Where Death Delights

SIX

‘Why don’t I drive you down there, Doc?’ offered Jimmy Jenkins. ‘It’s a long ’ole journey and you want to be fresh to do your duty when you gets there, eh?’

It was Wednesday evening and Pryor had arranged to carry out the second post-mortem at noon the next day, having made all the arrangements through the coroner’s officer in Gowerton, appropriately named PC Mort.

Richard wasn’t all that keen on Jimmy’s suggestion, but Angela thought it a good idea.

‘You’re paying him to do odds and ends about the place, but there’s no hurry about the gardening, so he might as well make himself useful driving you,’ she pointed out.

He gave in and at half past eight next morning, they left for the three-hour drive. Richard refused point-blank to sit in the back as if he was a grandee with a chauffeur and sat alongside Jimmy, where he could keep an eye on his driving.

He was soon aware that the man was an excellent driver, for he learned that Jimmy had spent much of the war behind the wheel of a three-ton Bedford, trundling across North Africa and then Italy.

‘How are you getting on with the little widow woman, Doctor?’ he asked. ‘Nice little lady, she is! Do her good to get out and about a bit more, she’s been keeping too much to herself since her husband died.’

He seemed to know everyone’s business from top to bottom of the Wye Valley.

‘She’s doing fine,’ said Richard sincerely. ‘At least we’re eating proper food now, not stuff out of tins! I understand her husband died in an accident.’

‘Blown to bits, he was!’ said Jimmy with ghoulish drama. ‘Some chemical factory up near Lydney. Time she had a bit of cheerful company, after the bad time she’s been through. Mind, that Sian will cheer her up, she’s always on the go, ain’t she?’

As Bridgend was left behind, Richard sat and studied the countryside, seeing things he missed when he was driving. It was more relaxed, he had to admit, though he resolved in future only to let Jimmy drive on long-distance trips. Talking of Moira Davison got him thinking about her – she seemed perfect for the job and he only hoped she stayed. He had known secretaries in the past to give up when they had to type post-mortem reports with descriptions of horrible injuries or decomposed corpses. Moira was very well organized, setting a routine on the first couple of days which first ensured that any office work was done, then the beds made and the lunch prepared, with some cleaning in the afternoon and more typing if it was there.

He sensed that both Angela and Sian were slightly wary of the new employee, though they were unfailingly friendly and pleasant to her. It never occurred to him that he might be the cause of this watchfulness, as they waited to see how his attitude to her developed.

Pryor had been married for nine years until his divorce in Singapore last year – it was one of the factors that persuaded him to take the ‘golden handshake’ and return to Britain. He had met Miriam, five years younger than himself, when he was serving in Ceylon. She was a civilian radiographer attached to the military hospital in Colombo. Later, he found that the old adage ‘marry in haste, repent at leisure’ was all too true and after a honeymoon year, things started to go downhill. She went with him to Singapore when hostilities finished and stayed for several years when he took the civilian post.

But after a series of ‘affairs’, she left him and went back to England, the final break coming with the divorce a year ago.

Though by no means celibate since the divorce, he had no burning desire to marry again. Ruefully, he thought that he now had no lack of feminine company, with three women under the same roof most of the time!

His reverie took them further towards Swansea and soon they were looking for the mortuary, which the coroner’s officer had told him was in The Strand. This turned out to be a dismal street between the lower part of the town and the river, which in former times had been a quayside. The mortuary was housed in one arch of a disused railway viaduct, each end being blocked off with brickwork, that on the street side having large double doors. Jimmy parked outside and declared that he was going off for an hour to find a pub.

Pryor knocked on the door and it creaked open to reveal a small, dark-haired man who announced himself as the coroner’s officer. There were two other men present, who PC Mort introduced as Dr O’Malley and Detective Inspector Lewis. The other pathologist was about seventy, burly and red in the face, dressed in an old-fashioned blue suit with high lapels. He seemed an amiable enough man and had a marked Irish accent when he told Richard, with tongue in his cheek, that he still did a few coroner’s cases to finance his membership of his golf club. Pryor thought that it was very likely that the coroner was also a member of the same club.

The local detective was another small man, middle-aged and with thick dark hair coming low on his forehead.

‘The coroner had a word with my ‘super’ and he thought it best if I came along, in case anything significant turned up,’ he explained.

The arch was divided into two halves, the outer part containing an old cold cabinet like the one in Monmouth, only larger. It was a ‘walk-in’ type without racks and looked as if it had originally come from a butcher’s shop. Beyond a door in the central partition of the arch lay the post-mortem area, merely a porcelain slab raised on two brick pillars, with a sink and a table against the walls. A dusty fluorescent light hung by chains from the distant roof. Standing by the table was a tall, stooped man with a walrus moustache, already attired in a long red rubber apron and thick rubber gloves that came almost to his elbows.

‘This is Mr Foster, from a local undertaker’s,’ explained Patrick O’Malley. ‘He’s really an embalmer, but he comes down to help here when required.’

Foster bobbed his head and muttered a greeting, then went outside to pull a trolley from the fridge. He slid the sheeted body on to the table whilst Richard opened his case on the table and then put on an apron. There were several pairs of grubby rubber boots under the sink and he chose a pair of short, white ones which looked as if they were rejects from a hospital operating theatre.

Foster removed the sheet from the body and to complete the legal formalities of continuity of evidence, should it ever be required, PC Mort confirmed it was the mortal remains of Linda Prentice.

‘I’ve no doubt it was a drowning,’ volunteered the older pathologist, as Pryor began to examine the body externally. ‘There was no froth at the mouth and nostrils, but plenty down in the air passages.’

He was slightly defensive, which was natural enough when a colleague was being hired to pick any holes in his opinion that could be found.

Richard nodded. ‘As she wasn’t found for a couple of days, that’s not surprising,’ he agreed. ‘Were all these marks like this when you examined her?’

He pointed with a gloved finger at a number of scratches and areas of peeled skin on the forehead, nose, arms and legs. O’Malley came near, bending forwards to keep his suit clear of the table. He peered at the superficial injuries, his glasses on the end of his nose.

‘They’re much more obvious now, of course,’ he observed. ‘But that’s to be expected after all this time. I did my examination a week ago.’

He was correct, thought Richard, as bruises could ‘come out’, as his grandmother used to say, and appear more prominent after a day or two.

Richard got Foster to turn the body on its side, holding the upper arm so that the pathologist could look at the back, where there were more irregular scratches, some in long tracks.

‘Where she was recovered was a very rocky place,’ offered O’Malley, still rather defensively. ‘Deep gullies with the tide surging up and down. The rocks are sharp there and those limpets and barnacles make it even worse.’

‘Some bruises as well,’ Richard pointed out. He recalled that O’Malley had not listed the injuries in any detail in his brief report to the coroner, but that was not unusual in a non-forensic autopsy in which there was no suspicion of foul play. O’Malley peered again at some small areas of discoloration on the arms, neck and face, which varied from blue and purple through to pale green and yellow.

‘Banging about on those damned rocks, no doubt!’ he declared. ‘I’ve seen it too often around this coast, it can be a very dangerous place.’

Richard made no reply, he was keeping all his options open. He produced a few instruments from his capacious bag and began reopening the neat stitching made by Foster at the first post-mortem. Carefully, he went through all the organs again, O’Malley being keen to point out the water-logging of the lungs which was still very apparent. Pryor took some small tissue samples from various organs into pots of formalin which he always carried in his bag, then turned his attention to the head. PC Mort and the CID man watched impassively as he felt all over the scalp with his fingers and parted the damp hair to look at the skin beneath.

‘I didn’t think it worth disturbing the poor lady more than necessary,’ said O’Malley, as the other doctor took a scalpel and began shaving the auburn hair from several small patches near the back point of the head. Again, Pryor recognized that many pathologists – and other doctors who still did coroner’s work – frequently omitted to open the skull and examine the brain in cases where another cause of death seemed glaringly obvious.

‘Some more bruising here,’ he commented, standing back so that O’Malley could lean in and look at a couple of bluish stains under the scalp, each about the size of a two-shilling piece.

The Irishman grunted. ‘They’re rough old places, those rock gullies. Perhaps you ought to have a trip out there to have a look at them.’

Richard remembered them well enough from his student trips to Gower – including one where he and a nurse from Cardiff Royal Infirmary spent a cosy afternoon lying in the grass above one of those gullies.

He stood back for a few minutes while Foster incised the scalp and removed the skullcap with a hand saw, though not making such a neat job of it as Solly Evans at Chepstow.

Richard spent a few minutes in making detailed notes on a clipboard, recording the position and size of each mark on a printed outline of a body, back and front, using a celluloid ruler to measure the exact dimensions of the injuries. Then he looked carefully at the inside of the scalp, taking more tissue samples, and then at the skull itself, before removing the brain and examining that on the draining board of the sink.

Finally, he managed with some difficulty to get a clean blood sample from one of the leg veins and some urine from the bladder, which O’Malley had not opened.

‘That for analysis, Doctor?’ asked Lewis Lewis, the detective inspector, the first time he had spoken since they began.

Pryor nodded. ‘I’d better fill in some exhibits labels and sign them, just in case,’ he murmured and fished in his case for some buff luggage labels. ‘I’ll check for alcohol and anything else relevant,’ he said. ‘Though in drowning, the dilution of the blood by absorbed water spoils any accuracy. Still, the urine should be OK.’

O’Malley grasped at his words thankfully.

‘So you agree with me that she drowned, Doctor Pryor?’

‘I do indeed, no doubt about it,’ he replied, thinking that this was safe ground, whatever else might materialize. After settling the tip with Foster – he reckoned the coroner’s officer had already had his pound of flesh from O’Malley – he said goodbye to them all and went out to where Jimmy was sitting in the car, reading the Daily Mirror.

‘All set, Doctor?’ enquired his driver.

‘I’m starving, did you see a café on your travels?’ Dissecting bodies had never yet put him off his food and they walked around to Wind Street where Jimmy had noticed a ‘Bracchi’ establishment, the South Walian nickname for an Italian café. He had a ham omelette and treated his driver to bacon, beans and egg, all with chips, a plate of bread and butter and a pot of tea.

‘Funny old town, this,’ observed Jimmy. ‘Can’t decide whether it’s ancient or modern!’

From what he’d seen of the place, Richard knew what he meant – the remains of a Norman castle and the oldest pub in Wales just up the street, but with ugly modern buildings springing up amongst the wide acres of bomb damage that had completely destroyed the town centre.

‘It’s called progress, Jimmy,’ he sighed. ‘And we may be seeing quite a bit more of Swansea and district before long.’

At a loose end, now that her current batch of analyses was finished, Sian wandered over to Angela’s bench and stood watching what the biologist was doing.

‘That’s this diatom test, is it?’ she asked, always eager to learn something new.

‘Pull up a stool,’ invited Angela. ‘You’d better learn how to do this, in case I’m away when Richard needs one urgently.’

The technician watched as the older woman took a conical-bottomed test tube from a rack, containing a clear yellow liquid with a button of brown deposit in the tip. She sucked off most of the upper fluid with a teat-ended pipette, discarded it and then tapped the tube with a fingernail to mix the deposit into what was left.

‘I don’t really understand the principles of this test,’ confessed Sian. ‘How can it help diagnose drowning?’

Angela carefully sucked up a single drop of the fluid with another pipette and placed it in the centre of a glass microscope slide, covering it with a wafer-thin glass cover-slip.

‘It’s still not accepted by everyone, but I think it’s reliable if done carefully,’ she said. ‘When someone drowns in water containing these microscopic algae called diatoms, it goes down their windpipe and into the lungs, taking the diatoms with it.’

‘So if they’re dead, there’s no breathing, so the diatoms can’t be found in the lungs!’

Angela laughed. ‘I wish it was that easy! No, even if you throw a corpse into the river, the water still percolates down into the lungs. So finding diatoms in lungs doesn’t mean anything.’

‘So what’s the point of looking?’ demanded Sian, pointing to the tube, which had a label saying ‘Lung’.

‘To check that the water actually contains diatoms, though we always look at a water sample as well. If it doesn’t, there’s no point in looking further. Some waters don’t, though even tap water often contains a few, especially if the pipe hasn’t been used for a time.’

She pointed at the test-tube rack, where there were three other tubes. Sian looked at them and read the names written in grease-pencil… marrow, liver, kidney.

‘Are these what you’ve been boiling up in the fume cupboard?’ she asked.

‘Yes, you have to dissolve little samples of internal organs taken at the post-mortem in nitric acid, which gets rid of all the organic material and leaves the diatoms.’

‘Why don’t they vanish as well, then?’ demanded the knowledge-hungry technician.

‘Because they’ve got a shell of silica, which resists the acid. Now, if the victim drowns, then these tiny things get into the lungs and some penetrate the lining, they’re so small. The heart is still beating, so they get carried off in the blood stream and get filtered out in the bone marrow, liver, spleen, and kidneys.’

Light dawned in Sian’s mind. ‘Ah, I see! So you can tell if it was a live body or a dead body that went into the water. That’s really clever!’

Angela smiled at her enthusiasm. ‘Hang on a minute! It’s not all that simple. You have to find a good number of diatoms in the target organs, not just the odd one or two, because we’ve all got some knocking around inside us. They are wafting around in the air, dust from all sorts of places. Filter material, toothpaste, chicken farm litter – it’s everywhere.’

‘You mean I’m breathing the damned things in even now?’ demanded Sian.

‘Probably… a researcher in a London hospital examined the air-conditioning filters on the roof and found plenty of diatoms in them. And because the sea is full of them as well, a chap from Norway found that eating shellfish produced plenty in the organs, as they can penetrate the wall of the gut!’

Sian looked dubiously at the slides that Angela was preparing from the other tubes.

‘So is it worth doing?’ she asked.

‘Sure, if you can find a heavy penetration, especially in the bone marrow – and they match up with what’s in the water – then it’s good evidence of live entry.’

‘What d’you mean, “match up”?’

‘There are thousands of different types of diatom, which vary from place to place. If those in the organs have a similar mix to those in the lungs or the water sample, then it adds to the probability that they weren’t just strays, especially if there are a lot of them.’

She began looking down the eyepieces of the microscope at the slide from the lungs. ‘There we are! Plenty in the River Wye, have a look at those.’

She leaned aside to allow Sian to look and as she twiddled the fine focus knobs, the technician gave an exclamation.

‘They’re so pretty! Like little bananas or boats or pillboxes, with lace patterns on them.’

‘Now have a look at the kidney extract, see if there are any there. It might take some time.’

Sian used the stage controls to move the slide around and eventually gave a cry of triumph. ‘Got ’em! Once you get your eye in, it’s easy.’

Angela took her place and soon agreed that all the samples had diatoms which were a similar mix to that in the lung. ‘So we can tell Richard that this chap undoubtedly drowned, though he probably knows that already. Still, it’s nice to have a belt-and-braces confirmation.’

Sian went back to her own bench, happy that she had acquired a bit more forensic mystique.

That afternoon, Trevor Mitchell had again gone to see Molly Barnes in Ledbury. She was not pleased to see him and she later told her sister Emily, who lived further up the street, that if she had known who it was, she wouldn’t have opened the door to him.

‘Bloody cheek of the man – and that lawyer fellow who wrote to me!’ she protested.

‘What did he want this time?’ asked Emily, who had a soft spot for her brother-in-law Albert. She privately wondered if he had just done a runner to get away from her difficult sister. He had once admitted to her that he had a lady friend in Hereford.

‘Want? Only Albert’s medical records,’ said Molly, indignantly. ‘At first I told him to get lost, but he said the coroner was in agreement and that because it had been an open verdict at the inquest, he could reopen it if he wasn’t satisfied.’

Emily nodded sagely. ‘You can’t beat the system, Molly. It would look bad if you refused. They’d think you had something to hide.’

Emily was inclined to think that her sister did have something to hide, but she didn’t know what. Since Albert had vanished, Molly had ‘taken up’ with a fellow from the other side of town and she wanted to get married, as soon as she could. The coroner had given her a paper to take to the Registrar for a death certificate, but now it looked as if someone had thrown a spanner in the works.

‘So what did you do?’ she persisted.

‘I didn’t have much choice, did I?’ snapped her sister. ‘I can’t see what medical records from years ago have got to do with this. It was only a little accident at work.’

‘Only a little accident?’ squeaked Emily. ‘He was knocked out and spent a night in the County Hospital.’

‘I still don’t see what they want them for,’ she said sullenly. ‘That private snooper said I should have told the inquest that he had been in hospital once.’

The private snooper in question drove away with a sheet of paper in his pocket, signed by Mrs Barnes, giving consent to an inspection of her late husband’s medical notes. Trevor Mitchell had been told by John Christie that if it came to the crunch, the coroner could demand that the hospital produce the records, but it would be easier if the widow agreed.

As he had to pass through Hereford on his way home, he thought he might as well call into the County on the way. It was on the eastern side of the historic city and he parked and made his way to the Records Department, tucked away at the back.

The woman at the desk looked askance at the letter he produced and went off to talk to someone higher up the bureaucratic tree.

‘I can’t give you these, sir,’ she said officiously, when she returned. ‘It’s quite out of order. How do I know who you are?’

‘Do you know PC Christie, the coroner’s officer? He must come in here now and then for records.’

She softened a little. ‘Of course I know John Christie. What’s he got to do with it?’

‘If you can’t give them to me, you’ll have to give them to him on the coroner’s order,’ he said patiently. ‘Then he’ll give them to me.’

Long experience of people on the other side of her counter told her that this man was – or had been – a police officer.

‘I’ll have to ring him, sir,’ she said half-heartedly.

‘Yes, a good idea. I’ll wait,’ he replied politely.

She vanished for a few moments and then came back.

‘It’ll take some time, these are a few years old.’

Trevor Mitchell nodded. ‘I’ll go and get a cup of tea in the canteen. Half an hour be alright?’

When he came back, there was a thin brown paper folder waiting for him.

‘The Records Officer says you can’t remove it from the hospital, but you can look at it here,’ she announced with a note of triumph in her voice. ‘Only the coroner can have it taken away.’

Mitchell sighed, but pulled out his notepad and leaned on the counter to copy every word. It was not difficult, as the notes were only one and half pages long. He didn’t understand some of the words, but transcribed them faithfully for Doctor Pryor to see.

Thanking the clerk with exaggerated courtesy, he left, wondering if the whole afternoon had been a waste of time. He drove his Wolseley back to Monmouth and then down the valley, deciding that instead of turning off near the bridge to go up to St Brievals, he might as well call at Garth House to show the doctor what he had found.

As he drove into the back yard, he saw that the Humber had also just arrived and Richard Pryor was hauling his black case into the house. Invited into the kitchen for a cup of tea, Trevor saw a new face, a neat woman with dark hair, who was just hanging up her pinafore.

‘This is our new recruit,’ said Richard heartily. ‘Mrs Davison is our housekeeper, cook, secretary and general factotum! Moira, meet Trevor Mitchell, the Wye Valley’s answer to Sherlock Holmes!’

Mitchell grinned as he shook hands. ‘Is the doctor always like this?’ he asked.

Moira gave him a lovely smile. ‘It looks that way, but I’ve only been here a couple of days!’ She turned to her employer. ‘I’ve left the rest of the cottage pie in the fridge for your supper, Doctor. Just heat it up in the oven – and there’s a new tin of Campbell’s oxtail in the cupboard if you fancy soup to start.’

She took a light jacket from a hanger on the back of the door and slipped it on. ‘Nice to have met you, Mr Mitchell. I’m sure we’ll see you often.’

Trevor hoped so too, as she smiled again and went out into the yard.

‘Nice woman, that,’ he said appreciatively, then waved his notebook at Pryor. ‘I’ve managed to copy Albert Barnes’s hospital record, what there is of it.’

Richard wet the tea and set cups and saucers on the kitchen table. ‘Angela’s in the lab, I’ll give her a call, she might want to hear this.’

A few minutes later the three heads were bent over the notebook, studying two pages of Trevor’s neat handwriting.

‘Not much help is it?’ commented Angela, when they had read to the end.

Richard summarized what it said. ‘He was admitted to Casualty after being struck in the railway siding by an empty truck that was rolling down an incline. Thrown to the ground, bruised chest and arm, two fractured ribs and a laceration of his scalp needing six stitches. Mild concussion, admitted overnight for observation. Discharged himself late next day, ribs strapped up, dressings on head wound, told to go to GP if any problems and to come back in ten days for the sutures to be removed.’

‘What did you expect to find from hospital records that would help in identifying him?’ asked the ever-critical Angela.

Richard shrugged, his lean face scowling at Mitchell’s handwriting in the book. ‘Well, say he’d had a fractured leg – that could have left a deformity on the bone that the pathologist might have noticed – some callus, for instance.’

‘What’s callus?’ asked the detective.

‘It’s a lump of calcified stuff that forms around a break to join the two parts of the broken bone together. It gradually absorbs over months or years, but usually leaves some permanent sign, especially on X-ray.’

‘Nothing here like that,’ said Angela. ‘Neither did the Hereford pathologist mention any old injuries.’

‘So we’re no further forward,’ growled Mitchell, obviously disappointed that his efforts had been in vain.

‘What’s this you’ve written here, in the clinical examination?’ asked Pryor, jabbing a finger at the notebook.

Trevor peered over Richard’s shoulder. ‘It says ‘pec.rec’, that’s all. I don’t know what it means, I just copied what was in the original notes.’

‘Pec.rec?’ asked Angela. ‘What’s that mean, for heaven’s sake?’

The pathologist shrugged. ‘Search me, it’s no medical term I’ve ever heard of. The doctor who examined him, whoever he was, has just written it down at the end of his external examination, before he goes on to say that the heart and lungs seem normal.’

‘Could it be of any use to us?’ asked Mitchell.

‘Until we know what it means, there’s no way of telling. It might be worth asking the chap who wrote this, what he meant by it.’

Angela looked at the date on the notes. ‘It’s seven years ago. That doctor might have drained his brain to Canada or Australia by now.’

‘Was his name on the original notes?’ asked Richard.

Trevor shook his head. ‘No, only the name of the consultant who he was admitted under that day.’

Pryor slapped his fingers on the edge of the table. ‘That’s good enough! The hospital staff records will show who worked for that consultant at that time. It would have been a house officer or a senior house officer admitting patients on surgical intake. We could track him down through the Medical Directory.’

‘A lot of effort for two little words which may mean nothing useful,’ said Angela dubiously.

Trevor drank his tea and got up to leave. ‘Next time I’m near Hereford, I’ll call in and make some enquiries. Nothing ventured, nothing gained,’ he added, philosophically. ‘When I was in the CID, we sometimes got a result from snippets just as unlikely as pec.rec!’

After their meal that evening, Richard and Angela brought a couple of chairs from the office and sat on the tiled area outside the front porch, between the two bay windows. It was a glorious evening, the setting sun lighting the opposite side of the valley, making the dense woods glow in different shades of green. He had unearthed a bottle of Gordon’s gin from one of the boxes in his room and with some tonic water that Moira had thoughtfully added to the shopping list, they spent a peaceful hour relaxing.

The woman stretched out her legs luxuriously.

‘Quite a change from my flat in New Cross, with the fog coming up from the river and the noise of the traffic outside.’

‘I though you lived in posh Blackheath,’ observed Richard, lazily.

‘The estate agents always called it that, but really it was New Cross,’ she admitted. ‘But this is much nicer!’

The sat and sipped their gin for a time, watched the shadows change beyond the Wye as the sun slipped down.

‘People would take us for an old married couple,’ said Richard grinning at his partner.

Angela glared at him. ‘Don’t get any ideas, my lad!’ she growled. ‘We’re just business partners, remember?’

Her feelings towards him were ambivalent, she realized. Richard was an attractive enough fellow, in a lean and wiry sort of way. He was clever, honest as far as she knew and generous, but was given to swings of mood that were so unlike her steady temperament that she doubted she could put up with him in anything other than an arm’s length relationship. At the same time, she felt herself illogically irritated by the hero-worship attitude of Sian towards him – and even after only a few day’s acquaintance, the respectful and admiring manner of Moira Davison.

‘Right, tell me about today, we’ve not had a chance until now,’ she commanded.

Pryor described the strange mortuary in Swansea and the people he had met there, then summarized what he had found.

‘No doubt at all that she had drowned, it was just as obvious as that chap dragged out of the Wye at Chepstow,’ he said. ‘But I’m a bit concerned about some of the injuries on the body. I realize she was being bashed about on the rocks, but I need to know how old some of those bruises were. They certainly weren’t all fresh.’

‘Because of this story that the dead woman’s friend told to her father?’ asked Angela.

‘Yes, she reckoned that the daughter claimed that her husband was being violent because she wouldn’t agree to a divorce.’

Angela sipped her drink slowly as she pondered.

‘What are you going to tell Massey?’ she asked.

‘I’ve got to be cautious, I don’t want him rushing around yelling “murder” until I’ve had a chance to look at those injuries under the microscope.’

‘The funeral has been postponed once already. Can they hang on to the body even longer?’

‘That’s up to the coroner. If it does turn out to be suspicious, then I don’t see how he can allow it to be buried – certainly not cremated, as was the family’s intention.’

‘But there’s been a second post-mortem. Won’t that do as defence autopsy?’

‘No, because I’m acting for the father, who’s in the position of a complainant. If the husband was ever charged, then his defence lawyers would almost certainly want another opinion of their own, to counter mine.’

‘We’d better get it right then, laddie!’ said his partner, sagely. ‘When are you going to tell the father what’s going on?’

‘I hope Sian can manage some decent histology, but that will take a few days. I’ll have to say something to him before then, I’d better ring him tomorrow.’

They sat for a while longer, then Angela decided it was getting cooler as the sun went down. She stood up and collected the glasses, while Richard took the chairs back inside.

‘I forgot to tell, you, the coroner’s officer in Newport rang, he wanted to know if you could cover there from next week, as their chap is going on holiday. Sounds as if your pal Brian Meredith has been talking on the grapevine again.’

‘Newport? Should be quite a few cases there. Perhaps we’ll be able to afford another bottle of gin after all, partner!’

Next morning, Pryor had one routine post-mortem in Chepstow, but by mid-morning was back at Garth House, where Angela was busy with her paternity tests, checking blood groups of the mother and child against the putative father, who had denied that the child was his and therefore had no obligation to finance its upbringing. Sian was assembling her histology equipment, ready for Monday, when the tissues that Pryor had taken would be sufficiently fixed in formaldehyde for her to process them for examination under his new microscope. Unlike the big hospital laboratories, which were beginning to get the new automated processing machines, she would have to do it by hand, placing the tissues in jars of varying grades of alcohol and then xylene until they could be embedded in paraffin wax, ready for cutting into diaphanous slices, ready for staining.

Richard looked in briefly on this earnest labour, then backed out and went to the telephone, where he placed a trunk call to Leonard Massey’s chambers in London. Fortunately, the barrister was available to talk to him, as he had cancelled many of his commitments, due to this family tragedy. Carefully, Pryor summarized his post-mortem findings at Linda’s autopsy, emphasizing that these were provisional conclusions and would have to be further investigated over the next few days, possibly a week.

‘But you feel that some of these injuries were made before death, not in the sea?’ demanded Massey, well-used to interrogating witnesses.

‘Yes, but I don’t know yet how long before death – and I may never be at all accurate,’ answered Richard, cautiously.

‘This last letter that my daughter wrote to her friend Marjorie, was about ten days before she disappeared. Could they be that old?’

‘It’s possible. They would be unrelated to the events surrounding her death, so perhaps made during an assault. I can’t be more specific at this stage – and as I say, dating injuries is notoriously inaccurate.’

There was a silence over the miles of phone line between them, but Richard could sense the wheels going round in Massey’s head.

‘So where does that leave us, Doctor?’ he asked eventually. ‘What am I to say to the coroner and the police?’

‘I need at least a few days to check on these wounds. I’m afraid that these laboratory investigations inevitably take time. It’s not my place to become involved in the legal aspects, but I doubt that the coroner would want to hold on to the body after two post-mortems, given the tenuous evidence we have so far.’

Massey seemed of the same opinion. ‘Naturally, my wife and I are distressed enough as it is without having to again delay laying poor Linda to rest. Do you see any merit in postponing burial any longer?’

Richard shook his head at the telephone, even though the recipient was over a hundred miles away.

‘I think I have every sample that is necessary, Mr Massey. I doubt the coroner would grant a cremation order in the circumstances, but I see no reason why you could not go ahead with a burial, if he agrees.’

This was because the slight possibility of an exhumation existed, should any future defence lawyer insist on a further opinion.

Massey switched to another aspect of the case.

‘I’d like to know more about this alleged affair that Michael Prentice was having with some woman. I presume she was down in South Wales, so do you happen to know any reputable enquiry agent who could get some information?’

Richard was happy to be able to recommend Trevor Mitchell, telling him that the former detective superintendent was working with him on another case. He gave Mitchell’s phone number to Massey and they left it at that for the moment, Richard promising to send a written preliminary report that day and keep him informed the following week about the results of the microscopic examination.

He sought out Moira in the kitchen, where she was preparing a couple of trout for lunch, new potatoes and peas already waiting in saucepans on the Aga cooker.

She always slipped home for an hour at lunchtime, as it was only five minutes away and she wanted to feed her cat.

‘When you come back, can you type out a report on this Swansea case and get it in the post tonight?’ he asked. ‘I’ll write it out in longhand now and leave it in the office.’

‘I can take shorthand, if you ever need it,’ she offered.

Richard grinned and made a show of sniffing the air like a Bisto Kid. ‘I’d rather you finished making our lunch, thanks all the same!’

As she went back to flouring the glistening fish, she had another suggestion.

‘A lot of offices now are using these small tape recorders, Doctor. I’ve seen a portable one in a little carrying case that you can take around with you and record straight into it when you do your work.’

Moira used the term delicately, still not quite used to his macabre occupation.

‘A good idea, when we get some cash under our belt, we’ll think about it. There’s so much stuff we need, it’s frightening.’ As he went back to his room to start writing, he thought of the shopping list that Angela had for the laboratory, especially on the chemistry side. It would take a lot of mortuary work and paternity tests before they could even think of some of that equipment.

With a sigh, he sat down and pulled out his fountain pen.

An hour later, Moira was clattering away on her new Olivetti, copying Richard’s draft report. He had good handwriting for a doctor, and she had no difficulty in transcribing it, even the unfamiliar medical terms.

After only a few days, she was enjoying her new job very much – it was a strange one, a little housework, some cooking and now this, describing the dissected remains of a young woman. After several years of mourning and apathy for her lost husband, she felt as if life could restart properly once again and she was grateful to the inhabitants of Garth House for giving her this unexpected opportunity. She realized that Doctor Bray was slightly wary of her, though she was friendly and communicative enough. Moira also knew that this might be due to an almost subliminal feeling of competition over Richard Pryor – she had not yet worked out what the relationship was between the two partners, or what it might develop into in the future.

As she was typing away and musing on the new turn her life had taken, Richard was answering the telephone in the hall. He had earlier brought a spare stool from the kitchen to put alongside the small table that carried the heavy black instrument, as he anticipated spending a lot of time there until the GPO got around to putting in some extensions in the other rooms.

It was the Gower coroner on the line, a local solicitor called Donald Moses. He had just been contacted by Leonard Massey about Richard’s preliminary findings.

‘This leaves me in a difficult position, Doctor,’ he said, sounding rather agitated. ‘If I feel there is any substance in these suspicions raised by Mr Massey, then I’m bound to pass the matter to the police.’

Pryor repeated what he had told Massey, that he could not be more specific until he had examined the sections of the bruises under the microscope, which could not be until sometime the following week.

‘There was a detective present at the post-mortem,’ he added. ‘But he just verified the continuity of the samples I took and I didn’t discuss any findings with him, they are too uncertain at present.’

Donald Moses sighed. ‘Mr Massey is very persistent, I’m afraid. But I don’t want to start a wild goose chase and then find it comes to nothing. To even approach the husband of the dead woman at this stage would be most unfortunate if nothing came of the matter.’

Richard saw a flaw in this argument.

‘But he must already know that something is going on, as the original funeral date was postponed for my examination?’

The coroner accepted this ‘He never contacted me to ask why, which is a little odd. I suspect that his father-in-law had it out with him. He’s a forceful personality, to say the least!’

Pryor wanted to avoid getting too involved in aspects that were none of his business.

‘I’ll be sending you a copy of my preliminary report today, it’s being typed as we speak. And as soon as I see the tissue sections, I’ll get back to you.’

The coroner seemed relieved by this breathing space.

‘I’ll hang fire until then, Doctor. But if you find nothing definite, I’m going to allow a burial to go ahead whenever the family want it. Mr Massey told me that you said you had all the material that was necessary.’

After he put the phone down, Richard sat on his hard stool for a few moments to think about the situation. It seemed that a lot might hang on his examination of the bruises next week, as the coroner was right in saying that it would be both embarrassing and unjust to start a possible murder investigation, based only on the angry dislike of a father-in-law, fuelled by a letter alleging a domestic dispute.

Well, he thought, there was nothing more he could do until Sian came up with the microscopic sections in a few days’ time, so he might as well enjoy the weekend.

He had seen in the newspaper that the new film Richard the Third, with Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud and Claire Bloom was playing in Cardiff and decided to go down on Saturday. He wondered if Angela would like to go with him – maybe they could hold hands in the back row, he thought facetiously!