Where Death Delights

SEVENTEEN

A couple of days later, Trevor Mitchell called at Garth House, perhaps not altogether accidentally at the time of their afternoon tea break. He sat with the team in the staff room and brought several items of news.

‘The first thing will probably make you groan,’ he said, as he accepted a McVities Digestive from the biscuit tin.

‘I’ve tracked down Anthony Oldfield’s blood group at last.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ said Angela, with a sigh. ‘He was A-Positive?’

The private detective nodded. ‘Murphy’s Law, I suppose, though it is very common.’

‘How did you find out?’ asked Moira.

‘The obvious way, I suppose. Mrs Oldfield couldn’t find a donor card in the stuff her nephew left behind in the house, but that didn’t necessarily mean that he had never given blood.’

‘So you went to the BTS records,’ suggested Angela. ‘Would they give you confidential medical information?’

‘I got a letter from Edward Lethbridge explaining the problem and one from Mrs Oldfield giving her consent as next of kin. As some people have it engraved on a bracelet or tattooed on their arm, it’s not all that confidential, anyway. The problem was that there are quite a number of Blood Transfusion Service centres and each keeps it own records, unless the groups are very rare and needed for making antisera.’

‘And you struck lucky – or unlucky, depending on how you look at it!’ said Richard.

‘Yes, after a few false starts, I tried the Bristol centre, who turned up a record of Anthony Cyril Oldfield who was a single-time donor back in 1947.’

There was a thoughtful silence as they digested the implications.

‘There’s nothing more we can do about it,’ said Angela eventually. ‘The coroner isn’t going to get very excited about a marker that exists in about thirty-five per cent of the British population.’

Trevor’s broad face creased into a grin. ‘And who’s going to convince Agnes Oldfield of that?’ he asked.

‘But while you’re worrying about that, I’ve got a bit more news. Have you seen this morning’s Western Mail?’

Moira lifted a folded copy from the chair beside her.

‘I’ve only looked at the headlines so far – why?’

Trevor leaned back on his chair, his bulk making it creak.

‘Inside, you’ll see a short report of a hearing yesterday at Gowerton Magistrates’ Court. “Swansea Industrialist remanded on charges of obstructing the coroner”, but there are no details worth talking about.’

Richard leaned forward, intensely interested.

‘What’s it all about, Trevor? They haven’t charged him with murder, have they?’

The former police officer shook his head. ‘I rang Ben Evans, I’ve known him for years. He gave me the bare bones of it, there’ll be a lot more to come.’

Mitchell passed on what the Gowerton superintendent had told him, that Prentice had claimed that his wife had killed herself and that he had suppressed the suicide note to make it look like an accident.

‘Then he dropped her back in the sea at a different place! Ben doesn’t believe a word he said, but the lawyers are going to have a field day with this.’

Moira and Sian were agog with excitement at this first major case they had become involved with and their housekeeper hurried to open her newspaper and find the report. The headline on the second page was prominent, but the actual content was notable only for its brevity.

‘It says he was released on bail until the next appearance in two weeks’ time,’ announced Moira in a somewhat disappointed voice. ‘I thought he would have been locked up until the trial.’

‘So did Ben Evans,’ agreed Trevor. ‘Prentice must have a pretty persuasive solicitor. The father-in-law will be spitting tacks at the fact that Prentice wasn’t held on remand.’

‘I suppose obstructing the coroner isn’t exactly a capital offence,’ observed Angela. ‘Richard, you’ll be called as a witness for the prosecution in this case, as it was you who confirmed the bruises. They are bound to go into that aspect.’

Trevor nodded his agreement. ‘No doubt about it. I expect Ben Evans will be in touch with you soon, the prosecution will probably have a conference, before the full preliminary proceedings.’

‘I wonder if the defence will want their own autopsy?’ said Pryor. ‘That would be the third, but they’re still entitled to one.’

Later that afternoon in the front laboratory, Sian was still excited about the increase in their workload.

‘We’ve had a mass of stuff from Doctor Pryor’s fortnight in Newport, as well as the Chepstow and Monmouth cases. I’ll have to start a proper filing system for these microscope slides and tissue blocks. And now we’ve had two murders in the same week!’

Angela smiled at her enthusiasm. ‘Hold on, we don’t know what the Swansea case is going to turn out to be. The chap is only charged with a technical offence, not the violence.’

She relented when she saw that her technician looked a little crestfallen. ‘But the Gloucester one is real gangster-style – and with the Gower body, you played an important part in making such nice sections for Richard to base his opinion on concerning those bruises.’

This cheered Sian up and she went off to her microtome humming happily. The mention of the shooting the other night brought back to Angela the image of Paul Vickers marching unexpectedly into the mortuary. Though she had firmly closed the door on that unpleasant episode, she was often depressed about the fact that life was passing her by when it came to romance – and yes, to her sex life, or rather lack of it.

The years were passing all too quickly and she wasn’t getting any younger. Though she had no burning desire to jump into marriage and motherhood, she missed the social life she had with Paul, even though he turned out to be a rat. She determined to get about more, maybe join a golf club or go riding or do something to meet people. Yet she was enjoying this relaxed life in the Wye Valley and it would be an effort to start ‘putting herself about’ more. With a sigh, she rolled her laboratory stool nearer the bench and got down to more paternity tests, her trade having increased as the reputation of Garth House spread ever more widely.

Trevor Mitchell was right when he forecast that Richard would be required at a conference about Linda Prentice’s death. Ben Evans phoned him the next day and more or less repeated what Trevor had revealed.

‘You’ll learn all the details next week, Doc,’ said the superintendent. ‘The prosecuting solicitor wants a meeting in his office in Swansea next Tuesday, as the case is coming before the magistrates again the following week and we want to oppose an extension of bail. I don’t see why the bastard should be walking the streets when I’m sure he killed his wife.’

‘Is he going to be charged with murder?’ asked Richard

‘I don’t know, that’s what’s got to be discussed next week. It will need the consent of the DPP to send this to trial.’

The ‘DPP’ was the Director of Public Prosecutions and as he was in London, it was a cumbersome business dealing with major offences. The lesser cases were handled by local solicitors who acted as agents for the police, but the big stuff had to be considered by the famous offices in St Anne’s Gate, Westminster.

At the urging of the three women in the house, Richard had gone to Cardiff and bought a ready-made suit in Evan Roberts, an outfitters opposite the castle. It was of dark grey flannel, double-breasted and with wide lapels. Though he preferred his ‘big white hunter’ outfits, which had served him well in the Singapore courts, he had to give into Angela’s pleas for him to have more of the Spilsbury look when appearing professionally. He drew the line at the wide-brimmed trilbies favoured by police and newspaper men and instead decided on a smart Homburg with a rolled brim to go to the conference in Swansea.

As the solicitor’s office was in a busy street, he again decided to use Jimmy Jenkins as a chauffeur and at two o’clock, he was dropped outside a large Edwardian house in St Helen’s Road, near Swansea General Hospital. Jimmy promised to pick him up at four o’clock and to cruise around if he was later than that.

He was shown into a spacious upstairs room, where the prosecuting solicitor, Maldwyn Craddock, was presiding from behind a large desk. Craddock was a very fat man, his neck bulging over his collar and his pink face rounded by comfortable living. He had sparse silver hair parted in the middle above a misleadingly jovial face with blue eyes and a small purse-like mouth.

Already ranged before him on hard chairs were Ben Evans, Lewis Lewis, Dr O’Malley and the Gowerton coroner, Donald Moses. Richard took the empty seat next to the other pathologist and after being greeted cordially by Maldwyn Craddock, the lawyer got straight down to the main issues.

‘Right, gentlemen, I need to know what we are charging Michael Prentice with next week. At the first hearing, it was only a charge of obstructing the coroner, but are we going to be able to improve on that, given that the DPP agrees?’

Donald Moses looked a little put out at this.

‘It’s not a trivial offence, Maldwyn, like riding a bike without lights!’ he complained. ‘For a start, it’s made a nonsense of my original inquest verdict of accident. It will all have to be done again and the paperwork chased up to London and back.’

The fat lawyer held up a conciliatory hand. ‘I wasn’t belittling it, Donald. Just wanting to know if we can turn the screw a bit more, so to speak. Mr Evans, what’s the position from where you’re sitting?’

‘I think Prentice is lying through his teeth, sir. Why would he carry the body all the way up one cliff, then drive half a mile and carry it down another? And this suicide note sounds phoney to me.’

‘And why go to the trouble of wire-brushing his oil leak off the track?’ added Lewis Lewis.

Craddock nodded benignly. ‘But our problem is proof! We would need enough to convince the magistrates to send him for trial for murder or manslaughter – and to be frank, we haven’t got there yet. Already he has to be committed to the assizes on the obstructing of the coroner’s charge – and possibly the DPP might crank that up to ‘perverting the course of justice’, but homicide is a different kettle of fish! What about this suicide note, Superintendent?’

Evans shifted his bulk on the uncomfortable seat. ‘Inspector Lewis has already taken it up to Cardiff. The lab there is the acknowledged document examination centre for the whole country. We want to know who typed the letter, the wife or the husband.’

‘Will they be able to tell us?’ asked the solicitor.

‘The problem is that though there’s no doubt that it was typed on the machine in the house, that’s not the issue,’ answered Lewis, who had spoken at length to the expert in Cardiff. ‘I was told that differentiating between two typists is very difficult. It depends on things like the heaviness of keystrokes, the repetition of mistakes and the style of writing, but it’s not an exact science, unlike comparing defects in the machine itself.’

Ben Evans nodded his agreement. ‘We’ve got samples from both of them from typed documents we found in the house and Inspector Lewis has taken those, together with the actual typewriter, up to the laboratory. We now have to wait for their opinion.’

They discussed this for a while, Lewis pointing out that Linda had been a trained secretary before her marriage.

‘It gives us a better chance of proving whether or not she wrote it, as she would have a more professional style, rather than the amateur two-finger bashing that someone like her husband would be likely to use.’

‘What about fingerprints?’ asked Craddock.

‘Of no use, sir,’ replied Ben Evans. ‘Both the letter and the typewriter keys have got plenty of both their prints on them. They both used the machine in the house long before this affair, that’s where we got these sample letters and carbons. And as for the actual suicide note, he admits having the body in the house, so he could just have pressed her fingers all over it.’

The prosecuting solicitor moved on to another aspect.

‘Tell me about this oil business?’ he asked.

The superintendent turned up his hands. ‘It was a nice piece of detection, but now that Prentice has admitted driving to the place where his wife’s body was recovered, it doesn’t matter so much, except to raise the question of why he lied about it and why he felt so vulnerable that he went and tried to scrub it off.’

Craddock was making notes on a yellow legal pad in front of him.

‘Yes, that’s a very telling point, of course. Tied in with the fact that he moved the body from one bit of sea to another, it’s so far the only hint we’ve got that he might have killed her. But it’s still not proof and I’m damned if I can see why he did it!’

Richard Pryor sat quietly in his new suit, listening to the exchanges. This was police business and had nothing to do with him, but it was intriguing stuff, all the same.

Eventually, Craddock got around to the medical aspects. He turned to Patrick O’Malley first.

‘Doctor, it seems there is absolutely no doubt that Linda Prentice drowned?’

The Irishman, who seemed to be trying to remain as inconspicuous as possible, hastily agreed.

‘As far as I’m concerned, yes, she died of drowning. But I make no claims at being a forensic chap, that’s Doctor Pryor’s province.’

‘You made no particular reference to the bruises on her body?’ asked the lawyer, mildly.

O’Malley looked uncomfortable. ‘Well, I knew she had been recovered from a rocky part of the coast and most of the injuries were scratches from that. I assumed the bruises were from the same cause.’

‘But I understand that you can’t bruise a dead body?’

‘She would have been alive for a time in the water, until she drowned. She could bruise against the rocks then,’ said the pathologist, rather evasively.

‘You didn’t carry out the tests under microscope that Dr Pryor did?’ asked Craddock, smiling indulgently. ‘You see, Doctor, I’m trying to anticipate the questions the defence will no doubt put to you, if the Director of Public Prosecutions decides to run this for murder.’

O’Malley admitted that he had not thought it necessary, given that he had been told the death was accidental, but he readily agreed with what he knew of Pryor’s interpretation. Craddock gave up tormenting O’Malley and turned to Richard.

‘A rather unusual situation, Doctor Pryor! Here you are, a private expert retained by the family, yet now you may have been transformed into a prosecution witness.’

Richard matched his smile in return.

‘That’s how it goes, Mr Craddock. Facts are facts, whoever commissions me.’

The prosecuting solicitor then went through Richard’s statement in minute detail, questioning every piece of evidence until he was sure he knew its significance. The bruises were the focus of his interest and especially the dating and location of these injuries.

‘So in summary, they are a mixture of ages, Doctor, suggesting that they were inflicted over a period?’

‘Certainly not in one episode,’ replied Richard cautiously. ‘I can’t give you exact timings, but some were probably of the order of a week or two, others were more than a day or so – and a few were so fresh that they could have been inflicted during the previous day or as Dr O’Malley said, even in the water immediately before death.’

He added the last as a compassionate sop to reduce the other pathologist’s discomfiture.

‘And you are also quite happy that the cause of death was drowning?’ was the final question, to which Pryor had no difficulty in giving a positive answer.

After some more general discussion, the lawyer laid down his pen and squared up the yellow pad on the desk in front of him.

‘I’m not sure where this leaves us, gentlemen,’ he said, his smile having vanished now. ‘I’m not all that optimistic about being able to push the charges beyond obstructing the coroner and wasting police time. We might be able to jack it up to “perverting the course of justice” but as for murder, I can’t see much hope of that.’

He fiddled with his pen again. ‘It will be up to the DPP and no doubt he’ll consider all the papers and perhaps brief Counsel to give an opinion. Even if the magistrates would wear it and commit him for trial, I can’t see a judge letting that charge go to the jury as it stands, on the evidence we have so far.’

‘What if the letter proves to have been written by Prentice?’ growled Ben Evans, reluctant to let his instincts be confounded. ‘What earthly reason would he have for writing a false suicide note, other than to cover up a homicide?’

Craddock bobbed his head in agreement.

‘It would indeed be a telling point, but is it enough to send a man to the gallows? And Inspector Lewis told us that determining who typed a given document is not a straightforward exercise, it has a lot of subjective opinion about it. Much would depend on the strength of the document examiner’s evidence, as opposed to a defence expert, who I am sure would be called to challenge him.’

Richard Pryor sat listening to the lawyer demolishing his own case, but recognized that this was the sensible thing to do. It was no good going to court with flimsy evidence that a competent defence counsel could shoot down in flames. Maldwyn Craddock made one final resumé of the situation.

‘We have a man who is having an affair with another woman. His wife finds out and they have a stormy period. He wants a divorce and she refuses so he becomes violent on at least one occasion, gripping her arms and probably her throat. This is corroborated by the letter she writes to her friend.’

He paused to drink from a glass of water on his desk.

‘Then she is found dead in the sea, which is assumed to be an accident. After his car is proved to have been standing further along the cliff, the husband admits that he has suppressed a suicide note, which may or may not be genuine.’

He stopped and looked along the faces in front of him, his eyebrows raised in an invitation to comment.

The detective superintendent was the first to respond.

‘That’s about the measure of it, Mr Craddock. A lot will depend on the strength of the document examiner’s opinion on who wrote that note.’

Donald Moses, the coroner who had been largely silent until now, agreed with Ben Evans. ‘In my opinion, everything hangs on that note. If the death was an accident, why on earth try to make it look like a suicide? The only conclusion is that he’s trying to cover up the fact that somehow he killed her.’

The prosecuting solicitor drummed his fingers restlessly on the edge of his desk.

‘Agreed, but how did he kill her? Doctor Pryor, have you ever heard of someone being carried alive and then thrown into the sea to drown? Especially as it seems she was an experienced swimmer.’

Richard shook his head. ‘It seems very improbable. The only way would be if she was drugged or drunk. We did an alcohol on her urine and it was negative. We still have a blood sample in our fridge, perhaps it had better go to the forensic laboratory in Cardiff for drugs screening.’

‘What if she was knocked out first?’ suggested Lewis Lewis. ‘There was an injury to the back of her head, wasn’t there?’

Richard nodded. ‘There was a recent bruise under the back of the scalp, yes! Impossible to say whether or not it would have rendered her unconscious or not.’

‘Remind me, was that a fresh injury, Doctor?’ asked Craddock.

‘Fresh, in the sense of being within a day before death,’ replied Richard. ‘We originally assumed that it was from being banged against the rocks, which in an accidental scenario, could account for a good swimmer being drowned.’

The solicitor nodded his fleshy head. ‘That’s certainly what any defence counsel would allege – and I presume you couldn’t deny it?’

He did not wait for an answer but again surveyed the others in the room.

‘So it looks as if we’ll have to run with what we’ve got, unless something new turns up before the preliminary hearing. Prentice has confessed to the suppression of the letter, so he can’t dodge that, but we may have to be content with whatever sentence that brings.’