Where Death Delights

EIGHT

When Richard Pryor returned to the Wye Valley late on Wednesday morning, after having done his duty at Newport, he found Sian waiting for him with a tray of microscope slides.

‘Here we are, Doctor, a set of ‘H and E’ and one of Perl’s.’

‘H and E’ was probably the best-known acronym in pathology, standing for ‘haematoxylin and esosin’, which for a century or more had been the main method of staining tissues for microscopic examination.

She proudly set the cardboard tray alongside the small microscope that stood on a table in his room. Their big new microscope was in the laboratory for communal use, as it was so expensive that Richard and Angela had to use it between them until their finances improved. However, he had this smaller monocular in his own room, the same one he had had as a student. Sian hovered over him as he sat on his high stool.

‘Are they OK?’ she demanded, as soon as his eye was settled on the top of the instrument. He made no answer until he had studied and replaced several of the glass slides on the stage of the microscope, moving them around with the pair of control knobs. Then he looked up at the pert little technician, who was staring at him in tense anticipation, a cloud of blonde hair like a halo around her pretty face.

‘Damned good, Sian, first class! Nice and thin, fully dehydrated and beautifully stained!’

They were good, but he laid the praise on thickly as he knew it meant a lot to her, the first histology she had produced for him. Technicians were very proud of their expertise and took it personally when things went wrong.

She beamed and looked as if she had just won the football pools.

‘Thank God for that,’ she said fervently. ‘I hadn’t used a Cambridge rocker for years, we had a sledge at the Royal Gwent.’ Sian was referring to the devices used to cut slices a few thousandths of an inch thick, gadgets like mini bacon slicers, which passed the paraffin-wax blocks containing tissue against the edge of a blade like a cut-throat razor.

‘They’re great, Sian, now I can spend a happy hour looking at your handiwork!’

She took the hint and almost skipped out of his room in satisfaction. Pryor sat for a long while on his stool, eye glued to the eyepiece of the microscope, except when he changed slides and once when he got up to take a thick textbook from a shelf. Then he sat back and stared out of the window for a while, gazing unseeingly at the trees above Moira’s house further down the valley. When he finally moved, he drew a lined pad towards him and began writing a supplementary report.

By that afternoon, two conferences with different coroners had been arranged, each requiring Pryor’s presence. Phone calls between the solicitor in Lydney and Trevor Mitchell had resulted in the first appointment being made with Brian Meredith for the following morning.

‘You’d better come with me, Angela. I may need some biology expertise, as well as your moral support!’ said Richard as they were having their mid-afternoon tea.

She nodded and, with a grimace, stretched her legs out from the chair.

‘It would be nice to get out for a change, after sitting doing all that blood grouping. You get all the fun, Richard, going to all those glamorous mortuaries.’

‘Fun? Abattoirs have more glamour than those awful places I have to work in.’

Moira and Sian had taken to joining them in the staff lounge – in fact, it was Moira who now made all the tea and coffee. ‘I’ll have that extra report typed up for you to sign in an hour, then I can get it in the post tonight,’ she promised.

Sian, itching to know whether her efforts with the tissue sections had proved useful, asked Richard to explain.

‘I saw the report on Moira’s desk,’ she admitted. ‘What’s it actually mean?’

‘The bruises were of different ages,’ he replied. ‘That was obvious to the naked eye from the colour, as fresh ones are blue or purple, but the haemoglobin decays after a time and then they turn green and yellow.’

‘My grandmother could have told you that!’ said Angela, softening the sarcasm with a grin.

‘Sure, but she couldn’t put a date on them,’ he countered. ‘Neither can I for that matter, except in very approximate terms, as different people react differently, as well as there being other factors.’

‘So what use was my histology?’ persisted Sian.

‘In a fresh bruise only red blood cells have leaked out from the damaged blood vessels, but soon white blood cells start accumulating to start the clear-up and healing process and their type changes with time.’

‘Why did you ask me to do a Perl’s stain on them? That’s to show iron, isn’t it?’

Pryor nodded, he liked to teach others the mystique of his profession, which was why he was happy to have been given those medical student lectures in Bristol.

‘The haemoglobin in the red cells gets broken down and the contained iron is set free, so that it shows up in a Perl’s stain as blue specks. That doesn’t happen for a day or two, usually longer. So if it’s Perl’s-positive, then the person must have lived for at least that length of time after the injury.’

Sian nodded her understanding.

‘That means she couldn’t have sustained the bruises knocking around against the rocks, because she was dead too soon afterwards?’

‘That’s it, my girl! Trouble is, I can’t put a definite date on them, apart from some which are undoubtedly fresh. Whether they go back a week or so, to when she was supposed to have had this punch-up with her husband, is hard to tell.’

Moira listened to this with fascination. After years of humdrum life in a local solicitor’s office, typing letters about house conveyancing, divorces and motor claims, this erudite talk of blood, bruises and suspected homicide brought home to her how a week or two had changed her outlook on life. Richard had taken her aside early on and tactfully emphasized that everything she heard in Garth House must be kept strictly confidential, as some might be sub judice, though he softened the warning by saying that he was sure that she already appreciated that, after having worked in a lawyer’s office.

He had given the same homily to Sian, soon after she started with them and he had every confidence that these two sensible women would keep their mouths shut outside working hours.

The other conference was set up after he had telephoned Massey to give him a cautious interpretation of his examination of the bruises, telling him much the same as he had explained to Sian. Within an hour, he had had a call back from the Gowerton coroner’s officer, asking him to attend a conference with the coroner on Friday, to determine exactly what the significance of his findings were.

Richard realized that this coroner was treading very carefully in such a sensitive matter. Leonard Massey must have phoned him straight after speaking to Pryor about the bruises and Richard hoped that he had not painted too strong a picture.

Next morning, a bright but breezy Thursday, he drove up to Monmouth, with Angela sitting in the passenger seat, revelling in the sunlit appearance of the valley as they followed the winding river through meadows and woods. Richard thought she looked very elegant today. Around Garth House, she normally wore a blouse and slacks under her laboratory coat, but for this professional meeting she had on a light grey suit with a narrow waist and long slim skirt. Angela was keen on the fashions of the day, being an avid student of Vogue. He knew she went on shopping expeditions in London with her sister and suspected that her wardrobe was now subsidized by her parents, as their present earnings from the new practice were negligible.

Brian Meredith’s partner was taking morning surgery for him, as the coroner had put aside the morning for a short inquest, followed by this meeting. They met in the empty magistrates’ court where he had just held his inquest. It was housed in the historic Shire Hall, which bore a statue of locally born King Henry V on its front, but the court itself was a gloomy chamber lined with sombre wood panelling. There were two pews for lawyers and benches at the back for the public, all set below a raised bench for the Justices of the Peace, dominated by a large plaster Royal Coat of Arms.

This morning, the participants sat in the well of the court, around a large oak table normally used by the clerk of the court and a shorthand writer.

The coroner claimed the clerk’s chair in the centre, the others present being the pair from Garth House as well as Edward Lethbridge, Trevor Mitchell and rather to Richard’s surprise, Dr Bogdan Marek, the pathologist from Hereford. Pryor was half-expecting to see the old battleaxe Mrs Oldfield there, but presumably her solicitor had managed to keep her out of the proceedings – neither was there any sign of Molly Barnes.

PC John Christie hovered in the background as Meredith cleared his throat and began by welcoming the gathered participants.

‘This is an informal meeting, not an inquest. In fact I did not actually call this gathering. I am responding to a request by Mr Lethbridge here, so I think he should explain the position.’

The solicitor made a performance of changing his spectacles for a different pair, then produced some papers from his old briefcase and shuffled them about on the table before speaking.

‘Thank you, Coroner. As you say, I have asked for this meeting with you, to put forward some new facts which I hope will persuade you to reopen your inquest on the human remains found on May the twelfth at Glasfryn Reservoir. I was not involved at that time, but it is a matter of record that you returned an open verdict and declared the remains to be that of Albert Barnes, aged forty-five, resident in Ledbury.’

Richard suppressed a sigh, as Lethbridge droned on, making a meal of facts about which everyone present were already well aware.

Dr Meredith nodded his chubby head. ‘I did indeed, the identification was made by Mrs Molly Barnes, who declared that the remains were those of her husband.’

Apologetically, the solicitor hesitantly ventured to disagree with the coroner.

‘In actual fact, sir, she did not identify the remains themselves, which she never saw. She claimed to have identified his watch and his wedding ring.’

Dr Meredith nodded in agreement.

‘That is so, but in view of the strongly positive manner in which she said that those items of property belonged to Albert Barnes and in absence of any other evidence to the contrary, I felt it justified to accept what she claimed – and I still do, unless you can provide me with fresh information.’

Lethbridge almost fell over himself in his haste to dissociate himself from any criticism of the coroner’s decision.

‘Of course, sir, it was most understandable that this was considered the right course of action given the information available at that time,’ he brayed. ‘But some further investigations undertaken on behalf of a client, who claims that the remains were that of her relative, has since cast doubt on the identification as that of Albert Barnes.’

He peered over his glasses at Trevor Mitchell and suggested that he take up the tale. The detective described first how he had some doubts about the dating of the wedding ring and the Omega watch, especially as Mrs Barnes’s claim that her husband had obtained the watch during his wartime service in Germany could not be true, as the watch had not been made until 1950 at the earliest.

Brian Meredith had some objections to these disclosures.

‘I admit those facts are odd, but I can’t accept them as sufficiently relevant,’ he said mildly, but decisively. ‘The ring might genuinely have been much older than the date of their wedding, if it was second-hand, as she claimed. And though the husband may not have obtained the watch in the way he said, there are many things that a man fails to tell his wife. He might have won it in a game of poker – or even stolen it!’

Mitchell was too old a campaigner in the witness box to be thrown by such legitimate criticisms.

‘That’s very true, sir, but they raised my threshold of suspicion. I then found from further enquiries that Mr Barnes had been in hospital for injuries sustained several years earlier, which his wife failed to disclose to you. We obtained a view of his medical notes – with Mrs Barnes’s consent, I might add – and found that he had been X-rayed, which I understand might have been conclusive evidence of identity had they been available when the remains were examined.’

Meredith already knew the general thrust of the new argument, because he had given a note to Richard Pryor to authorize the doctor in Frenchay to clarify his notes, but he was not yet aware of the details of the result.

‘Perhaps this is now more within Dr Pryor’s field of expertise to explain,’ cut in Edward Lethbridge.

Angela winked at him as her partner leaned forward to speak. This was not the Old Bailey, she thought, but let’s see how he performs. Some of her forensic colleagues, experts though they might be, were hopeless witnesses, humming and hawing and mumbling technicalities without any attempt at making them understandable to judge or jury.

‘Put simply, Coroner, the clinical examination of Albert Barnes in Hereford County Hospital seven years ago, recorded a harmless anatomical abnormality, which according to Dr Marek here, was not present in the bones he examined.’

Top marks, Richard, thought Angela. Short and sweet!

The coroner’s fair eyebrows rose on his cherubic face.

‘Indeed! What exactly was this abnormality?’ he asked.

‘The hospital notes recorded a pectus recurvatum, which you obviously know as a “salt-cellar sternum”, Doctor Meredith.’

The coroner shifted his gaze to the Polish pathologist.

‘What do you say to this, Doctor Marek? You are the only one who actually had the opportunity to examine these remains.’

The big man from Hereford shifted uneasily. He was not sure whether his professional skills were being called into question.

‘It is unfortunate that these notes and especially any X-rays were not available when I did my examination,’ he rumbled. ‘But as far as the sternum is concerned, I am almost certain that there was no depression. I am familiar with pectus recurvatum and I am sure I would have noted it if it had been there.’

‘How sure are you, Doctor?’ asked Meredith. He suddenly had assumed a penetrating manner, at odds with his usual benign nature.

Bogdan Marek backtracked a little.

‘I’m very sure, sir. Of course, there are different grades of depressed sternum, but if it had been marked enough for a junior doctor to have recorded it, I feel sure I would have recognized it.’ His accent was more pronounced as he spoke with extra emphasis.

There was a heavy silence as they waited for the coroner to digest what had been said.

‘So where does this leave us, Mr Lethbridge?’ he asked at last. ‘I suspect you are going to make an application to me?’

The lawyer cleared his throat. ‘In order to at least clear the way for my client’s pursuance of her own claim, I submit that the new evidence is sufficient for you to reopen your earlier inquest, the verdict of which was left open and to annul the stated identification of the remains as that of Albert Barnes.’

Brian Meredith shook his head sorrowfully. ‘I don’t think I can do that on the sole evidence of the recollection of Dr Marek, Mr Lethbridge. With the greatest respect to Dr Marek, the consequences of rescinding an already-certified death are profound, not least in the bureaucratic processes involved, as well as the distress caused to the putative relatives.’

Lethbridge nodded, not at all surprised at the rejection of his first attempt. He fiddled with the papers in front of him before offering a second course of action.

‘If you feel unable to do that at this stage, sir, then I would respectfully request you to consider applying for the exhumation of the remains so that a definitive answer be obtained.’

The coroner took a deep breath and let it out slowly, his cheeks puffing out in a gesture midway between resignation and exasperation.

‘I suspected it would come to this,’ he said sorrowfully. ‘The thought of doing battle with the grinding machinery of the Home Office frankly appals me! Are you sure that re-examining the bones will give us the final answer, Doctor Pryor?’

Richard nodded confidently. ‘No doubt about it, sir. As well as settling the issue of the sternum, the fact that we can get the X-rays from Hereford will clinch it.’

‘What films did they take, then?’ asked the medically qualified coroner.

‘I understand that they are of the skull, pelvis and leg.’

‘There was no head, so the skull films will not help,’ growled Dr Marek, fighting a final rearguard action.

‘We can X-ray the remains and compare the internal structure of the major limb bones in the two sets of films,’ said Pryor decisively.

Angela Bray spoke for the first time. Justifying her attendance at the meeting. ‘And I can determine the blood group. There are sure to be records of Barnes’s group either from the hospital or from his Army records.’

The coroner resignedly closed the file in front of him.

‘And you are absolutely sure that this will be a hundred per cent reliable?’ he asked Richard Pryor.

The pathologist nodded confidently.

‘I won’t be able to tell you who he is, Coroner – but I’ll certainly be able to tell you who he isn’t!’

Moira was busy typing up some of Angela’s paternity test reports when the two principals returned from Monmouth and she stopped to listen to their news. Sian hurried in from the laboratory just in time to catch Richard announcing that the coroner had agreed to an exhumation.

‘Can you just walk into a churchyard with a shovel and dig someone up?’ asked Sian rather indignantly. She had strong views on human rights and social justice, coming from a strong Labour-voting family.

‘Good God, no!’ responded Richard. ‘It’s a hell of a performance and is not always granted.’

‘But if the coroner says it must be done, isn’t that sufficient?’ asked Angela, who was perched elegantly on the edge of the desk.

Pryor shrugged. ‘I’m not sure. I have an idea that if the coroner still had jurisdiction, he could order an exhumation off his own bat, though even then, I seem to recall that he always plays safe and goes through the Home Office, which is the usual route in seeking consent.’

Moira Davison listened with interest to these discussions; she was finding every day more fascinating as bits of the forensic world were opened up to her.

‘But how can he not have jurisdiction, as you call it?’ she asked, her typing forgotten for the moment. ‘Surely that’s his job, to sort these things out.’

‘As far as I can make out, a coroner has jurisdiction over a body lying within his area, up to the point where he arrives at a verdict at an inquest,’ explained Richard. ‘Once that verdict is given and the certificates issued, then he loses control over what happens to it.’

‘So then he can’t tell the chap with the shovel to go and dig it up?’ concluded Sian, still harbouring her image of some arbitrary bodysnatching.

‘I’m no lawyer,’ said the pathologist. ‘But I understand that an “open verdict”, as was given in this case, really means “no verdict yet” and therefore the inquest can be reopened at any time in the future if new evidence is found. So the coroner still keeps his jurisdiction!’

‘Where are these remains, as you call them?’ asked Moira, with a slight shudder at her mental image of what they must look like by now.

‘Buried in the public cemetery in Ledbury, according to John Christie. But knowing how slowly the Home Office wheels grind, it’ll be some time before we get our hands on them.’

‘If we prove that they are not those of Albert Barnes, what happens then?’ demanded Moira, already using the ‘we’ as an indication of her immersion in the Garth House team.

‘That’ll be a totally different ball game,’ said Angela. ‘No doubt Mrs Oldfield will be back on the warpath, championing the cause of her nephew. But how she’s going to get any further, I can’t imagine.’

‘Maybe she’ll find a new set of bones to send Lethbridge chasing after,’ suggested Sian, cynically.

‘How could she claim that these remains were that of her nephew?’ asked Moira. ‘Did she also say that the ring and the watch were his?’

Richard Pryor shook his head. ‘I asked Trevor Mitchell about this. It seems she never noticed his watch, she said all men’s watches looked the same to her. But as for the ring, apparently he had been married. According to Mrs Oldfield, he was divorced fifteen years ago and still wore a ring.’

‘But the hallmark would be as wrong for him as it was for Barnes,’ objected Sian. ‘He couldn’t have been married as far back as 1931.’

Angela got up to go back to her workbench.

‘The coroner wouldn’t dismiss Molly Barnes’s claim on either the ring or the watch,’ she observed. ‘So he’ll have to apply the same logic to Agnes Oldfield.’

Richard also pushed himself to his feet.

‘She’ll have to do better than that, though! Brian Meredith will be much more cautious next time, if we rubbish his Barnes identity,’ he said as he went to the door. ‘He’ll demand cast-iron proof before putting another name to the bones.’

‘We can only do our best!’ said Angela philosophically, as she went back to her racks of blood-grouping tubes.

With the next day’s conference in Gowerton in mind, Richard spent another hour that afternoon looking at the microscopic sections of the bruises from Linda Massey.

Sian had stained some spare sections with other staining techniques that he had asked for, but he felt that they didn’t add anything to more accurate dating of the injuries. He had heard of some new research from Finland, involving these new methods of ‘histochemistry’ where enzymes were used on fresh tissue, but he knew nothing of the details. He was discovering that ‘going solo’ had its disadvantages compared with working in a university or large teaching hospital, where library facilities and all the current medical journals were available. He subscribed to a couple of forensic journals, but it was too expensive to take a whole raft of publications.

‘Must spend a day in the library in Bristol,’ he muttered to himself, as he stared down the eyepiece of his microscope. ‘And maybe I can wangle a ticket to the one in Cardiff medical school, as I’m one of their old students.’

After their tea break, he abandoned the sections to give his eyes a rest and wandered out into the plot behind, where Jimmy Jenkins was using a scythe on the patch marked out with stakes for Richard’s vines.

The lush grass of early summer had grown up to knee height and with his rhythmic sweeps of the curved blade, Jimmy had already laid almost half the area low.

He stopped to sharpen the scythe with a short rod of carborundum as Pryor approached.

‘You still set on planting this with them grapes?’ he demanded, his tone suggesting that he thought his boss was mentally defective for wanting to do such a thing.

‘Yes, of course. But I can’t do this until the spring, so we’ve got time to get the ground into shape ready for them.’

His scanty knowledge of viniculture came from a slim booklet he had bought in Bristol recently. Jimmy grunted, pushing the peak of his cap further up from his forehead. With cooler weather, he had taken to wearing a plaid lumberjack shirt, tucked into corduroy trousers, which were tied below the knees with lengths of binder-twine to keep them clear of the scythe.

‘Far better to plant forty rows of strawberries!’ he advised. ‘Grows a treat here in the valley. You could sell ’em to passing tourists or up in the market in Monmouth. Make more money than with your doctoring, I wouldn’t wonder!’

That wouldn’t be difficult at the moment, thought Richard.

‘Whichever it is, Jimmy, we’ll have to get this plot turned over somehow.’ He looked at the large area on the slope and wondered how many men with spades it would take to turn the grass in and make a decent tilth. Jimmy seemed to be reading his thoughts.

‘Need machinery for that, Doctor! Near on half an acre, this is! Either a tractor with plough and disc-harrow – or maybe I could borrow one of them “walk-behind” rotavators.’

They talked on for a while about the problem, though Richard was often hazy about what Jimmy was telling him. He had never before shown any interest in horticulture, having been either in the army or living in servant-rich idleness of colonial comfort. But now he felt that this might be a pleasant release from the tensions of a stressful profession, a welcome change from corpses, courts and coroners. He listened to Jimmy extolling the virtue of the various types of strawberry, in his crusade to wean Richard off his determination to plant vines. In the contest between Royal Sovereign and Cambridge Favourite, the pathologist happily forgot his concern about the ratio of polymorphs to lymphocytes in those bruises back in the house.

But later that evening, the concerns crept back with the prospect of the conference next day and he pulled down his textbooks and pored over them yet again to get the salient facts clear in his mind before he went to Swansea next day.