll need drastic pruning when they’re bigger.’

‘Are you sure you should plant them in the autumn like this?’ grunted the countryman, who had an almost instinctive feel for what was right.

‘Many vineyard owners prefer the spring, but this valley is one of the most frost-free places in the country,’ said Pryor, repeating the wisdom he had gleaned from half a dozen books on the subject.

‘You’d have been better off with bloody strawberries,’ growled Jimmy, half to himself, but he went to work with a will and soon they had a hundred plants laid out on the yard.

‘They look a bit dry, God knows how long they’ve been on the railway,’ advised Jimmy. ‘The sooner we get them in the ground the better.’ After a dousing with the hosepipe, they barrowed the vines up to the plot and began planting. Jimmy dug a hole with a spade and threw in a shovelful of rotted manure, while Richard unwrapped the sacking from each plant and held it at the right level while Jimmy refilled the hole. They stuck at it for two hours, until Richard decided that he would leave the remaining fifty for next day.

They celebrated with a flagon of beer drunk on the seat outside the back door, Richard glowing with satisfaction and manual labour, though he suspected that with all that bending and crouching his back would be killing him in the morning.

‘So when will we be drinking this wine, doctor?’ asked Jimmy with thinly veiled sarcasm.

‘Give the vines two years and we’ll be picking a crop,’ said Richard confidently. ‘And the next year we’ll be drinking Chateau Wye Valley!’

On Monday the usual routine held sway, as both Chepstow and Monmouth demanded Richard Pryor’s services. A fatal two-car road accident on the A48 near Caerwent was a possible Section Eight, according to John Christie, the coroner’s officer. He meant that the surviving driver might be charged with causing death by dangerous driving, contrary to Section Eight of the Road Traffic Act. This was a potentially serious offence, punishable by up to five years in prison, so often a Home Office pathologist was asked to carry out the post-mortem.

‘He’d been drinking, doctor, no doubt of that! Our police surgeon was called to the nick late on Friday night to make him walk the chalk line.’

John Christie was the right-hand man of the local coroner, Richard’s medical school pal, Brian Meredith, who was also a family doctor in Monmouth. The officer looked more like a prosperous farmer than a policeman, always attired in thorn-proof tweed suits with a matching trilby with a turned-down brim. He doubled up as the mortuary attendant in Monmouth, managing to assist in the dissection and restore the body without getting a drop of blood on his clothes – all with his hat firmly in place.

As Dr Meredith’s coronial patch extended over most of east Monmouthshire, he also came down to Chepstow for post-mortems, but at that public mortuary there was a part-time assistant. Richard dealt with a sudden death from natural causes and a sleeping-pill overdose before going back to Garth House in time for his lunch.

Though Moira had cooked roast pork with apple sauce for Angela and himself, she was more concerned with giving him a message from Stow-on-the-Wold than with her culinary labours.

‘Mr Lovesey rang to say that he had had some of the material you wanted from abroad,’ she reported cheerily. ‘Can you give him a ring as soon as you can, please?’

As he tackled his welcome meat and veg, Richard wondered what had arrived from foreign parts. As Germany was so much nearer than the centre of the United States, he thought it was more likely to be something from Wolfgang Braun in Cologne.

After his meal he hurried through their usual coffee session in the staffroom to get to the phone in his office and ring George Lovesey in Stow.

‘Dr Pryor, I’ve had several responses from your requests for written material. One was from Germany, by mail – and another from Chicago.’

‘That was quick work!’ responded Richard. ‘I didn’t think anything could get here by mail that fast.’

‘It didn’t – at least only from London! Apparently, it was sent by something called photo-telegraph service to a GPO office in London and they sent it on here by post.’

‘That’s extraordinary, but welcome. No sign of anything from Minnesota yet?’

‘Afraid not, but I’ll get these others to you as quickly as I can. If I sent them by taxi today, would you be able to study them tonight? Time is really pressing now.’

Richard readily agreed, and by the time that Siân and Moira had left for the day he had a large envelope delivered by a man driving a rather aged Austin Fourteen. He called Angela and they both sat in the kitchen with an extra pot of tea and some of Moira’s home-made cheese straws, while they looked at what George Lovesey had sent.

The large envelope contained a smaller one with airmail stickers and West German stamps on it, together with another holding half a dozen pages of thin, rather brittle sheets covered in typescript and some graphs and tables.

‘Funny-looking paper – the print is a bit blurred, but it’s readable,’ said Angela. The German envelope also had a few pages of regular paper, the typing obviously a carbon copy of an original. There were short covering letters from the senders, hoping that the accompanying material would be of some use.

‘What happens next?’ asked Angela as she began to read the missive from America.

‘I’ve got to read it all and see if it helps to support my hypothesis,’ he answered, looking intently at the pages from Cologne. ‘Thank God it’s in English. We’d be delayed again if we had to wait for a translation from German.’

They read steadily for ten minutes, then exchanged papers, absently drinking their tea between pages. ‘Does it help?’ asked Angela when they finally dropped the documents on the table.

Richard nodded. ‘Just the job! I don’t know how strong the evidence is for these chaps’ own research – estimating the time of death – but that’s no concern of mine in relation to our veterinary surgeon.’

‘What happens next?’ she asked again.

‘I’ll have to go through all this stuff carefully, then draft a summary of the aspects that we need for this defence. George Lovesey wants it urgently, to send to them and get affidavits sworn and returned for submission to the court in Gloucester.’

‘How’s he going to do that in time? We haven’t even had the second lot from America.’

Her partner shook his head. ‘That’s his problem. I expect he’ll find a way – lawyers usually do, especially when they’re going to stick it all on the bill!’

Next morning Richard monopolized Moira and her typing skills so completely that lunch had to be cold ham and salad. He had spent all evening until midnight going through the papers from Stow and roughing out drafts for affidavits. Now Moira was banging out fair copies on her big Imperial as Richard had arranged with the solicitor to take them to Stow that afternoon.

For once, he was free, as there were no post-mortems at his two regular mortuaries, though he had agreed to go next morning to the big hospital in Newport. Here he had been asked to act again as an independent pathologist over a death in the operating theatre, as according to the coroner’s officer the relatives were unhappy.

When he had checked through the final copies, Richard dropped them into his old oriental briefcase. ‘Let’s hope these do the trick,’ he murmured to Moira.

‘You’ve got the other American one to deal with as well,’ she replied, getting up to start setting out lunch. ‘I hope you understand all that stuff. It’s gibberish to me!’

‘We’ve got to convince a court, so I’ll have to put it over as simply as I can,’ he answered soberly. ‘That’s the problem with our jury system. When it comes to technical evidence, the jurors tend to switch off – or go to sleep!’

This led to an argument about whether the Continental system of a trio of professional judges was better than the Anglo-Saxon reliance on the good sense of a dozen solid citizens. Angela was all for a jury, but Richard had his doubts.

‘It’s fine when it comes to straightforward facts, like whether Bill was in the pub that night or whether Joe beat his wife,’ he argued. ‘But start a long lecture about temperatures and time of death or some obscure explanation about the concentration of some poison, then you’ve lost them. You really need experts to evaluate expert evidence.’

Siân, always the champion of the common man, was strongly with Angela, but Moira sided with Richard, saying that she had read in the newspaper about a fraud trial that was still going on after three months, with the bemused jury trapped under a welter of accounts and statistics. Soon after lunch, Richard decided he had better leave for Gloucestershire.

The Humber made good time across the full width of the big county, and he arrived at Stow soon after three o’clock. As soon as he was shown into the lawyer’s chamber, George Lovesey rose to meet him, waving another sheaf of papers at him.

‘Dr Pryor, the other American material has arrived! Almost as quickly as that telegraphed batch.’

Richard sat down on the other side of the desk and they exchanged documents. The lawyer began reading the draft affidavits that Pryor had written, while the pathologist pored over the notes that the researcher in Minnesota had sent. It was an outline for a future article to be submitted to the American Journal of Forensic Sciences, generally similar in concept to the ones from Chicago and Germany but with different experimental results in respect of timing death.

When he had finished studying his papers, the lawyer looked over his glasses at Richard Pryor.

‘You’ve made it quite clear; even I can understand it!’ he said warmly. ‘But it seems that the three experts have come to somewhat different conclusions about the potassium levels. Is that going to be a problem for us? In cross-examination, prosecuting counsel will seize on any opportunity to discredit us.’

Richard nodded and tapped his own papers, the ones from Minnesota. ‘I know what you mean, but happily that doesn’t concern us. They can argue between themselves until the cows come home, about the implications of their findings, but that’s not what matters to us.’

He explained at length what he meant, and eventually George Lovesey was satisfied. ‘We’ll have to have at least one pretrial conference with Nathan Prideaux to get this really sorted out,’ he observed. ‘Now what about the other prong of your attack on the prosecution case?’

‘You mean Professor Lucius Zigmond? He seems the most authoritative person to fire that particular broadside.’

Lovesey waited for a few moments as one of his office staff had tapped the door and brought in the inevitable tray of tea and biscuits. When she had served them and left the room, he continued.

‘As you suggested, I contacted him and he is quite happy to give a statement and attend court if necessary. He seemed quite tickled by the idea, especially when I mentioned the fee and expenses. I think you should go to see him, to explain exactly what is required. That seems to be the most effective way, given how short of time we are.’

Over the teacups, they discussed details of the affidavits, the solicitor suggesting a few editorial changes to fall in line with legal conventions. Then Richard settled down to write a version of the affidavit based on the new material from Minnesota. It was fairly straightforward, as it followed the others almost exactly, apart from substituting some of the different analytical data of the potassium concentrations in the eye fluids at varying periods after death. When they had agreed on final versions, Lovesey said that he would get his legal agents in London to send them by the fastest route, the one that the Chicago papers had arrived by.

‘I hadn’t realized that the GPO had this photo-telegraph service from London,’ he said. ‘Apparently, it’s been there since 1935, but the place was bombed out during the war and they restarted it on the Victoria Embankment in 1948.’

‘I’ve never heard of it either,’ admitted Richard. ‘Probably damned expensive, but useful.’

‘It’s used mainly for sending photographs for newspapers, but apparently it will accept text just as well,’ explained George. ‘Our agent can use it to send these drafts back to the three researchers, to save time. But, of course, the actual sworn statements will have to be airmailed back to us. The court would never accept anything but original signatures and the stamp of the attorneys who administered the oaths.’

Richard grinned to himself at the archaic language of the law, though he knew that medicine’s vocabulary was just as mystical.

Before he left, he promised Lovesey that he would make arrangements to talk to Professor Zigmond in London and agree on a form of words that could be used in a deposition of the biochemist’s evidence in court.

‘Make it soon, doctor,’ were the solicitor’s final words. ‘We’ll be at the door of the Assize Court before we know it!’