Where Death Delights

TEN

The following week was a busy one for Garth House, as Richard’s stint as a locum in Newport produced a steady stream of sudden deaths, a couple of suicides, a fatal road accident, a death under anaesthesia and a fall from a factory roof. Angela was also busy, as her reputation in the blood-grouping field for disputed paternity had spread rapidly and she had half-a-dozen new cases to deal with.

Sian also had her hands full with several blood and urine alcohol estimations, using the time-consuming Widmark method, as well as some more histology for Richard. One of the two suicides needed a carbon monoxide analysis, as the victim had her head in a gas oven – and the other one was more obscure, being a mixture of barbiturates and an unknown number of tablets from an unmarked bottle.

‘We’d better ask the coroner if this can be sent to the Cardiff Forensic Laboratory,’ said Richard, after Sian had explained that she had no facilities for doing a blind screening test on the blood and urine samples that he had brought back from the Newport mortuary. The Cardiff laboratory was one of the seven that the Home Office had set up across England and Wales and although it specialized in the forensic examination of documents, it also did the full range of investigations.

In addition to Pryor’s work in Newport, there were a number of routine post-mortems in Monmouth and Chepstow, so there was little time to think about the more curious cases.

‘I’ve heard nothing from Trevor Mitchell so far this week,’ observed Richard, as he and Angela sat over the ham and salad supper that Moira had left for them on Wednesday evening.

‘We can’t expect any progress on the exhumation yet,’ replied Angela, sampling a glass of sweet cider that Jimmy had brought in from a farm a few miles away.

‘Knowing the speed the Home Office reacts, the application is probably still sitting in someone’s ‘In’ tray in Whitehall.’

Her partner drank some beer, his preferred drink, this time a bottled one from Brain’s Brewery in Cardiff.

‘I wonder if the police have decided to lean on Michael Prentice?’ he mused. ‘I thought that Superintendent Evans was quite a capable chap, he reminded me of Trevor. If they don’t make their minds up soon, the coroner is going to let them bury that poor woman.’

‘Would it matter if they did?’ asked Angela. ‘You said there’d be nothing to be gained by a third post-mortem, given that you’ve got all the samples.’

Richard grunted. ‘All the same, any decent defence counsel would complain that they were at a disadvantage if they couldn’t get their own expert opinion. They could hardly get much joy out of O’Malley’s report.’

The biologist speared the last piece of local ham with her fork.

‘The coroner won’t allow cremation, you said – so they could join our club and get an exhumation order.’

Richard grimaced. ‘The value of what they could get out of that will get less by the week, once the body is buried,’ he observed.

Perhaps the Glamorganshire Constabulary had the same concerns, as that evening, a maroon Vauxhall Velox saloon parked at the side of the track across the cliffs at Pennard and two police officers went across to the gate of Bella Capri.

Ben Evans led the way up the long gravel drive and his inspector followed, looking about him with a professional eye.

‘He’s in, as there’s a car at the side of the house,’ muttered the superintendent, nodding at a black Jaguar parked outside the garage at the rear of the house.

‘He can’t be short of a bob or two,’ growled Lewis. ‘That’s a Mark Five, and brand new by the look of it.’

The senior officer went to the front door and banged on the brass knocker, discoloured by the constant salt spray that blew up from the sea. He heard some muffled voices, then a shape appeared beyond the coloured frosted glass of the top half of the door. When it was opened, a tall man in a Fair Isle jumper stood there, but there was no sign of anyone behind him.

‘Mr Michael Prentice?’ queried Evans. ‘Could we have a word with you, please?’

He identified himself and Lewis Lewis as police officers, but Prentice needed no introduction to know that this pair were detectives. He sighed and stood aside, opening the door fully.

‘You’d better come in, I suppose. No doubt that bloody father-in-law of mine has set you on to me with his crazy notions.’

‘In fact, sir, we are here at the behest of the coroner,’ began Ben Evans, heavily. ‘We thought it better to visit you at home, rather than at your place of work.’

Prentice led them into a room on the left of the hall, one of those with a bay window that overlooked the front garden. It was expensively furnished with a leather three-piece suite around a thick patterned carpet. A baby grand piano stood against a further wall and there were two glass-fronted cabinets filled with porcelain.

Prentice motioned them to sit on the settee, but remained standing in front of the stone Minster fireplace in which was fitted a coal-effect electric fire, now switched off.

Lewis produced a notebook and pencil, leaving his DS to do all the talking, but Michael Prentice beat him to it.

‘I know you are only doing your duty, but this is really intolerable! My late wife’s father has disliked me since the moment he set eyes on me, years ago! This is a great chance for him to embarrass me, but I must warn you that I intend taking legal action against him for defamation of character.’

Evans, who had heard similar threats so many times before, remained imperturbable.

‘We just need to establish some facts about your wife’s death, sir. I’m sorry I have to trouble you at a sad time like this, but there are some points which need clearing up.’

Prentice, somewhat deflated, gave up his ‘master of the house’ pose before the hearth and subsided into one of the buttoned armchairs.

‘What is it you want to know?’ he sighed. ‘I’ve given all this to the uniformed men who came at the time of my wife’s death, as well as to the coroner’s officer.’

‘What is your occupation, sir?’ asked Evans, thinking of the very expensive car outside.

‘I’m a partner and technical director of a company that develops new equipment for the motor industry – electronic ignition systems, lubricating additives, disc brakes and the like,’ he said with obvious pride. ‘We have a research and production unit on Jersey Marine, just beyond Swansea docks.’

‘And how long have you been married?’

‘Just over five years. My wife was twenty-eight when she drowned and we married on her twenty-third birthday.’

Lewis scribbled away as the other detective carried on with his questions.

‘I understand that your wife, Linda, was a keen swimmer. She went in almost every day, is that right?’

‘In the summer, yes. We’ve been in this house for a year and she only stopped swimming from about last October until this April.’

‘So where did you live before?’ asked Ben Evans.

‘In Slough, where our first small factory was based. We were offered a good deal on a new building and rate-relief in Swansea, so we moved here. Linda wanted to be near the sea, she loved the coast.’

Evans paused for a moment, while he leaned across to look at what Lewis had written.

‘Is all this necessary, Officer?’ said Prentice testily. ‘I’ve said all this over and over before!’

‘I’m afraid so, sir. Now, let’s go to the day she vanished. What exactly happened?’

Michael Prentice hunched forward in his chair, his hands clasped between his knees.

‘This is very painful for me, Superintendent. But if you must know yet again, I was at my office as usual, leaving after breakfast and working late, getting back here about eight in the evening. It’s almost an hour’s drive at rush hour. There was no sign of Linda, which was unusual.’

‘No one else lives here?’

There was a momentary hesitation. ‘Not then, no. Since the tragedy, a friend spends some time here to keep me company.’

Evans decided to leave this topic alone for the moment.

‘Where did you think your wife had gone? Was she always here when you came home?’

‘Almost invariably. She doesn’t drive, so has no car. We’re a bit cut off out here, just an infrequent bus service from the village.’

‘What did you do next?

‘I waited a bit, thinking she might have gone for a swim, though she always got back in time to make me a meal. After a couple of hours, I began to get worried and went out to look for her along the cliff track.’

‘Did you take your car when you searched?’

Prentice looked up at Evans and twisted his hands in agitation. ‘No, I left it at the side of the house all evening. I went over to the village to ask in the shop, but they hadn’t seen her. Then I came back this way and walked along towards Pwlldu Head, but there was no sign of her.’

‘Where did she usually go to swim?’

‘It varied, according to her whims and the state of the tide,’ he answered. ‘To be honest, I didn’t take much notice, as long as she was enjoying herself.’

‘Did you never go with her, sir?’ cut in Lewis, speaking for the first time. Prentice shook his head vehemently.

‘Never, I can’t even swim, for one thing. And I spend so much time at the unit now, I’m whacked when I get home.’

‘But where was her favourite place to swim?’ persisted Ben Evans.

‘Just below the house, I suppose, what she called Broad Slade. The cliffs are less steep there, there’s a sort of sloping valley going down to the rocks.’

‘You looked there?’ put in Lewis.

‘Of course, it was the first place I thought of. I didn’t go right down, but you can see from the top.’

He jumped up again and paced over to the window and back again to the fireplace. ‘I walked back along the edge of the cliffs, rather than the track, so that I could look down at the edge of the sea wherever I could. In some places, the cliff bulges out, so you can’t see the rocks below – and it was getting dusk by then.’

‘What were you looking for?’ asked Ben Evans.

Michael Prentice looked at the detective as if he was an idiot. ‘Well, Linda herself, of course. She might have fallen and twisted her ankle or broken a leg. And if she’d gone into the sea, she would have left her robe on the edge, she always took a white terry-towel dressing gown sort of thing, as well as sandals and a bath towel.’

‘And you saw nothing?’

Prentice shook his head. ‘Not a thing. After she was found, the local police told me that her things were at the bottom of Broad Slade, but behind a gorse bush, so I couldn’t have seen them from above. Not that it would have made any difference,’ he added bitterly.

The superintendent waited until Lewis had finished writing in his notebook, then returned to his questions.

‘You didn’t report her missing until the next morning, sir. That seems rather a long time.’

Michael made an impatient gesture. ‘Maybe it does with hindsight. But I had checked that she hadn’t gone swimming, as far as I could tell, so I thought she had just gone off somewhere.’

‘Gone off somewhere?’ repeated Evans, sceptically. ‘But you said she was always at home when you returned, having made you a meal?’

‘Well, not always,’ replied Prentice evasively. ‘She did go out, you know, sometimes shopping in Swansea on the bus.’

‘And not come back all night? Come on, sir, that’s no answer.’

Michael flopped down into the armchair. ‘All right, officer, I’ll be honest with you, as I’m sure it’s no secret after that nosy bitch in Reading has been telling tales. Linda and I had been through a rough patch lately. We had a bit of a tiff the night before and I thought she had got the hump and gone off to teach me a lesson.’

Evans and Lewis exchanged glances and the inspector began writing away busily again.

‘A bit of a tiff, sir? Would this have been the previous evening or the same morning?’

‘Well, it had been brewing for a week or so. She wasn’t speaking to me the last day or two.’

‘And did this “bit of a tiff” involve physical violence?’ asked Lewis Lewis, who never believed in mincing his words.

‘Good God, no!’ snapped Prentice, his face flushing with indignation. ‘You must already know, thanks to my damned father-in-law and that so-called friend of Linda’s, that my wife suspected me of having an affair.’

‘Suspected? Would that be with the lady who is in this house at the moment, Miss Daphne Squires?’

The other man stared in surprise. Did the whole bloody world know his business, he thought? Ben Evans, who had been informed by Leonard Massey of the result of Mitchell’s visit to Porthcawl, registered Prentice’s discomfiture with some satisfaction. Shake the tree and see what falls out, was one of his favourite maxims.

‘I don’t see what my private life has to do with you, officer,’ blustered Michael.

‘We have evidence that your wife suffered some injuries consistent with an assault, some time before she was found in the sea,’ said Evans, bluntly. ‘Have you any explanation for those?’

‘Injuries? What injuries?’ barked Prentice, shaken but still aggressive.

‘Bruising of the arms and neck indicative of gripping by another person! Mr Prentice, did you assault your wife, in the days leading up to her disappearance and death?’

The man sitting opposite Ben Evans rose to his feet.

‘That’s enough, I refuse to answer any more of your insulting questions without my solicitor being present,’ he grated. ‘This is all the result of my father-in-law’s slanderous motives. Just because he’s a London QC, you police all sit up and beg!’

The superintendent got up and his colleague followed suit, still writing in his pocketbook.

‘We are here because Her Majesty’s coroner wishes us to follow up the results of the second post-mortem examination,’ said Evans easily. ‘I will have to report back to my senior officers and no doubt we will need to question you again, next time at a police station, where you are fully entitled to have your solicitor present.’

Prentice stood aside as they went to the front door, which he slammed behind them without another word.

The two CID men walked back to their car and sat in it to discuss the visit.

‘No sign of the floozie,’ observed Lewis. ‘She’s keeping her head down, but he didn’t deny she was there.’

‘We heard their voices, so he could hardly claim he was alone,’ said Evans. ‘But that’s not our concern. Do you think he’s lying about the assault?’

Lewis nodded. ‘Through his teeth, boss!’ he said. ‘But it doesn’t mean he killed her, does it? What about if she was so cut up about his affair with this blonde that she jumped into the sea to end it all?’

‘It’s a possibility, of course. A bit drastic, but stranger things have happened. He doesn’t seem all that distressed, does he, but again that’s not a crime.’

Lewis started the Vauxhall and they bumped along the track to reach the road into Southgate.

‘Right, tomorrow we’ll see these coastguard people and hear what they’ve got to say about it,’ grunted his boss, as they headed back to their Divisional Headquarters at Gowerton.

That evening, Richard was in his office at the back of the house, writing a draft of a letter for Moira to type the next day. He sat at his desk, an old one his father had discarded from his surgery when he retired, slowly composing a notice for inclusion in the various medical journals that were devoted to forensic medicine. He was a committee member of the World Association for Medical Jurisprudence, an organization that had been going for many years. It held a congress every three years and the next one was to be hosted in Cardiff in November. Now being virtually a local, he was involved in organizing it and though most of the work was being handled by a commercial conference company, Richard had been saddled with some of the publicity, mainly keeping the medical profession aware of the congress, to get enough participants to make it viable. Pryor had become involved because the last meeting had been in Singapore and he had been drawn into the Association’s activities then.

Angela wasn’t involved, as the ‘WAMJ’, as it was known, was purely medical and was not primarily concerned with forensic pathology or science, but with all the other aspects of legal medicine, such as negligence, injury compensation, ethics, and professional misconduct – all the problems that besiege doctors worldwide. This was the stuff that he taught to medical students, rather than the details of forensic pathology, which the vast majority of doctors would never need.

As he laboriously composed his latest progress report to send to the editors of half a dozen journals, he sighed over the numerous crossings-out and rewrites he had made and hoped that Moira could make sense of it all.

It was almost a relief when he heard the telephone ring out in the hall. The GPO had promised to come this week to install the extensions, but so far there was no sign of them and he went out to answer it. Angela was upstairs in her own room, as they avoided living in each other’s pockets, though they usually met in the evening for a drink or cup of coffee.

When he picked up the phone, he found it was Edward Lethbridge on the other end.

‘Apologies for disturbing your evening, Doctor, but I thought you might like to know that I’ve heard from the coroner about this exhumation,’ said the dry voice. ‘He’s had consent from the Home Office to go ahead.’

‘That’s damned quick!’ said Richard, enthusiastically. ‘We were all told that they usually drag their feet on this sort of thing.’

‘It seems that the powers-that-be didn’t really want to know, saying that as it was an open verdict, it was still within the coroner’s jurisdiction. But they’ve rubber-stamped it as a formality. Dr Meredith says that he’s arranged with the local council in Ledbury to open the grave early next Tuesday morning, if that suits you.’

Richard promised to liaise with the coroner’s officer about details, such as which mortuary to use, then rang off and ran up to Angela’s room to tell her the news.

She invited him in for a gin and tonic and they sat in the window to look out over the valley as the sun set.

‘What do we need to do?’ he asked. ‘You need some tissue for blood grouping, though we’ll have to search for Albert Barnes’s group.’

‘He was in the army, he should have it in his records,’ she said. ‘Trevor Mitchell should know how to go about getting it. Where will you look at the remains?’

Richard sipped his drink appreciatively. He was no drunkard, but he liked a glass of something every day.

‘Ledbury is in Herefordshire, not Meredith’s area, but he’s got a permanent arrangement with his counterpart in Hereford to use the County Hospital. Hopefully, we’ll need to have a bone or two X-rayed and then compare them with the Barnes’s films that were taken when he had his accident.’

Business talk finished, they sat and talked for a while, mainly about their families. Angela had a much younger sister who lived at home in Berkshire, but she had taken up with a man of whom her parents disapproved.

‘I’d better go up there next weekend and listen to all the angst,’ she sighed. ‘After the collapse of my romance, they’re dead scared of another fiasco!’

Richard had never probed into her failed engagement to a detective superintendent in the ‘Met’ and she had never volunteered any details. Angela seemed to sense what he was thinking and smiled at him over the rim of her glass.

‘This is an odd situation, isn’t it?’ she mused aloud. ‘Here we are, two red-blooded people staying together in the same house with no chaperone. The village people must think we’re living in sin!’

Richard’s lean face creased in a grin. ‘I always make sure my bedroom door’s locked every night!’

His partner prodded him in the leg with her pointed court shoe.

‘One of these nights I might break it down with an axe when I’m desperate!’ she promised playfully, but they both knew that it was an empty threat. Theirs was the perfect platonic friendship – or so she told herself. As for Richard, he wasn’t so sure. She was a very attractive woman, but he would never make the first move.

‘Moira has got a real crush on you,’ said Angela abruptly. ‘You know that, Richard, don’t you?’

He stared at her incredulously. ‘Moira! Go on, she’s only known me for a week or two!’ he said scornfully.

Angela nodded wisely. ‘I’ve seen her looking at you, with eyes like a big soft spaniel! You could do worse, she’s a very smart woman.’

‘I don’t want to “do” anything, thanks! I had enough problems with Miriam to last me for a bit. You’ll be saying next that Sian fancies me!’

Angela nodded sagely. ‘Of course she does! But you’re a bit old for her, so I’m not sure if she wants you for a lover or a father figure!’

Pryor laughed and stood up. ‘You’ve had too much of that gin, madam! I’m off before you get more fantasies – or start ravishing me! Don’t forget, up early next Tuesday, you’ve got an exhumation to attend. That’ll sober you up!’

He went back to his office in a thoughtful mood.

On Thursday morning, Ben Evans had arranged to speak to the men who had recovered Linda Prentice’s body from the sea and the most convenient place to meet them was at the Signal Station at Bracelet Bay. This was perched on a rocky knoll just beyond Mumbles Head, a pair of small islands which carried the lighthouse that marked the western end of the huge sweep of Swansea Bay. The coastguard station was a low building with an observation deck above it, used to monitor all vessels passing up the north side of the Bristol Channel. The two detectives parked below and climbed the path to meet the pair of coastguards in a room below the operations level. It was half-filled with equipment, but had a table and a few chairs, along with an electric kettle. The two men were burly ex-seamen, dressed in thick blue jumpers and serge trousers. One was George, who made four mugs of tea before sitting at the table with his mate, Arthur, who did most of the talking.

‘The local police called us about eight o’clock that morning,’ he began. ‘They’d been warned of a body in the sea by a chap going to do some early fishing.’

Ben Evans had already read the police report and knew that they had called the coastguard because it was impossible to get the body out of the water without proper equipment.

‘Was it difficult to recover it?’ he asked.

‘We’ve had much worse places,’ replied Arthur. ‘But without ropes and safety lines, it would have been bloody hard to get her up. She was obviously dead by the time the police responded to the chap’s call, so there was no question of resuscitation.’

‘Where exactly was she?’ asked Lewis Lewis.

‘At the foot of the last bit of cliff west of Pwlldu. There was a steep valley going down over the grass and scrub to the rocks, but then there was a ten-foot drop down to the water – a lot more at low tide.’

‘Why would a fisherman want to go down such a hairy place?’ asked Evans.

Arthur shrugged. ‘You can get some good bass in those deep gullies.’

‘Was she being knocked about much when you got there?’ asked the inspector.

‘It was near high tide and there was a fair swell running. She was close in to the rocks, being washed back and forth, rubbing against them sometimes,’ explained George.

‘The gully went in a long way, so she wouldn’t have gone out to sea until the tide ebbed and pulled her back out,’ said his mate.

Lewis wrote away in his notebook, while Ben drank some tea and thought of his next question.

‘How long d’you think she’d been in the water?’

Arthur rubbed his bristly beard. ‘Not all that long, but no way of saying exactly. She was still fresh, no signs of decay. The skin on her hands and feet was wrinkled badly, but that can happen in a couple of hours.’

‘If she had gone swimming the previous day, could you guess where she went in, given where you found the body?’ queried the detective superintendent.

Arthur grimaced. ‘These chaps who claim to tell you that exactly are talking a lot of bullshit!’ he declared.

‘There’s so many factors like tide, wind and coastal streams. With the usual westerly wind and the tidal drift along there, she would have gone eastwards, but I can’t say how far.’

As the police had later found Linda’s robe and towel at the bottom of Broad Slade, Ben knew the point was academic.

‘No doubt in your mind that she drowned?’ he asked.

‘None at all – when we hauled her out on to grass, the movement brought up some froth from her nose and mouth. That goes with her not being in all that long, as when bodies reach a bad state, it’s too late for that.’

‘Do you get many drownings like this along that bit of coast?’ asked Lewis.

The coastguard shook his head. ‘Very few, thank God, only one or two a year. We get more damn fools who fall down the cliffs or get caught by the tide.’

‘She was said to be a strong swimmer – and she went in along there very often. So why d’you think she might have drowned?’ asked Evans.

Again, Arthur gave a shrug. ‘Hard to say! She might have got cramp. The water’s still cold even though it’s June. Or she might have taken a knock on the head against the rocks if the swell caught her at the wrong moment.’

There was very little else they could extract from the men, helpful though they were and after some more chat and a refill of tea, the two detectives left, wondering what decision their senior officers in police headquarters in Bridgend were going to make about Michael Prentice.