Where Death Delights

ONE

The Wye Valley – June 1955

‘If I’d realized that setting up house was as hellish as this, I’d have stayed in bloody Singapore!’

He staggered through the office door with a large cardboard box and dumped the heavy typewriter on a new desk, whose five-ply top creaked ominously.

‘Stop complaining, Richard! We’ve broken the back of it now.’

He stifled the obvious retort about breaking his own back and dropped into the swivel chair behind the desk, wiping the sweat from his face with a large khaki handkerchief. It was very warm and the confines of the Wye Valley seemed to hold in the summer heat, even though he should be used to it, having lived in the tropics for the past thirteen years. Looking across at Angela Bray, he almost resented how cool and fresh she looked in a yellow summer dress. His business partner sat at a table, checking lists of laboratory equipment, ticking off delivery notes against her own inventory of what they needed. The rest of the room and the one next door, which was to be their main laboratory, were piled with crates and cardboard boxes, most carrying labels bearing the name of suppliers in Cardiff and Bristol.

‘All we need now are some clients, or it’ll soon be overdraft time!’ he muttered, thinking of their rapidly dwindling bank balance.

Angela slapped down her pencil and glared at Richard Pryor. ‘Come on, Richard, the coroner has promised you regular post-mortems in Chepstow and Monmouth. And you’ve got those medical school lectures in Bristol, so that’s a good start. We agreed that it would take us at least a year to break even.’

Her level-headed pragmatism was a counterpoint to his swinging moods, for she was always calm and self-possessed whatever the crisis. Pryor sometimes thought of her as the ‘ice maiden’, except that the thick mane of brown hair that framed her handsome face was hardly that of some Nordic beauty.

‘That’s the last of the stuff from the car,’ he announced, his good humour returning. ‘So I’ll start shifting some of this stuff into the lab.’

He climbed to his feet and took off the jacket of his crumpled linen suit, which like all his clothes, was a legacy of more than a decade in the Far East. Before next winter, he reflected wryly, he would have to get something warmer.

Angela looked up briefly from her papers.

‘Sian will be back soon, she can tell you where some of the things go. Then she can start putting the reagent bottles and apparatus in the right places.’

He humped a dozen boxes into the next room, which had been his late aunt’s dining room but which now was lined with white Formica-topped kitchen units, a large wooden table standing in the bay window. With the last carton in his arms, he stopped in front of Angela.

‘Where d’you want this microscope?’

She tapped her lists together and stood up, almost as tall as Pryor.

‘I’ll come and see, shall I? You’ll be using it as well, once we get some histology going.’ They spent the next hour in their new laboratory, unpacking boxes and starting to fill cupboards with bottles of chemicals and strangely shaped bits of glass. Even though it was not yet mid-morning, the old mansion was already stifling in the hot June day and Angela Bray mentally added a couple of electric fans to her next list of purchases.

‘Where’s that damned girl?’ asked Richard eventually. ‘I hope she’s going to be reliable.’

Sian Lloyd, their new laboratory technician-cum-secretary had offered to stop off at the post office to get a supply of stamps and a wireless licence.

Angela sighed. ‘She has to get a bus from Chepstow, then walk up from the village. Give her a break, Richard, she doesn’t have a car like us.’

‘Talking of a break, we could do with our elevenses.’

He looked hopefully at his partner, who steadfastly ignored his hint that she should assume some domestic duties. ‘There’s no milk’ she said. ‘But if you want black Nescafé, feel free to make it.’

‘I thought Jimmy was bringing us some groceries and things.’

‘He is, but after shaking a couple of bottles of milk around on that motorbike of his, it will probably be butter by the time he gets here.’

Pryor had inherited Jimmy Jenkins along with the house that Aunt Gladys had left him in her will. He had been her gardener, odd-job man and part-time driver and when Richard had appeared as the new owner, he had materialized again and taken up his old duties virtually by default. Richard had to admit that though at first he had suspected the man was something of an idle scrounger, the house and four acres needed the attention that a pathologist and a forensic scientist were in no position to provide.

Thirst drove him to the old-fashioned kitchen that lay at the back of the big Victorian house, and in the rattling old Kelvinator fridge he found a flagon of local cider. Taking a couple of glasses back to the office, which had once been his late uncle’s study, he put them on the table and sat down opposite Angela, who had gone back to check something on her equipment lists.

Abstractly, she murmured some thanks, still immersed in her papers. When she got to the bottom of the last page, she looked up at her partner and caught him staring out of the French window at the distant trees on the English side of the valley. Covertly, she studied his profile and decided again that he was not a bad-looking chap, in a stringy sort of way. Forty-four years old, he had that lean, sinewy appearance, often seen in men who had spent many years in the East. Though not a frequent cinema-goer, she was reminded of actors like Stewart Granger or Michael Rennie with their ‘big white hunter’ look, a similarity which Richard Pryor unconsciously reinforced with his belted safari suits with button-down pockets. He suddenly came out of his reverie and his deep-set brown eyes fixed her with a worried gaze.

‘Do you think we’ve done the right thing? Both giving up good jobs to take a leap in the dark like this?’

‘We’ve been through this before, Richard,’ she said patiently. ‘We agreed that we’d give it two years. If it doesn’t pan out then, both of us are well enough established to go back to what we did before.’

Angela took a sip of her cider and shuddered slightly at the acrid flavour.

‘People with our qualifications and experience are not going to starve, you know, even if we have to join the brain drain to the States or Australia.’

Dr Angela Bray had been a forensic scientist at the Metropolitan Police Laboratory in London and Richard Glanville Pryor was formerly the Professor of Forensic Medicine in the University of Singapore.

She had become increasingly frustrated by public service bureaucracy and the lack of any foreseeable advancement in the system, whilst Pryor had been offered a generous ‘golden handshake’ after nine years in the university, who wished to appoint a local Chinese in his place. He could have stayed on, but the size of the financial inducement, coupled with a weariness with the tropics and a yearning for his native Wales, tipped the scales.

He and Angela had met the previous year at an International Forensic Science Congress in Edinburgh. After discovering a mutual desire to make a radical change in their professional lives, they decided to combine their talents by setting up a private partnership to offer forensic expertise to anyone who needed it. Angela’s decision was reinforced by the prospect of living in the beautiful Wye Valley on the Welsh border, as she had fond memories of holidays in the valley. There was little to keep her in London, so now it was crunch time, to see if their ambitious venture would succeed.

Richard had been living in the house for over a month and Angela had moved down a fortnight earlier, after burning her boats by selling her flat in Blackheath. One thing they had not fully foreseen was that their professional partnership was going to be less of a problem than their personal lives. Though Garth House was a large place with five bedrooms, it was not proving easy to share the accommodation, especially as it possessed only one bathroom.

Angela had made it quite clear from the outset that their relationship was purely professional – she had no intention of becoming housekeeper, cook or surrogate wife. The obvious answer was for her to find somewhere to live nearby, but this seemed ridiculous with such a large house available, especially as their finances were already stretched. After spending the first few nights in a bed and breakfast in Tintern Parva, the nearest village, Angela rebelled at the ongoing cost and inconvenience.

‘I’m moving in to the middle bedroom,’ she announced, arriving with her cases in the back of her white Renault Dauphine. ‘The village gossips can call me the scarlet woman from London if they like, but it’s crazy to leave a big house like this half empty. As soon as we can afford it, we’ll divide it properly into two flats.’

Garth House now belonged to both of them, as they had set up a limited company for their venture, he putting in the house and Angela the proceeds of the sale of her flat. As the courteous Richard had lugged her cases upstairs, he had wondered how this was going to work out. Were there locks on the bedroom doors, for instance?

‘But I’m not cooking or cleaning, remember,’ she called up after him. ‘We’ll have to camp out for a bit, until we sort out some more permanent arrangement.’

So far, their lifestyle had been spartan, with Shredded Wheat and Typhoo Tips for breakfast, a sandwich lunch and usually something from a tin as supper. Sometimes they splashed out on an evening meal in a café at Chepstow or Monmouth, the towns at each end of the famous winding valley with its steep, wooded sides. Aunt Gladys had died at eighty-six in a nursing home, leaving the house furnished. Though much of it was old and worn, they had kept the better pieces to kit out some of the bedrooms. The downstairs rooms, apart from the kitchen and one turned into a communal lounge, were given over to the needs of their practice. As well as the office, there was a large laboratory and a workroom each for Angela and himself, together with a toilet at the end of the corridor that led back from the central hall. A preparation room and wash-up for apparatus occupied the former scullery and what had been a huge pantry was now to be a storeroom.

As they finished their drinks, there was a throaty roar from outside as a motorcycle climbed the steep drive from the main road below and swung around the back of the house to the yard behind. Here there was a coach-house with space for two cars underneath a large loft that Angela had her eye on for an extension to the laboratory. With a final noisy revving, the engine of the Royal Enfield died and moments later the rider and his passenger marched into the office.

‘Jimmy saw me at the bus stop and gave me a lift,’ announced their sole professional employee. Sian Lloyd was a lively, ebullient blonde of twenty-four, small and shapely, with a snub nose and blue eyes. Not a girl to be pushed around, she gazed out at the world defiantly, speaking her mind on anything that concerned her – and some things that did not. Sian came from a working-class family, her father a welder in a local engineering works, a shop steward and fervent socialist, some of which had rubbed off on his daughter. She was fully qualified, having passed all the examinations giving her Fellowship of the Institute of Medical Laboratory Technology, and she had already started on an external degree in biochemistry.

‘Here’s the licence – and the stamps.’ She placed an envelope on the table in front of Angela. ‘Jimmy’s left the groceries in the kitchen.’

Behind her, their odd-job man touched a finger to the greasy cap in which he seemed to have been born. Richard wondered if he even wore it to bed.

‘Got all the stuff on the list, Miss Angela – and I saw some nice-looking sausages in Emery’s shop, so I brought you half a pound.’

Jenkins was a broad, powerful man with a short neck and long arms. The fanciful Richard wondered if he had a touch of gorilla in him, after seeing his hairy arms and chest when he was clearing some of the neglected area behind the house. Jimmy, who appeared to be about fifty, had a wide, weather-beaten face with a broken nose and a permanent grin, which exposed irregular teeth yellowed by years of smoking Woodbines. On the rare occasions when he lifted his cap to scratch his head, he revealed stubbly grey hair that stuck up like a scrubbing brush.

‘Goin’ to rain tonight, no doubt about it,’ declared Jimmy. ‘So I’ll get out and trim that hedge down by the front gate while it’s still dry.’

Unless Richard gave him some definite task, he seemed to decide for himself what jobs he would do, but in spite of earlier misgivings, his employer had to admit that Jimmy seemed a good worker.

Angela took Sian into the laboratory to carry on sorting out the new equipment, while Richard walked down the corridor from the hall to the room at the back of the house which he had earmarked for his own. His medical books and journals were piled on the floor and he began stacking them on the bookcases that lined one wall. It had been a library-cum-smoking room in the distant days when Uncle Arthur had been alive.

Angela’s room was the former drawing room in the front of the house. Like the lab, it had a magnificent view across the valley, with the River Wye meandering at the bottom and steep tree-covered slopes opposite. The large bay window matched the one across in the laboratory, and only Pryor’s sense of chivalry prevented him being a little envious of Angela’s domain.

It was Wednesday, but there was nothing else for him to do until the following Monday, when he was to start carrying out post-mortems for the coroner at the small public mortuaries in the area – assuming there were any customers that day. Though he wished no one any ill will, he trusted that the mortality statistics would ensure that there be some sudden deaths, suicides and accidents, as this would be almost their only financial income until their reputation spread and business came in from further afield. Thanks to a professional contact in Bristol University, he had been offered twenty lectures a year to medical students. The salary was derisory, but it gave him a nominal academic appointment and hopefully widened his medico-legal contacts which could lead to work from police, lawyers and doctors in the area.

As he hefted up heavy textbooks on to the shelves, he thought that the last time he had opened any of them was six thousand miles away, in the island city at the bottom of the Malay peninsula. He had enjoyed his years in Singapore, but with the Empire rapidly shrinking, it was time to move on, especially when the university had been so generous in wanting to get rid of him.

As he ruminated about his life in the tropics – and his failed marriage – he heard the distant ringing of the telephone on a table in the hall. Pryor had already asked the GPO to put extensions in the office and the two doctors’ rooms, but it would be weeks before they got around to it. He started towards it, but his new employee had beaten him to it.

‘There’s a call for you, Prof!’ said Sian, speaking as excitedly as if the call was from Mars. ‘It’s some solicitor, maybe he’s got some work for us.’

Sian Lloyd had already identified strongly with the venture and was agog that maybe someone wanted their expertise. Pryor hurried into the hall and picked up the heavy black phone. A carefully measured voice answered his ‘hello’.

‘This is Edward Lethbridge, of Lethbridge, Moody and Savage. We are solicitors in Lydney and I wondered if you could help us?’

Richard felt his own frisson of excitement at this possibility of their first case. ‘I’m sure we can, Mr Lethbridge. We have hardly opened for business yet, but I’m sure that we can do something for you. How did you hear of us so soon?’

‘The coroner, Doctor Meredith, gave us your name and telephone number. I’ve known him for years, as we have occasional dealings in the coroner’s court. This is a little difficult to explain over the telephone, so I wonder whether you could call at my office.’

Only too anxious to follow up this invitation, Richard arranged to meet Edward Lethbridge in Lydney that afternoon. Sian hurried in to the laboratory to tell Angela and start putting more bottles in place in case they were needed for this new development. The biologist was more restrained in her reaction.

‘He probably wants us to do a paternity blood test in some family dispute,’ she said evenly, ‘Still, it’s all grist to the mill, and we certainly can do with the money.’

It was not a paternity test, but was hardly a serial-killer case either, as the pathologist discovered later that day. He drove the ten miles to Lydney in his five-year-old Humber Hawk, the Severn estuary visible down on the right of the A48, which took most of the traffic from England into South Wales. It was a busy road, far too narrow, tortuous and built-up for the volume of traffic it had to bear, thought Pryor. With the rapid increase in manufacturing and trade generally since the war had ended, the infrastructure of the country was proving woefully inadequate. Big lorries lumbered past him almost in convoy and those in front held him up, many of the old trucks of pre-war vintage belching fumes from their worn engines. A decade after VE and VJ days, things were improving rapidly, but there was still a long way to go.

Lydney was a small industrial town, with a branch railway going up into the Forest of Dean to the few remaining coal mines that lurked in that strange and historic region. Richard drove into the long main street and eventually found Lethbridge, Moody and Savage above a building society office in the main street.

A middle-aged secretary showed him into a gloomy room where the senior partner of the firm with such a threatening name was waiting for him. Edward Lethbridge looked a typical provincial solicitor. He was a thin, desiccated man in a faded pinstripe suit, steel-rimmed glasses perched on his long nose. After a limp handshake and after a few platitudes about the hot weather, he came straight to the point.

‘We have a client who lives in Newnham, a few miles up the river from here. She’s an elderly lady by the name of Agnes Oldfield. We have done some work for her in recent years, as her nephew Anthony vanished three years ago and we have made strenuous efforts to trace him.’

The lawyer sank his chin to his chest so that he could look at Pryor over his glasses.

‘Last week, she read an account in the local paper of an inquest held by Dr Meredith on some human remains found near a reservoir up beyond Abergavenny. She is convinced that they belong to Anthony.’

Richard was rather at a loss. ‘If there was an inquest, then surely that settled it?’

Lethbridge smiled a secret smile, and shook his head.

‘The verdict was that the deceased was an Albert Barnes, but my client wishes to dispute this.’

‘Ah, a matter of identity. What do you want me to do? Review the papers, then examine the remains?’

The solicitor steepled his fingers, elbows on his desk, an old mahogany relic which looked as if it been bought by his great-grandfather.

‘The papers, certainly. However, there is a difficulty,’ he added ruefully. ‘The body, or what was left of it, was buried a fortnight ago.’

Richard felt deflated. Once a corpse was in the ground, he knew that it was a devil of a job to get permission to dig it up again.

‘The coroner has been good enough to release the inquest proceedings to me, as I persuaded him that Mrs Oldfield was a sufficiently interested party to allow her solicitor to have access to them.’

He opened a drawer in the cavernous desk and slid a thin folder across to the professor. ‘If you would care to take these away and study them, perhaps you could come up with some suggestions – even if it is only confirmation that Mrs Oldfield is barking up the wrong tree.’

Pryor took the file and opened it briefly to riffle through a few flimsy pages.

‘Is there anything else you can tell me about the matter?’ he asked hopefully.

Edward Lethbridge shook his head. ‘Not really, doctor. If you decide to look into the case, then I suggest you talk to the lady herself. I would be happy to make an appointment for you. And there is, of course, Trevor Mitchell.’

‘Who’s Trevor Mitchell?’ asked the mystified pathologist.

‘A former detective superintendent who has set up as a private enquiry agent. He lives in St Brievals, not far from you. He does some work for me occasionally and I recommended him to Mrs Oldfield some time ago, to look into her nephew’s disappearance.’

After a rather diffident conversation about an hourly fee rate, Richard left, clutching the papers. He treated himself to a pot of tea and a Chelsea bun at a nearby café, resisting the temptation to open the file on the stained gingham-patterned oilcloth that covered the table. For a moment, he thought nostalgically of the eating house in River Valley Road in Singapore, where he used to call in for the best nasi goreng in the Colony, a savoury fried rice with which no Gloucestershire bun could hope to compete.

He drove slowly back to Chepstow in his comfortable saloon, which he had bought second-hand as soon as he arrived back in Britain. Driving down Castleford Hill, the steep gradient to the famous iron bridge over the swirling Wye, he looked up at the great castle on its crag above the river, one of the first the Normans had built to subdue the local Welsh. Though born in Merthyr Tydfil, he knew this area quite well, having stayed with his aunt many times, both as a schoolboy and later when a medical student in Cardiff. His years in the East had not diminished his love for his native Wales and he found that to be back again among these hills, valleys and castles was immensely satisfying. As the traffic lights on the bridge turned green, he patted the lawyer’s file on the seat alongside him, confident that this was the start of a new era in his life.

He drove complacently up through the winding streets of Chepstow and on to the valley road past the racecourse, relishing the breeze that came through the open window, as he looked down on the impressive ruins of Tintern Abbey, a mile or so down the valley from home, as he now termed it.

Back at Garth House, he passed Jimmy hacking away at the hedge, stripped to his waist in the heat. Parking the Humber in the open coach house alongside Angela’s smaller car, he walked to the back door and into the kitchen, calling for his partner as he went.

‘We’ve got a job, Angela! Got a moment?’

They sat at the table in the office and Richard opened the buff folder to display a few sheets of handwritten notes, together with a couple of official forms and several newspaper cuttings. Sian had sidled up to the door, unable to resist eavesdropping on their very first case, anxious to be accepted as part of the team. To her a professor was a very august person and she was determined to give Richard the respect he was due, but not to be intimidated. Anyway, she rather fancied him, this lean, tanned man from the East, a fact which Angela had already noticed.

Pryor explained to Angela the general outline offered by Edward Lethbridge and then began scanning the documents, before passing them to Angela. There was silence for ten minutes, until they had digested the relatively meagre information that was on offer.

‘This Mrs Barnes seems to have it all sewn up,’ commented Angela. ‘I wonder why Widow Oldfield is so intent on proving it was her nephew?’

‘The solicitor hinted that she was keen on his money, as it seems she was his only surviving relative,’ said Richard. ‘He was forty-five when he disappeared and was apparently very well-heeled from money left him by his parents. Unless she can get a declaration that he’s dead, she can never get probate and hopefully inherit.’

Typically, Angela wanted to rehearse the facts methodically. ‘The post-mortem report is a bit sketchy, but it seems that what was recovered was over half a skeleton, but minus the skull.’

‘The most useful part is missing, as far as identity goes,’ agreed Pryor. ‘No head, so no teeth to examine.’

‘Why wouldn’t it have a head? Animals?’

The pathologist nodded. ‘It must have been lying for several years out in the countryside, by the sound of it. Predators, especially foxes, but also dogs, rats and even badgers, would have made a mess of it in that time. A lot of the other bones were missing, too.’

‘Did they have any idea of how long it had been there?’ asked Angela.

‘The report says that the bones still had remnants of ligaments and tendons, which fits in with a couple of years since death – no way of being exact about that, in spite of the claims by writers of detective novels!’

‘Who’s this doctor who did the post-mortem?’

‘A pathologist in Hereford County Hospital, a Dr Marek. By the name, he must be Polish. Not a forensic chap, but the police were obviously satisfied that there was nothing suspicious about the death.’

He shuffled the pages about on the table and picked up the single page of the autopsy report. ‘As you say, not very detailed, but seems sound enough given the little there was to work with.’

‘So why did the coroner reckon it was this Albert Barnes?’ said Sian.

‘When the local paper announced the finding of the remains, this Mrs Barnes from Ledbury went to the police and said it might be her husband. She had reported him missing four years earlier, but he never turned up. The wife said he often used to go walking and sometimes fishing in that area. The police showed her a ring and a wristwatch that was still with the remains and she was adamant that they were his.’

‘Did the bones fit with what was known of this man Barnes, I wonder?’ asked Angela.

Pryor looked again at the post-mortem report, turning it over, but failing to find any more written on the back. ‘It just says “typically male pelvis and limb bones consistent with a man more than twenty five years of age and of average height”.’

Sian looked unimpressed.

‘Most men are older than twenty-five and of average height,’ she commented. ‘Doesn’t help much.’

‘If you had the bones, especially the femora, you could calculate his height, couldn’t you?’ asked Angela.

Richard nodded, but made a face expressing caution.

‘To within an inch or so either way, but as there’s no record of Albert Barnes’s height, apart from his wife saying he was “average”, it doesn’t help a lot. And anyway, the bones are six feet down in some cemetery.’

‘The inquest report is short and sweet as well,’ observed Angela. ‘The police offered no evidence of foul play, there were no injuries on the skeleton – not that that means much without a head.’

‘It was the wife’s definite identification of the wedding ring and the watch that clinched it with the coroner. That was fair enough, he had no reason to disbelieve her.’ Pryor threw the paper down on to the table.

‘So your old coroner pal Brian Meredith declared it was Albert Barnes and brought in an open verdict,’ concluded Angela.

‘Hardly an “old pal”! Until last month, I hadn’t seen him since before the war, when we were students together in Cardiff. I’d heard he’d gone into general practice in Monmouth and become the local coroner as well.’

Richard Pryor and Brian Meredith had qualified in 1936, but their paths had then diverged. Richard had taken up pathology and in 1940 been called up into the Royal Army Medical Corps. He had spent most of the war in Egypt and Ceylon, but when Singapore was liberated in 1945, he had been posted to the laboratory of the British Military Hospital there, ending his service with the rank of major. When ‘demobbed’ after the war, he had taken local release and stayed on as a civilian pathologist in the General Hospital, dealing with coroner’s and police cases. This post carried an additional appointment in the university medical school to teach forensic medicine.

‘So what happens now?’ asked Sian, disappointed that their first case seemed a bit of a damp squib. ‘Sounds as if this Mrs Barnes has got a cast-iron case.’

‘We’ve not got the remains, so I can’t even try for a blood group, even if we knew what group Albert was,’ said Angela.

Richard nodded disconsolately. ‘Without the damned bones, we’re stumped!’

There was a cough from the doorway behind them and turning, they saw Jimmy James standing there, his sweating body stripped to the waist, an open bottle of beer clutched in one hand.

‘Doc, just tell me where they’re buried and I’ll dig the buggers up for you tonight!’