Where Death Delights

SEVEN

As a Shakespearean performance was being played out in a Cardiff cinema, another drama was taking place in a Swansea hotel.

The Osborne was a small, but exclusive, hotel perched on the edge of a low cliff at Rotherslade. About six miles from the town centre, it was at the eastern end of the Gower peninsula, overlooking the popular Langland Bay.

In one of the best bedrooms, with a perfect sea view, a furious row was going on.

‘You’ve got a bloody nerve, interfering in my affairs like this!’ ranted Michael Prentice, his face suffused an angry red. He was a tall man, though not so heavily built as his father-in-law, who stood facing him in a colder type of fury.

‘Your affairs! That’s what’s led to this, according to Linda’s best friend,’ he responded scathingly.

‘Watch what you say, Leonard, or I’ll have you for slander, barrister or not!’ snarled the younger man, his handsome face contorted with hate. ‘You accuse me of assaulting my wife and I’ll break you!’

The two large men stood just inside the door, squaring up to each other like a pair of boxers before the fight.

‘Do you deny pushing and punching Linda when she discovered you were having it off with some tart?’ said Leonard, in intense but measured tones.

‘Don’t you call her a tart, damn you!’ howled Michael, then stopped dead, as he realized he had been tricked by the experienced advocate.

The Queen’s Counsel gave a cynical smile. ‘No use denying it now, Michael? Who is she?’

‘Mind your own damned business. If Linda and I did have a row, what’s that to you?’

‘As I’m her father, a great deal, blast you!’ rasped Massey, losing his temper for a moment. ‘She writes to her friend that you want a divorce and that you assaulted her, then within a couple of weeks, she ends up dead! Do you wonder that I feel that it’s my business?’

Prentice glowered at the barrister. ‘Are you accusing me of murder now, instead of assault? Good God, man, I could sue you for thousands for this!’

Massey looked around the room with exaggerated care.

‘Indeed? Where are the witnesses? I think you’ll be talking to people soon who have no fear of slander. I’m talking about the police, Michael.’

The younger man took a threatening step nearer Massey.

‘You wouldn’t dare, damn you! Your reputation would be ruined when the farce was exposed!’

The barrister did not flinch, but glared at his daughter’s husband with utter contempt. ‘It won’t be my decision, it’s up to the coroner. It’s his duty to report any suspicious circumstances to the CID. You’ll be getting a visit from them soon, I don’t doubt.’

He turned away and went to a table, where he picked up a cheque and handed it to the other man.

‘Meanwhile, we have to do the decent thing and see that my poor daughter is put to rest. The coroner will be calling you on Monday about a disposal order for burial, so this is for whatever funeral director you choose.’

Michael Prentice snatched the cheque and violently ripped it in half, dropping the pieces on the floor.

‘I don’t want your damned money, blast you! I can bury my own wife, thank you very much!’

He swung around, and went out, slamming the door behind him.

Massey stood for a moment looking down at the fragments of paper on the floor, then he took a diary from his breast pocket and looked up a telephone number. He went to the phone and asked for an outside line.

‘Is that Trevor Mitchell?… this is Leonard Massey.’

On Sunday, Richard Pryor spent much of the afternoon in his large plot behind the house. He was increasingly keen on starting a vineyard, in spite of Jimmy’s scathing remarks and with the help of a long tape measure, was pacing off a large patch about the size of two tennis courts.

In the house, Angela was standing in the window of one of the back bedrooms with a mug of coffee in her hand, watching him as he banged lengths of wood into the ground with a brick, making off the margins of his chosen area. She smiled, much as a mother would humour a child who wanted to build a spaceship in the garden.

‘Enjoy yourself, Richard, but it’ll never happen,’ she murmured. Probably by this time next year, he would be full of keeping turkeys or pigs there instead, or some other impulsive and equally impracticable scheme.

As she stood sipping her Nescafé, she idly tried to analyse her feelings towards him. It was a strange situation, she thought, living alone in a house with a man in a totally platonic relationship. Or was it all that platonic, she wondered?

Richard Pryor was an attractive fellow, with that frequent wry grin or a ready smile. He seemed free of any vices, never angry or sarcastic or mean-spirited. Impulsive, yes, and sometimes swinging between exuberance and depression, but his moods were like quicksilver, never lasting long. He sometimes needed pulling back from going down some irrelevant diversion, but on the whole, he was a really nice guy.

But what did she want with another really nice guy? The last one had left her in the lurch after four years’ apparent happiness, with an imminent walk up to the altar in view. No, she would try a bit of celibacy for a time, until something really special came along – and if it didn’t, well, she wasn’t going to risk another shaming debacle.

Looking out at Richard’s antics in the plot, she wondered what had gone wrong with his own love life. They had met at a forensic congress in Edinburgh last year and had hit it off from the first moment. Both recently crossed in love – or in his case, a bitter divorce – and she disgruntled with her employers, they had hatched this plan to set up in business together.

Angela mused over what might have gone wrong with his marriage. He had leaked out bits of information over the months, as he was much less secretive than she. Her private life was always played close to her chest, but he had told her that his wife Miriam had been playing the field with the limitless supply of men available in Singapore – the army officers and expatriate businessmen who abounded in the Singapore Swimming Club, the Golf Club and the famous hotels like Raffles.

Angela wondered if the fault had all been on Miriam’s side, but then decided that it was none of her business and that she should be glad that meeting him had led to her coming to live in this lovely valley in a job where she could be her own boss. Please God, let it succeed, she prayed to herself, as she finished her coffee and took one last look at a sweating Richard wielding his brick.

As she went downstairs to the kitchen with her empty mug, the phone started to ring again. Far from being irritated at a disturbed Sunday, she picked it up, knowing that it must be something to do with their business, as virtually no one else knew they were here.

It was Trevor Mitchell, another man she had taken to at first sight. A typical senior detective, he was impassive and dependable and though they had only met once, she liked him and trusted him, not like another senior detective who had let her down so badly.

‘What can we do for you, Mr Mitchell? Do you want to speak to Richard?’

‘Please call me Trevor, Doctor!’ he said. ‘And you’re in this bones job as much as him, so shall I tell you what I’ve found so far?’

She liked him even more for that, for not assuming that the male half of the partnership was the chief honcho.

‘Sure, Trevor, what’s new?’ she replied.

‘Remember those cryptic words on Albert Barnes’s medical notes? Well, I’ve tracked down the doctor that wrote them.’

‘That’s great!’ she enthused. ‘Who is he?

Mitchell explained that he had got John Christie to persuade the hospital to look up their staff records at the request of the coroner. The consultant mentioned in the notes had an SHO named Andrew Welton at the time of Barnes’s admission. By searching the Medical Register, he had found that he was currently a Senior Registrar in neurosurgery at Frenchay Hospital near Bristol.

‘Maybe Doctor Pryor could arrange to see him and take the notes, hoping that this chap would remember something about it?’

Angela promised to tell Richard and he would get back to him. ‘Anything else happening?’ she asked.

‘Yes, big stuff!’ replied Trevor enthusiastically. ‘A barrister called Massey rang me last night and said that Doctor Pryor had recommended me as an enquiry agent in a case he’s involved in. He’s going back from Swansea to London tomorrow and he’s breaking his journey at Newport to meet me and explain what it’s all about. All I know is that it’s an eternal triangle job.’

Angela gave a quick summary of the problem and their involvement, saying that Massey wanted to know more about this alleged ‘other woman’.

‘Well, it’s all grist to the mill – thank the doctor for mentioning me, I can see we’re going to be a good team!’

Angela told her partner about Trevor’s call, when he came in from his vineyard planning. ‘Would it be best if I went to see this chap in Frenchay or could I just ring him up?’ he asked.

‘I think you’ll have to see him, you could be anyone on the phone,’ she advised. ‘Maybe you ought to get a note from the coroner, as it concerns a patient’s confidential record, even if he is dead.’

‘Especially if he isn’t!’ added Richard, cynically.

Monday took Pryor to the large Royal Gwent Hospital in Newport, about fifteen miles away, where he was pleased to have the coroner’s work for the next fortnight while the resident pathologist was on holiday in Spain. It was a change to have a proper hospital mortuary to work in, rather than skulk in council yards or under boarded-up arches. There were three cases there that morning and after he had gone home and enjoyed another of Moira’s lunches, he drove up to Monmouth to deal with a single autopsy rung in by PC Christie.

‘Trevor Mitchell told you that we found the name of that surgeon at Hereford?’ asked Christie, as he was sewing up the victim of a carbon monoxide suicide who had killed himself with car-exhaust gas in his garage. Pryor nodded as he picked up the two pound notes that the coroner’s officer had left on the table.

‘Thanks for your help. I rang Frenchay this morning and I’m driving over tomorrow to see him. My partner thinks I should have some kind of authorization from the coroner to show him, so I’ll call on Dr Meredith after this and get some sort of billet-doux.’

Rather guiltily, he was glad that as it was mid-afternoon, he could avoid buying another expensive lunch for his portly friend. He found him in his surgery, just returned from house calls in time for his four o’clock clinic and explained the situation. As Meredith wrote out a quick authorization on a sheet of headed notepaper, the coroner asked about the likelihood of finding any more information.

‘I’ve never heard of this pec.rec either, Richard. It seems a bit unlikely that it’s relevant.’

‘I agree, but without something new, we’re not going to be able to twist your arm for consent to an exhumation,’ he admitted.

Next morning, armed with his piece of paper, Pryor drove to Bristol after another three-body stint at Newport. Rather than drive an extra sixty miles around Gloucester, he decided to take the Beachley-Aust ferry across the Severn, just above Chepstow. A ferry had been there from ancient times, being given to the monks of Tintern Abbey in the twelfth century.

Richard queued up behind a dozen cars at Beachley, a small village on the riverbank and waited for the return of the flat-bottomed vessel from Aust on the other side. Thankfully, it was not the busiest time of day and soon he was gingerly driving the Humber down the ramp on to the open deck. As they glided across the water on the Severn Queen, he wondered if this bridge they were talking about would ever be built.

Half an hour after reaching the muddy shore at Aust, he was turning into Frenchay Hospital. Originally an old sanatorium, it had been expanded into a military hospital for American servicemen during the war and now was a large general hospital providing various surgical specialities.

The head porter’s kiosk directed him to the neurosurgical department and as he trudged down long corridors in the wartime blocks of single-storey brick buildings, he wondered if Welton was still ‘Doctor’ or had advanced to ‘Mister’ in the strange way that British surgeons do after gaining the Fellowship of their Royal College, a memory of the times when surgeons were barbers, not proper physicians. He decided that as it was seven years since Welton had written those notes in Hereford, he must surely by now have passed his final examinations to land a job as Senior Registrar in these competitive times. When he eventually found the cubbyhole that was his office, a cardboard label on the door confirmed that it was indeed ‘Mr A Welton’.

The surgeon was a thin, rather haggard-looking man in his mid-thirties, with a cow-lick of fair hair hanging over his forehead. He had a strong Liverpool accent when he spoke. He greeted Pryor courteously and he spent a few moments reminiscing about Hereford and the Royal Army Medical Corps, in which Welton had done his two years’ National Service in Catterick.

Then Richard produced his coroner’s clearance and the copy of the County Hospital notes and they stood over a cluttered desk in the tiny room to look at them. The pathologist explained the problem and then pointed to the cryptic two words with his forefinger.

‘I’m sure you don’t recall Albert Barnes after all this time, but I wondered if you could explain this abbreviation – it’s a new one on me!’

Welton’s response was rather unusual. He opened his white coat, threw his tie over his shoulder and unbuttoned the middle three buttons of his shirt.

Pulling aside the material with both hands, he looked down at his bared chest.

‘That’s one – a pec.rec!’ he said, almost proudly.

Richard stared at the surgeon’s thorax and saw that his breastbone was pushed deeply inwards in its lower part.

‘Well, I’m damned – a funnel-chest! That’s what we used to call them, or a “salt-cellar sternum”!’

Andrew Welton grinned. ‘I was always interested in the abnormality, as I have one myself. Doesn’t matter tuppence, unless it’s part of Marfan’s syndrome.’

Richard dug around in his memory, but failed to find anything left on the matter from his long-ago student days. He looked enquiringly at the surgeon, who responded.

‘Whenever I saw a patient with a depressed sternum, I could never resist mentioning it in the notes. Pec.rec is my shorthand for pectus recurvatum, the proper Latin name for it.’

‘And this patient Barnes must have had one?’

Welton nodded. ‘No doubt about it. I don’t recall him now, but no way would I have written that unless he had one. Does it help at all?’

Pryor closed the folder with the notes and picked it up.

‘It may well do, as the thorax was still present amongst the remains. It all depends now on whether the first pathologist has any recollection of it.’

After thanking Welton for his time and patience, Pryor found his way back to his car and began the journey home. Was this another useful step on the quest, he wondered? If the older pathologist in Hereford had no clear memory of whether the benign deformity was present in the bones or not, they were no further forward.

Feeling more like Sherlock Holmes than a doctor, he decided that there was only one way to find out. Instead of going back to the ferry, he drove up the A38 to Gloucester, then turned to Hereford through Ross-on-Wye. Near there, he stopped at a small roadside café with a National Benzole petrol pump alongside. After egg and chips and a pot of tea, he had the Humber filled with petrol, scowling at the recent price increase which had taken it up to four shillings and sixpence a gallon.

By mid-afternoon he was in Hereford, where he found the County Hospital and sought out the pathologist who a month earlier had examined the remains from the reservoir.

Dr Bogdan Marek was about sixty, a thickset man with cropped grey hair. He rose from behind his microscope when a technician brought Pryor in and as they shook hands, the visitor noticed a pile of cardboard slide-holders on the bench alongside the instrument.

‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Doctor Marek, you look as if you’re snowed under with biopsy reports. I know the feeling!’

This broke the ice nicely and soon the two pathologists were exchanging common ground. Marek, who still had a thick Polish accent, had escaped from his home country in 1939 and come across to join the Polish Forces as a medical officer. Already a pathologist before the war, he had stayed on in Britain in 1945 and was now an SHMO in the speciality.

‘I make no claims to knowing much forensic medicine,’ he admitted frankly. ‘But someone has to do the coroner’s work here. If there’s anything suspicious, of course, the police get someone from Birmingham or Cardiff.’

He gave Richard a sudden beaming smile. ‘Maybe in future, it should be you, I’ve heard a lot about you lately!’

Pryor said he would be only too happy to come up at any time, but that it was really up to coroners and the police to decide.

‘They didn’t think it was worth getting a Home Office fellow up here for this one,’ said Marek, when Pryor told him the purpose of his visit. ‘So has it turned suspicious now?’

‘No, it’s a bit of a dispute over identity. I’ve just turned up a piece of evidence that might possibly help.’

He showed the other pathologist the medical notes and pointed to the words pec.rec.

‘I’ve just discovered what the clinician meant by that,’ he explained.

Bogdan Marek looked at him in mild surprise.

‘Surely that must refer to pectus recurvatum?’ he said mildly.

Richard’s mouth did not sag in astonishment, but he felt deflated at Marek’s instant recognition.

‘Good God, I’ve just been all the way to Bristol to find that out!’

‘Maybe it is because I qualified some time before you, when we used much more Latin in my medical faculty in Krakow!’ he answered with another broad smile.

Pryor swallowed his chagrin and came straight to the point.

‘The man whose wife claims the remains are his, undoubtedly had this abnormality of the sternum. Now you are the only doctor who has seen those bones, as they’ve been buried since then. Can you by any chance remember whether the sternum you saw had this defect?’

He felt tense as he waited for the answer, hoping that Marek would dig deeply enough into his recollections of the case. But the wait was but a few seconds, as the Pole soon shook his head.

‘I can definitely say that it did not,’ he said firmly. ‘As I said, I’m no forensic expert or a physical anthropologist, but I would undoubtedly have noticed a pectus recurvatum and I would have written it in my report to the coroner.’

Richard felt a surge of relief that his efforts had not been wasted. ‘And you’d be willing to confirm that to the Monmouth coroner?’

Bogdan Marek turned up his hands in a typically continental gesture. ‘Of course! Why not!’

Trevor Mitchell’s Wolseley was travelling across Clyne Common, a large area of rough heathland and bog, a few miles to the west of Swansea. He was reminding himself to keep a strict check on his mileage, as this job was likely to generate a lot of travelling.

The former superintendent liked his ‘Six-Eighty’ model, as it was a favourite with so many police forces and he admitted to a bit of nostalgia after having spent so much of his life in similar black cars.

On the seat alongside him was a road atlas opened at the appropriate pages, as well as a folded Ordnance Survey map at a one inch to the mile scale. He was making his way to Pennard, just beyond Bishopston, with no clear idea in his mind how he was going to proceed. The London barrister who had hired him was not very specific about his needs; he had said that he just wanted to confirm that his son-in-law had been unfaithful to his wife and to discover the other woman’s identity and whether this alleged demand for a divorce was true. As he could hardly knock on Michael Prentice’s door and ask him those questions, he would have to use a more roundabout method.

A few miles farther on, he turned down to Pennard, a small hamlet ending on the high cliff tops between Three Cliffs Bay and Pwlldu Head. Passing a golf course, he drove slowly through a quarter-mile ribbon settlement of houses and bungalows, with a post office, chemist and a general shop at the end, where the road petered out into stony tracks running right and left across the cliffs. He was hoping for a pub, which was often a useful place to pick up local gossip, but here in common with much of Gower, the place seemed to be teetotal.

At the far end of the road, some cars were parked on the grass, where there was a breathtaking view down a steep valley that intersected the limestone cliffs. He pulled in amongst them and went in search of information. Massey had given him the address of Michael Prentice, a house called Bella Capri, presumably from some romantic episode in a former owner’s life. However, he wanted a more ‘softly-softly’ approach and went across to the small shop and ice-cream parlour that was the last building on the approach road. He went to the counter, got himself a cup of over-milked coffee and a jam doughnut, and went to one of the small tables in the outer half of the shop. There were a dozen other people sitting there, all trippers brought out by a dry day, though the hot weather had gone and it was cloudy for June.

Trevor soon decided he would get nothing from either the visitors nor the adenoidal girl serving in the shop, so he finished his snack and went outside. Here he found a middle-aged man in a brown warehouse coat, sweeping ice cream and sweet wrappers from the concrete patch in front of the shop.

‘Not the best weather to attract the crowds, eh?’ he said, to strike up a conversation. The man, who he guessed was the proprietor, leaned on his broom, ready for a chat.

‘Bit early in the season, mind,’ he said. ‘Things should buck up soon and then we’ll get the crowd when the schools go on holiday.’

Trevor brought the conversation round to the direction he wanted.

‘I suppose most of the kids want sandy beaches, like Three Cliffs and Oxwich? It’s a bit dangerous for nippers down there, isn’t it?’

He pointed to the valley, where grey rocks could be seen where the grass and bracken ended, several hundred feet below. The shopkeeper nodded and said the very thing that Mitchell had angled for.

‘That’s true enough. We had a nasty accident a bit further along the cliffs. It was only a week or so ago, when a swimmer got drowned.’

‘Some tripper who didn’t know the dangers, I suppose?’ said Trevor, guilelessly.

‘No, it was a local lady, as it happens. Strange, because she often went swimming along here, she lived in the village and knew the coast well enough.’

‘Swimming alone, was she? Not very wise, if you get into trouble,’ said Mitchell, probing.

The proprietor shrugged. ‘She never came to any harm before and she’s been swimming here regular for a year or more. I often saw her walking in her swimming costume, she used to wear a sort of terry-towel coat over it to get dry on the way back. She only lived along there.’

He pointed with the handle of his brush to the track that led eastwards from the parking area. It was set back quite a way from the gorse and bracken that covered the undulating cliff top. The roofs and chimneys of several houses could be seen in the distance.

The detective knew when to stop his questioning, knowing he would get little more of any use. He moved back to his car and after the man had gone back inside the shop, he started the engine and drove very slowly along the rough track, the car rolling and pitching slightly over the irregular stones.

He passed a house and a bungalow, spaced well apart behind wind-blown hedges, but neither was Bella Capri. There was a gap of a few hundred yards before the next dwelling, the track passing between thick gorse bushes on the cliff side and dense elder and blackthorn on the landward verge. A pair of wrought-iron gates came into view, set back a little from the track and on one of the masonry turn-ins was a metal nameplate bearing the name he was looking for. He did not stop, but drove on a little until he found a gap between the bushes sufficient to make a three-point turn. The track deteriorated beyond this point and there seemed to be no more houses further on.

Mitchell went back towards Bella Capri and stopped the Wolseley opposite the gates. Without getting out, he looked up the drive from his seat and saw a low house, with bay windows downstairs and two gabled windows in the slate roof. There was a long front garden, entirely grassed, through which the gravelled drive went up the centre, until it swung around the right-hand side of the house, where a separate garage was visible. The main door was in the centre between the bay windows and a few yards in front of it was a circular rockery with a small ornamental pond in the middle.

Trevor sat looking for a few moments, prepared to act the nosy voyeur of a tragic house if anyone came out to challenge him. But the place remained silent and deserted. The curtains were drawn and no dog barked at him. He pondered what to do next, with such a dearth of anyone to question. Presumably, Michael Prentice would be at his factory, which Massey had told him was in an industrial estate the other side of Swansea, near the docks.

As he sat there, his problem was unexpectedly solved when an elderly lady appeared from the gate of the next bungalow down and began walking up towards him, a large black retriever running ahead of her, sniffing the bushes and cocking up its leg at intervals. Trevor expected her to pass the car, but she came to his driver’s side and rapped peremptorily on the glass.

‘What are you doing here, may I ask?’ she snapped, when he wound the window down. ‘Are you a policeman?’

Mitchell, who looked every inch a copper and was sitting in what looked like a police car, was glad that he could honestly say that he was not. ‘I’m a journalist, madam, writing an article on the dangers of solitary bathing on this coast. I’ve been looking at some of the more dangerous spots.’

It was a harmless lie and in fact, he had written a few articles for magazines on various aspects of policing in Britain, which almost made him a journalist. The rather hard-faced woman, her grey hair crushed under a scarf tied tightly under her chin, seemed mollified at his explanation.

‘We have to be careful of loitering strangers,’ she snapped. ‘We’ve had several break-ins along here.’

‘I understand that this was the house where that poor lady Mrs Prentice lived?’ he asked humbly, pulling out his notebook and pencil to validate his guise as a writer. ‘She was the reason I was asked to write this article, to point out the risks before the summer season gets going. Did you know her well? I presume she was an experienced swimmer.’

The neighbour fell for the ploy, unable to resist airing her knowledge.

‘Oh yes, she loved the sea. In good weather, she was in almost every day. I think that’s partly why they came to live here. I’m not sure that Michael was all that keen on it, I got the feeling he was more of a city man.’

Trevor also got the feeling that the old lady did not care for the man of the house nearly as much as she did for Linda.

‘Did you see her the day of the accident?’ he ventured. ‘No possibility of her being unwell and this contributing to the tragedy?’

The grey-haired woman looked thoughtful. ‘I didn’t actually see her for a few days before that,’ she admitted, rather regretfully. ‘In fact I thought she looked a little out of sorts for a week or two. I do hope that wasn’t anything to do with her death – getting cramp or something like that.’

Mitchell felt he would be sailing too near the wind if he probed much more, but he had one last try.

‘I suppose there’s no one else I could ask, to get more background on this awful business?’ he said solicitously. ‘Have any local friends or family been here since it happened?’

The neighbour thought for a moment, then shook her head. ‘They kept very much to themselves, especially the husband. I did see a blonde lady come in with Michael in his car on Friday, but I don’t know if she was family or not.’

Trevor knew when to bow out gracefully and with thanks to the lady, he said goodbye and let her march away up the track, snapping commands at her uncaring dog.

He went back into the village, which he saw from a sign was called Southgate, and found a red telephone box.

With a fistful of change, he rang a Reading number that Leonard Massey had given him, that of the dead woman’s schoolfriend, who had raised all this suspicion after receiving Linda’s letter. When he got an answer, he pressed Button A and spoke to her for several minutes, having to push several more pennies into the slot, then came out with a few more words written in his notebook.

About twenty-five miles from Pennard, on the main A48 going towards home, Trevor turned the Wolseley off onto a secondary road and made his way towards the seaside town of Porthcawl. As he drove along the promenade and out towards Rest Bay, he could see Gower on the western horizon and even identify the cliffs of Pwlldu Head, on the further side of which Bella Capri lay.

Here in Porthcawl, Trevor found the coast was very different, low cliffs and beaches giving way to miles of sand dunes, under which lay buried the medieval town of Kenfig. He was not going that far, however, and guided by the sparse information that Marjorie Elphington had given him over the telephone, he found the road that was an extension of the Esplanade, going towards the burrows and golf clubs.

All Marjorie had been able to tell him on the telephone, was that Linda had learned that her husband’s mistress was a blonde called Daphne and that she lived in a maisonette on the front in Porthcawl. Mitchell parked his car in a side street and began walking along the road which fronted the sea. The houses were built only on the landward side and included thirties modernistic houses with curved corners and flat roofs, mixed with some larger classical dwellings. Further on were smaller bungalows and he could see only one block of maisonettes. This two-storey building had four apartments, each with its own front door, two on the front, the others at each end. He walked slowly past, trying to get a glimpse of the bell pushes to see if there were any names on them, but they were too far away from the pavement for his eyesight.

Rather stumped as to his next move, he carried on up the road until he came to the next side turning, another suburban collection of houses and bungalows.

He could hardly walk up to the doors and push all the bells in turn, then ask each occupant whether they were the fancy woman of Michael Prentice! His brief from Leonard Massey was only to confirm the existence of the mystery woman and to obtain her name and address.

Turning round, he walked slowly back to the main road and ambled towards the maisonettes, hoping for some inspiration. The patron saint of private eyes must have been in good form that day, for as he approached the block, the door of the further apartment on the front opened and a woman stepped out and began walking briskly ahead of him. She was young and very blonde indeed, wearing a light sling-back coat and high heels.

He could not see her face, but making a bet with himself that a smart blonde living in those maisonettes might well be the mysterious Daphne, he followed her at a discreet distance. There were a few other people about and he had little fear of being challenged as a stalker as she turned into the road where he had left his car. Now he could see her face in profile, and decided she was in her mid-twenties, attractive but with rather sharp features. The blonde walked past the Wolseley and headed for the centre of the small town, but stopped after a few hundred yards and turned into a newsagent’s shop.

Seeing no reason why he should not do the same, as she could not know him from Adam, he went in and saw her at the counter at the back of the shop. He stopped just inside and began looking at magazines on a rack, taking off a copy of Picture Post and looking through the pages. He heard the woman asking for twenty Gold Flake cigarettes and laughing over something with the middle-aged shopkeeper, who she called ‘Tom’. Then she walked out of the shop past Trevor, without glancing at him. He managed a good look at her and confirmed that she was attractive, but perhaps wore too much make-up.

As soon as she had left, he went to the counter to buy his magazine and as he waited for his change, he spoke casually to the proprietor.

‘That was Daphne from the maisonettes, wasn’t it? I live a few doors away, but I can never remember her surname,’ he lied.

‘Daphne Squires? Yes, she’s a good looking woman.’

The shopkeeper was obviously appreciative of young blondes and assumed that Mitchell’s interests lay in the same direction.

‘I heard that she was leaving soon, going to live in Gower,’ said Trevor, with false innocence.

The man behind the counter shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t know. Pity though, she buys fags and magazines from me – and she’s better looking that most of my other customers.’

Trevor knew when to stop probing and he left to go back to his car. Before he drove off, he was able to write another line in his notebook.