THIRTEEN

On Saturday morning, Richard Pryor was alone in Garth House, with Angela gone to Berkshire, Sian at home and even Moira having a day off to go shopping in Newport.

She had left him a ham salad for his lunch in the old Kelvin refrigerator and he ate this quite early, as he wanted to get off to his appointment at the vineyard, forty miles away.

Picking up the A48 at Chepstow, he drove on it through Newport and Cardiff to the small country town of Cowbridge, an old Roman station twelve miles west of the capital city. It was now the market town of the lush Vale of Glamorgan, which lay between the hills of north Glamorgan and the sea. Here he followed the instructions given to him by Louis Dumas, supplemented by one of his one-inch Ordnance Survey maps. Richard loved maps and atlases, being happy to pore over them for hours as if he was reading a novel.

He turned off at the solitary traffic lights in Cowbridge and meandered through a few lanes until he came to the tiny village of St Mary Church, not far from the huge RAF station at St Athan. On a narrow lane beyond the village, he found a gateway in a high hedge with a discreet notice proclaiming ‘Saint Illtyd’s Vineyard’, named after the fifth-century founder of the first monastic ‘university’ at Llantwit Major, a few miles away on the coast.

Driving in through the open gate, a gravel track took him to a nicely renovated farmhouse, with extensive outbuildings visible behind. He stopped on a wide turning area in front of the house and was greeted by a friendly golden retriever which ambled out of the open front door, wagging its tail as it came to have its neck patted. The dog was followed by a slim man in his mid-fifties. He wore a tweed suit with a waistcoat and a paisley-pattern cravat at his throat, his silver-grey hair covered with a matching tweed cap. Richard thought he looked very much the gentleman farmer, perhaps more typical of the Home Counties than South Wales. However, as soon as he spoke, his French origins were clear, though his English was perfect — perhaps too perfect for a native Briton.

‘Doctor Pryor, welcome to my house. It is a pleasure to meet you.’ He extended his hand and shook it warmly.

‘We get very few vine enthusiasts here, though hopefully the number will increase as more people like yourself see the light!’

He escorted Richard into the house, where he introduced his wife as they settled themselves in an elegant sitting room. Emily Dumas was a small, neat woman, some years younger than her husband, even though her hair was quite white. Dressed in a dark blue dress with a prim lace collar, she was the epitome of a quiet, respectable housewife, yet somehow Richard felt that there was deep sadness in the eyes of both her and her husband. He sensed that they shared some deep unhappiness, but it was none of his business to probe.

After some polite small-talk about the improving weather, their amiable dog and the imminent approach of Christmas, Madame Dumas vanished, then returned with a tray bearing biscuits and coffee in exquisite Limoges crockery.

‘We’ll give you taste of good Welsh wine before you leave,’ promised the husband. ‘But have this before I take you on a tour of the estate.’

As they sat and enjoyed the coffee, Richard learned that they had lived in the house for twelve years, the vines having been planted the year after their arrival.

‘Only half an acre to start with, as it was very difficult to find any vine stock during the war. We scoured market gardens to get enough, until the war ended and we could import from France,’ explained Louis.

Emily Dumas took up the story.

‘We came to Britain at the fall of France in 1940, as my husband was a senior staff-officer in the army and we escaped to London with Charles de Gaulle,’ she explained. ‘Louis worked at the Free French headquarters in Carlton Terrace, but unfortunately fell ill two years later.’

‘It was a recurrence of a tropical disease I suffered when we were in Indo-China in the thirties,’ explained her husband. ‘But I was invalided out of the army in forty-three and we ended up here soon afterwards.’

At this, Richard caught a covert glance between the man and wife, which obviously had some private significance. Then briskly, Louis Dumas stood up, full of affability, and suggested that they go outside to talk about viniculture. The next hour was a fascinating one for the pathologist, who forgot all about headless bodies and lethal stab wounds during the Frenchman’s lucid explanation of the secrets of vine-growing and winemaking. What Richard really learned was the extent of his ignorance, confirming Jimmy Jenkins’ contempt for trying to become an expert by reading books. In the winter sunshine, they toured the acres of vines, now bare of leaves and looking like desiccated twigs as they clung to the wires that supported them.

‘It’s hard to believe that in a few months, these will spring back to life and by next autumn will be loaded with fruit,’ enthused Dumas. ‘We are the first to try winemaking in Wales since the twenties, when the last vines were grubbed up not far from here.’

When Richard sought encouragement that viniculture was a practical proposition in Wales, Louis Dumas reminded him that in the past, a great deal of wine had been made all over southern Britain, by both the Romans and the monasteries.

‘That was until the climate changed for the worse in the later Middle Ages, and of course, Henry the Eighth abolished the monasteries, who were the main producers,’ he explained. ‘There was then a hiatus for centuries until the Marquis of Bute, one of the richest men in the world, thanks to Welsh coal, started a vineyard in the late nineteenth century at Castle Coch, near Cardiff. He even sent his head gardener to France to learn the secrets, though I don’t understand how he could benefit much, as he didn’t understand French! The marquis’s son planted two more vineyards in the Vale, one at St Quentin’s, just a few miles from here. They made quite a lot of wine for a few years, producing twelve thousand bottles in 1893, being the only commercial vineyard in Britain at that time. But alas, they gave up soon after the Great War.’

‘Why was that, if they were making a decent vintage?’ asked Richard, eager to learn all he could, even if only to confound Jimmy’s pessimism.

‘It was too expensive to compete with imports,’ replied Louis. ‘And they chose the wrong grape variety for this cooler, wetter climate, as their Gamay Noir was better suited to Burgundy. They should have stuck to a white wine, rather than attempt to make a good red.’

As they walked towards the end of the first row of vines, Richard saw a figure ahead of them, bending over the wires. He wore green dungarees under a brown leather jacket and had a pair of strong secateurs in one hand.

‘That’s my son Victor, checking on the ties, ready for the winter gales,’ said his father.

As they came up to him, Richard saw a tall young man in his early twenties, who straightened up when they approached. He had an angular face with a marked cleft chin and prominent cheekbones.

‘Victor, this is Doctor Pryor, who I told you about. He’s going to join the ranks of the Welsh wine makers.’

The younger man shook hands and gave Richard a pleasant smile.

‘I’m glad to hear it! Then the ranks will consist of two of us!’ he said heartily. He had none of the accent of his parents, though Richard realized that he must have been born in France before the war.

They chatted for a few moments, Victor explaining what he was doing. The vines had recently been pruned after the leaf fall, but needed tidying up and securing while dormant.

He walked back with them towards the outbuildings where the wine was made and Richard’s head began to spin as he assimilated information of the double-Guyot training system, varieties of grape and the basic principles of making the wine once the grapes had been grown.

‘Did you grow up in a winemaking area of France?’ he asked Louis, when he had a chance to get a word in.

‘I did indeed. My family came from the Loire region where the conditions are not all that unlike Britain. My father was a winemaker, but as I left to join the army when I was eighteen, I had to relearn the trade when we came here.’

From various bits of information, Richard gathered that the family still had land in France and that though the vineyard here was successful, it was far from being their only means of support. In fact, from the furnishings and many fine paintings and ornaments in the house, he felt that they were more than comfortably off. He wondered why they had chosen to remain in Britain after the war, when they could have made wine more easily in their native country. It was none of his business and he was not a nosy person by nature, though the thought occurred to him that perhaps there were political issues involved, as General de Gaulle was a controversial figure.

The next hour was spent blissfully in the outbuildings, where Louis had his equipment and the storage for his wines. Though some of the vats, presses and other arcane machinery looked old, the place was almost clinically clean.

‘I brought most of this over from France later,’ said Louis, with a sweep of his hand around the sheds. Though becoming bewildered with an overload of information from both father and son, Richard listened to the explanations of all the processes with fascination, determined that in a year or two, he would be doing the same thing on a much smaller scale.

The high point was a wine tasting in a small room which was almost a laboratory. Emily Dumas came out to join them with a plate of plain biscuits, so that they could enjoy several different wines from the previous year’s vintage.

‘Of course, we only make white,’ said Victor. ‘As I said, I don’t think this climate is the right one for reds.’

It was almost dusk when, reluctantly, Richard left them, happy that his afternoon had been so pleasant and informative. As he drove home through the dark lanes and then the busier main roads, he felt that his odd, almost obsessional interest in vines had been greatly strengthened, in spite of the rather pitying way in which his friends and colleagues seemed to humour him over the idea.

‘A man has to have a hobby,’ he muttered to himself, as he stared down the tunnel of his headlights. ‘Especially when he has such a damned morbid job as mine!’

He rather envied the Dumases’ way of life at that idyllic estate, though he still had the impression that there was some sort of serpent in that Garden of Eden that prevented them from being totally contented.

Just as the orders to investigate the pickled head had cascaded down through the Birmingham police hierarchy, the fact that it had been found climbed back up the same route. When it reached the ACC early that afternoon, he called in his chief superintendent, Simon Black, and asked him what they were going to do about it.

‘Is it a murder or not?’ he demanded. ‘So far, we have no evidence at all to show that this head belongs to this body in Wales.’

The CID chief agreed. ‘But the Welsh corpse has to be a murder, according to the local force. Their pathologist down there says the chap was strangled… and anyway, who’s going to bury a headless corpse unless it was unlawfully killed?’

‘What does this fellow who kept the head in his shed have to say about it? Has he coughed as to its identity?’

The chief super shrugged. ‘The DI started on him this morning, but in view of the strange nature of the whole affair, he decided to refer it up here to see how we wanted to play it.’

‘What do you think, Simon? Do you want to handle it yourself or send a DS or a DCI down there?’

Simon Black shook his head. ‘The local DI, Trevor Hartnell, is a sound man, plenty of experience. And he knows his own patch best. It would be a pity to take it off him now, at least until we know where we are with it.’

‘Getting that damned head examined is the obvious priority, to see if it does belong to that corpse in sheep-shagger country.’

His chief detective agreed. ‘Seems most sensible to ask the same pathologist to come up and have a look at it. He’s in the best position to know if they match.’

The orders went out, one down to Hartnell telling him to get on with grilling Olly Franklin and the other to the police in Cardiganshire, informing them of the latest developments and asking them to arrange for Doctor Pryor to come up to Birmingham at his earliest convenience.

In Aberystwyth, David John Jones called Meirion into his office as soon as he had put the phone down.

‘They’ve found the head! Good thing Gwyn Parry’s brother-in-law has such good contacts. It had been in some pub as was suspected, but turned up in the licensee’s shed, of all places.’

‘What happens now?’ asked his detective inspector.

‘Birmingham suggest, quite sensibly, that Doctor Pryor goes up there to examine it, so can you ring him and fix a time. You’d better be there yourself, I think, to keep up to date on our behalf. The head is being taken to the central mortuary behind the coroner’s court in Newton Street, so they said.’

This sparked a question in Meirion’s mind. ‘Which coroner will have to deal with the death, I wonder?’

The DCC turned up his hands in doubt. ‘Beats me! We’ve got the biggest bit — that’s assuming they belong together. I still can’t understand how they came to be a hundred miles apart!’

Meirion Thomas made for the door, going back to his office to start phoning around. Then he stopped for a last question.

‘What about the Yard? Do we have to tell them?’

David Jones growled something under his breath, then sighed. ‘Have to, I suppose. Maybe they won’t bother to come back here, if a big force like Birmingham is involved.’

When his DI had gone out, he swung round in his chair and glowered through his window at the inoffensive Irish Sea outside.

‘Why the hell should the damned English use our bog as a cemetery?’ he muttered.

In the police station in Winson Green, DI Hartnell and his sergeant were hard at it, trying to prise information out of Olly Franklin. A night in the cells had done little to soften his stubborn truculence, but Trevor Hartnell had been flattered by the trust his seniors had shown in his abilities and was determined to get something out of the ex-publican, even if it meant reaching down his throat.

They sat in a dismal interview room, with damp-stained green walls looking down on a bare table and chairs.

Tom Rickman sat alongside his ‘guv’nor’, notebook and pencil on the table before him, as Hartnell began all over again.

‘Look, Olly, whatever happens, you’re in the shit over this. But if you come clean, it’ll be in your favour, right?’

‘You don’t want an accessory-to-murder charge slapped on you, do you?’ contributed the sergeant. ‘So far, you’re up for concealing a death and obstructing the coroner, but they’re not exactly hanging offences. Why don’t you keep it that way?’

‘I don’t know nothing — well, hardly nothing,’ growled the red-faced man opposite. ‘There was just this old drum in the pub cellar and I got stuck with it.’

‘You could have gone round the nick next day and reported it,’ snapped Hartnell.

Franklin sneered at this. ‘Oh yes, I’m likely to have done that, after Mickey Doyle told me to hang on to it. That would earn a beating or even a shiv across my face.’

‘Well, you’re here in the nick now, so you may as well cough for us,’ snapped Hartnell. ‘Why did Doyle want you to keep the thing?’

Olly stared down at the scarred table-top for a long moment, then sighed and leaned back in his chair.

‘OK, I’ll tell you what I know, but it ain’t much, honest. And it was years ago now.’

Rickman opened his notebook and poised his pencil in anticipation, as the other man began to speak.

‘Look, you know as well as I do that Mickey Doyle was a villain — and he ran a gang of villains. You knocked off a few of them now and then, but others just popped up in their place.’

The DI nodded. ‘We know that, what’s your point?’

‘He was into all sorts of things — theft, protection rackets, running tarts, illegal gambling — though I never heard he was into drugs. Then until things eased off after the war, black market was the big earner and Doyle was a big player in that.’

‘Thanks for the lecture, Olly,’ said the sergeant sarcastically. ‘Now tell us something we don’t know!’

The chippie scowled at him. ‘I’m getting to that, ain’t I? There was one thing about Mickey, he was a stickler for discipline among those who worked for him. He was a big bugger and I’ve seen him punch a guy to the floor in the pub, just for some fault in working the rackets. I even heard he had some guy’s legs broken years ago, for holding back some of the loot in a black-market scam.’

The two detectives waited, as Olly seemed to be painfully approaching something of use to them.

‘So where does this head come into it?’ demanded Hartnell.

‘It was before my time at the Barley Mow, but I heard that one of his thugs was actually topped for trying to rip Mickey off, big time! I don’t know how, nor who, nor if it was Mickey himself that did it, but he ended up dead.’

‘When was this?’ rasped Rickman, lifting his pencil.

‘Must have been when the war was still on, but towards the end. Anyway, what I heard from gossip between the villains in my bar was that part of this fellow’s job was to go round the illegal gambling joints run by Doyle and collect the takings. Turned out that he had a fiddle going on with some of the guys who ran the dens, so that they creamed off a part of the collection for themselves.’

‘And Doyle eventually found out?’ said Hartnell.

‘Yes, so the story goes. Mickey had him done away with, but as a warning to the rest of his foot soldiers, he had the head kept and used to display it now and then to keep them in line.’

The sergeant threw down his pencil. ‘Sounds a bloody far-fetched yarn to me!’ he growled. ‘Like something out of a Mickey Spillane novel.’

The former licensee shrugged. ‘You asked me, mate, so I’m telling you what I heard. Doyle wouldn’t let me get rid of the thing in case he wanted to use it again.’

Trevor Hartnell fixed Franklin with his hard blue eyes.

‘And you say he used to parade this horrible thing in front of his men in your pub?’

Olly nodded his ponderous head. ‘A few times, when I first went to the Barley Mow after the war. He used the function room upstairs for a booze-up now and then. It was usually after they made a good haul after some big heist. I remember one was after they had nicked a couple of lorry-loads of sheep from somewhere down in the country — couldn’t get much good meat during rationing.’

‘Did you see him showing off this head?’

‘No, he didn’t let anyone in the room. I had to leave a barrel of beer and a stack of food and spirits in there for them.’

‘And you claim you’ve no idea who this bloke was that he had topped?’ demanded Hartnell.

Olly shook his head and replied vehemently. ‘Not a clue — and I damned well didn’t want to know, either! Keep a tight mouth anywhere around Mickey Doyle, that was the golden rule.’

‘So who would know, Olly?’

The burly publican toyed nervously with the lid of a cocoa tin that served as an ashtray on the table in front of him.

‘Well, Doyle himself, I suppose. I don’t know who’s in his gang these days, I keep well clear.’

‘Mickey did a bunk to the Costa del Sol last year, Olly, things were getting a bit hot for him here. And there’s no extradition from Spain. So who else can we ask, eh?’

Franklin looked furtively around the room, as if some criminal eavesdropper might be lurking in a corner.

‘The only bloke from the old days still around is Billy Blair,’ he confided.

Tom Rickman threw down his pencil with a clatter.

‘Billy Blair! Well, at least we know where to find that bastard! He’s a quarter of a mile away, inside Winson Green Prison.’

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