Where Death Delights

TWO

Richard declined to take up Jenkins’ offer – in fact, his handyman’s apparent readiness to break the law so blatantly gave him something else to worry about.

‘That bloody man might turn out to be a liability,’ he growled to Angela later that day. Sian had left to catch her bus home at five o’clock and the two principals were sitting in the kitchen, eating a scratch ‘high tea’ of Fray Bentos corned beef and a salad, followed by a tin of peaches with Carnation tinned milk. The sausages were being kept for a late supper.

‘I don’t think he was serious,’ countered Angela. ‘You have to take anything Jimmy says with a large pinch of salt!’

Pryor shrugged as he finished his dessert. He then took the dishes to the big Belfast sink in the corner. ‘I admit he works hard outside, but I wish he’d keep his nose out of our business.’

Angela went across to the gas stove and lit the burner under the aluminium kettle, then used the same match to light a cigarette. ‘I must try to give these things up,’ she said, pushing the packet of Kensitas back into the pocket of her white coat. ‘I needed them with all the stress of living and working in London, but down here in this peaceful countryside, I should be able to kick the habit.’

Her tone rather suggested that ‘peaceful countryside’ was code for ‘deadly dull rural backwater’ and Richard was suddenly aware of how little he really knew about his new business partner. He had heard on the gossip network that flourishes amongst the small world of forensic specialists, that she had never been married but had had a traumatic breakdown of an engagement to a senior police officer in London. He also knew she came from a rather ‘posh’ family background in the Home Counties. Her parents ran a stud farm in Berkshire and she had been educated at a well-known boarding school, hence her well-modulated Thames Valley accent.

Quite different from his own, he thought ruefully. Though years abroad had blunted his Welsh accent, he was a product of a secondary school in a very different ‘valley’, that of the Taff near Merthyr. His parents were still there, his father having retired a few years earlier from an exhausting general practice in Aberfan.

His reverie was broken by Angela sitting down again after filling the brown teapot and bringing it to the table.

‘So what’s the next move over our first and only case?’ she asked, pouring the strong liquid into a couple of cups. Even though they were virtually camping out, her sense of propriety had made her fill a small jug with milk. The pint bottle from the village shop, the cardboard top already pecked by ardent sparrows, remained in the fridge. As Richard added his customary two spoonfuls of sugar, he ruminated about Mrs Barnes’s bones – or should it be Mrs Oldfield’s bones?

‘I’ll have to talk to this lady in Newnham, I suppose,’ he said. ‘Get her story first-hand and see if she can add anything that could help establish identity. Maybe she’ll say he had a wooden leg!’ he added facetiously.

Though Angela was not without a sense of humour, she was already learning to ignore her partner’s frequent whimsies.

‘What about this private detective fellow?’ she asked. ‘I’m always a bit wary of them, I imagine a chap in a dirty raincoat taking snaps of a co-respondent through bedroom windows.’

Pryor grinned, his lean face revealing a good set of white teeth.

‘Don’t forget the brown trilby pulled down over his eyes!’ He took a sip of the hot tea, before continuing. ‘But seriously, this man Mitchell sounds OK. Lethbridge said he was a detective super in the Gloucestershire force until a year or two ago. He was in the Division that covered the Forest of Dean, so he must know a lot about the area across the river.’

‘You’d better have a word with him as well,’ suggested Angela. ‘You never know, perhaps he can pass a bit of work our way, and vice versa,’ she added practically.

As it turned out, the pathologist met Trevor Mitchell very soon, for next morning Pryor rang the solicitor in Lydney, who after a few phone calls, made arrangements for him to see Mitchell that morning and to go on to interview Mrs Oldfield afterwards.

Leaving Angela and Sian to continue stocking the laboratory, he took the Humber up the valley for a short distance, past the hamlet of Llandogo, and across the river bridge. A side road took the heavy black car up a steep lane with sharp bends that climbed the English side of the valley, with superb views in all directions. At the top was the ancient village of St Brievals, which had been the medieval capital of the Forest of Dean and still had a castle to prove it. He stopped outside the Norman church to ask a lady for directions and was sent down a nearby lane to a thatched cottage whose picture should have been on a box of chocolates, even down to the roses around the door. A rap on the panels brought an almost immediate response, being opened by a large man wearing bib-and-brace brown overalls, looking like a carpenter or a plumber.

He held out his hand and pumped Richard’s vigorously.

‘Come in, Doctor, come in! Excuse the rig-out, but I’ve just come in from my workshop.’

As he led the way into a low living room, with blackened beams in the ceiling, Pryor saw that Mitchell was a powerful man just past fifty, with a thickset body and cropped iron-grey hair. His face reminded Richard of a bulldog, the Churchillian features looking as if they had been crushed from above downwards.

Mitchell piloted the doctor to a deep armchair, covered in flowery chintz like the rest of the three-piece suite. The room was like a film set of an English country cottage, with half-panelled walls, a large stone fireplace and numerous pictures of rural scenes. It even had a glass case containing a stuffed otter sitting on a dresser filled with blue and white china.

‘You’ll have some coffee, Doctor?’ asked the investigator, in a tone that seemed to rule out any refusal. He went to a door at the back and in a deep bass voice roared out instructions to someone in the nether regions.

Then he came back and dropped heavily on to a settee opposite.

‘I understand that old Eddie Lethbridge put you on to this,’ he began. ‘A dry old stick, but he’s sound enough, not like some of these slick lawyers in the city.’

Pryor nodded. ‘So far, there doesn’t seem much to go on. I hope this lady isn’t wasting her money on a wild goose chase.’

Trevor Mitchell grinned, his stern face lighting up for a moment. ‘She’s not short of a few bob, is Agnes – though she’s keen to add a lot more to it from her nephew’s money. I’ve benefited from making a couple of similar goose chases for her in the last couple of years.’

‘D’you think there’s anything in this one?’

Mitchell shrugged his wide shoulders, from which his head seemed to rise without any neck.

‘No reason why it shouldn’t be. This Anthony fellow did just vanish over three years ago, so he has to be somewhere!’

‘But this Mrs Barnes seems to have it sewn up, with this ring and the watch.’

The former detective pursed his lips. ‘It’s only her word that says they belonged to him. There’s no corroboration from anyone else, she’s got no one to confirm it.’

They were interrupted by the kitchen door opening and a small lady entered carrying a tray. She was a wisp of a woman, with fair hair coiled in a roll around her head. Wearing a floral pinafore that almost matched the loose covers of the furniture, she gave Richard a smile from her elfin face as she set down the tray of coffee and biscuits on a small table between the two men.

‘This is my good wife, Doctor!’ announced Trevor. ‘Mary, this is the professor from Singapore we’ve been hearing about. Come to live in Garth House, down in the valley.’

‘I hope you’ll be very happy there, Professor,’ said Mary Mitchell. ‘I knew your aunt slightly, she sometimes used to come up here to church whist drives.’

With another smile, she went back to her kitchen, leaving her husband to hand a plate of Crawfords Rich Tea biscuits to his visitor.

‘So do I call you “Doctor” or “Professor”?’ he demanded.

‘“Doctor” will do, thanks,’ answered Pryor. ‘I held a university chair for a short time, but that was a long way from here. It always seems daft for men to hang on to their military rank long after they’ve packed it in. I suppose I could equally call myself “Major”, but it would sound silly.’

After a biscuit and a few sips, they got down to business.

‘I’m going to see Mrs Oldfield after I leave here,’ said Pryor. ‘Anything I should know before I meet her?’

‘Bit of an old snob, is Agnes,’ confided Mitchell. ‘She’s not seventy yet, but seems older, a real hangover from Edwardian days. Speaks her mind, and damn the consequences!’

‘So why does she think these remains are those of her nephew, this Anthony chap?’

Mitchell grinned again, which lightened his forbidding features. ‘She thinks every set of bones found within fifty miles of here must be his! This is the third time I’ve gone poking into other deaths – but they had cast-iron identities. At least this one is a bit more open to doubt.’

He drank down his coffee and replaced the cup in its saucer.

‘Anthony had plenty of money, as he and his father ran a factory in Swindon during the war, making some bits for aircraft. His parents died some years ago, but he didn’t need to work again, so he enjoyed himself.’

‘How old was he, then?’ asked Richard, taking another biscuit.

‘Forty-five when last seen three years ago. He used to do a lot of hill walking in the Black Mountains and the Brecon Beacons – he was keen on fishing as well. He lived in a private hotel in Cheltenham, but latterly came to stay with his aunt, to be nearer the hills, she said. Apparently, he was also dotty about archaeology, and used to visit ancient places both here and abroad.’

‘And you didn’t find any trace of him from the time he vanished?’

Mitchell shook his head. ‘He wasn’t classed as a missing person for a long time after that. He used to just push off whenever he felt like it without telling anyone, as he had no other relatives. It was only when she hadn’t heard a word from him for over a year that she began to wonder if he was dead. That’s when she hired me, but what could I do?’

‘So he could be living in Nepal or camping in the Mexican jungle?’ said Richard.

‘It’s possible, but Mrs Oldfield won’t have it! She reckons he’s dead, but until it’s proved or he stays missing for seven years, she can’t collect. He intended leaving everything to her, according to Agnes – and the solicitor confirmed it to me.’

Richard took another biscuit and opened the file that the lawyer had given him the previous day.

‘According to this, the remains found near the reservoir were those of a man in middle age, of about average height and build. Not very helpful, as that fits about half the male population of Britain! Was there anything about the two missing men that wouldn’t fit that description?’

The former detective shook his head.

‘Of course, I’ve only been dealing with Anthony Oldfield, the Barnes angle is new to me. But Anthony, from what his aunt says and the photos I’ve seen, was a pretty ordinary-looking bloke, a bit on the lanky side perhaps.’

‘Has the solicitor asked you to look into the Barnes side of things on Mrs Oldfield’s behalf?’ asked the pathologist.

Trevor Mitchell nodded. ‘Yes, he told me that she wanted me to cooperate with you. She’s dead keen on winning this one, her nephew must have a lot of family money tucked away and she wants it.’

Pryor looked pleased at this. ‘I’m glad we can work together on this. As a doctor, it’s a bit difficult for me to go knocking on doors and asking questions.’

Mitchell’s face screwed up even more as a quizzical expression spread across his face.

‘What sort of questions, Doc?’

‘Well, anything noticeable about this Albert Barnes, which would be inconsistent with what’s described in this post-mortem report, little though that is.’

Mitchell thought for a moment. ‘Like a hunchback or club foot, you mean?’

‘That sort of thing – but we wouldn’t get that from his wife, who sounds as keen as our client on proving that the remains were that of her relative.’

‘But we might get something from a neighbour, perhaps.’

The pathologist nodded. ‘At least they wouldn’t be biased witnesses. It’s a long shot, but we’ve got little else to go on.’

‘And of course, we haven’t got the bones any more, they’re buried,’ added Mitchell.

Pryor nodded. ‘Without getting a sight of those, I can’t see we can go much further.’ He finished his coffee and stood up.

‘I said I’d be at Newnham by eleven o’clock. Mustn’t keep the lady waiting, especially as she sounds like an old-fashioned stickler for good behaviour. I’ll see if there’s any more medical details I can get from her. A pity we’ve got no head.’

‘At the moment, we’ve got nothing at all, Doc,’ said Mitchell, accompanying him to the door. ‘I’ll make arrangements to see Mrs Barnes to get her end of the story. She won’t be thrilled to see me, if she realizes that I’m trying to throw doubt on the coroner’s findings.’

Asking his host to thank his wife for the coffee, Richard made his way to his car, where he sat and pulled out a dog-eared book of AA road maps that had belonged to his father. Though he knew the area fairly well, from holidays with his aunt before the war, he needed to check on the route to Newnham, which was on the other side of the forest, on the main A48 to Gloucester. His finger traced out the road up to Coleford, then across to Cinderford and down an unclassified road to Newnham, which lay right on the river. Richard recalled it was one of the best places to see the famous Severn Bore, another memory from his student days.

He set off, window down in the rising heat and drove across the forest, through the most heavily wooded part of the Royal Forest that had provided England with so many ships in centuries gone by. In midsummer, the foliage was still fresh and green, quite different from the deep, lush colours of the jungle and rubber trees with which he had become so familiar during his years in the Far East. However, today the temperature was almost as great, a freak heatwave for June – but it was a dry heat, not the suffocating dampness of the tropics.

The road took him past the seventeenth-century Speech House in the middle of the forest, where the Verderers still held their Court every forty days, as they had done since the time of King Canute. Richard had learned these nuggets of local history during his pre-war holiday tours with Uncle Arthur in his old Morris Ten saloon.

As he came down the last lap of the journey into Newnham, the panorama of the narrowing river estuary lay below him, spread out like a map. The town had one main street which was the A48 trunk road, running downhill, then turning towards the river bank. When his small side road met the main one, he followed Trevor Mitchell’s directions and turned up into a narrow service lane that ran in front of a row of old houses. He remembered the brick clock tower in the middle of the town and the sixteenth-century Victoria Hotel at the top of the main street, but his attention was on the names outside the tall terraced houses on his right.

Crawling in bottom gear, he soon spotted ‘Meadowlane’ cut into a slate plaque at the side of a heavy front door. There was only one other car parked in this section of the road and he pulled up behind it and went to ring the bell.

It was answered by a short woman in a long linen apron, with a frilled mob cap on her grey curls. For a moment, Richard thought he had strayed into a stage production of a Regency play, but the woman smiled and pulled the door open wide.

‘Doctor Pryor? You are expected, please come in.’

He went into a rather gloomy hallway, unsure whether or not this was Mrs Oldfield, though she did not tally with Trevor Mitchell’s description. The house smelled of mothballs and furniture polish.

‘Mrs Oldfield is in the drawing room,’ said his guide, clarifying matters and indicating an inner door on the left of the hall. The servant, for that was what he decided she must be, tapped on the panels, opened it and stood aside for him to enter, calling out in a strong Gloucester accent, ‘Dr Pryor, ma’am!’

In the high-ceilinged room, its bay window looking down on the main street, he saw another elderly lady in a high-backed chair, one hand on a silver-headed ebony stick. She sat erect, her plain dark dress closed at the throat by a large cameo brooch. Her face was long and lined, set in a severe expression, under a swept-back mass of white hair, gathered in a bun at the back.

For a moment, he thought of Queen Victoria, though she was really nothing like the pictures he had seen of the old Empress – perhaps it was the stern expression and the gimlet-sharp eyes that regarded him.

‘Excuse me not rising to greet you, Professor,’ she said in a surprisingly melodious voice. ‘But I suffer from severe arthritis. Please be seated.’ As she waved her cane to indicate a similar chair opposite, he saw that all her finger joints were badly distorted.

As he made some polite greeting and subsided into the chair, Agnes Oldfield waved her wand at the old servant, who was still hovering in the doorway.

‘You may serve coffee now, Lucas,’ she commanded grandly and the woman vanished. Even though it was less than an hour since taking coffee with Mitchell, Pryor felt it unwise to decline, even if the draconian old lady had allowed it.

Obviously her code of conduct demanded some light conversation before they got down to business.

‘I understand you have not long returned from living in the East, Professor,’ she began. Again, he desisted from explaining that he preferred being called ‘Doctor’ and gave a quick resume of his recent life.

‘You were in the Army?’ she demanded.

‘A major in the Royal Army Medical Corps,’ he admitted.

Agnes Oldfield gave a delicate sniff. ‘My late husband was a colonel in the Hussars. We lived in India for a time, you know.’

Pryor again felt that he was playing a bit-part in some Oscar Wilde comedy, but the moment passed as Lucas came in with a tray of coffee, immaculately served in thin china amid a profusion of solid silver jugs, basins and spoons. They waited while the maid went through the ritual of moving small tables, pouring coffee and setting one at the side of the lady of the house, before giving Richard his cup. Then she proffered a plate of thin ginger biscuits and quietly left the room.

‘My solicitor has explained the problem, I take it, Professor,’ she began, fixing him with a beady eye.

‘I feel sure that this tragedy involved my nephew Anthony and that the coroner was in error with his verdict.’

Richard placed his cup back on the saucer, half-afraid of chipping the delicate china.

‘I understand perfectly, Mrs Oldfield. The problem is the lack of evidence to work with. I hoped that perhaps you could – well, fill in some of the gaps, as it were.’

He almost said ‘put some flesh on the bones’ but that would have been a slip of the tongue that he knew this severe lady would not appreciate.

‘What do you need to know?’ she asked, lifting her own cup with some difficulty.

‘Can you give me some better details of his physical appearance, for a start? His exact height, build and any old injuries or serious illnesses, for instance.’

She frowned and sipped her coffee as she considered this.

‘I’ve told Edward Lethbridge all I know,’ she replied. ‘I can’t tell you his exact height, he was perhaps a little taller than you, say five feet ten inches. He was rather slim, because he was such an active man, always walking or climbing somewhere.’

‘Did he ever have any serious falls doing that? Had a fracture of an arm or leg, perhaps?’

‘Not that I was aware of, no. Though he was away for months at a time, before the war and since, even going abroad to the Alps or the Middle East or somewhere.’

Aware that he was getting nowhere fast, Pryor tried another tack.

‘Do you know if he was ever admitted to hospital for anything – I’m thinking of the possibility of obtaining X-rays, for example.’

‘What could they tell you, Professor?’ she demanded.

‘If we could compare them with the actual bones, we might find a match?’

He refrained from saying that they were more likely to exclude a match than confirm it, thinking she would not want to hear the pessimistic side – but she was ahead of him.

‘But you don’t have the actual bones, do you?’ she snapped.

Pryor sighed, she had a sharp mind, but an abrasive manner, as Trevor had warned.

‘Not yet, but we need more facts to support an application for them to be re-examined.’

‘An exhumation, you mean? Would that be necessary, I would prefer poor Anthony to be left in peace.’

She had obviously already made up her mind about the identity. Richard turned up his hands in a gesture of despair.

‘Without a better examination, there would be no hope of overturning the verdict.’

Agnes Oldfield pondered this for a moment and Pryor could almost hear the cash register ringing in her head as she weighed an exhumation against an inheritance.

‘Very well, if it is the only way,’ she announced regally. ‘How can that be arranged?’

Richard shook his head. ‘It’s not that easy, I’m afraid. We have nothing to go on from your end, so to speak. Your nephew vanished three years ago, but there is not the slightest evidence that he is dead. Before we can even approach the coroner about an exhumation, it would have to be shown that those remains were not those of Albert Barnes. That would be to rectify the coroner’s verdict, not to replace it with your contention that the remains were those of your nephew – that would have to be a separate exercise. Mr Mitchell is investigating this possibility even as we speak.’

He thought it useful to emphasize how her minions were getting on with the job.

There was nothing more that he could extract from Mrs Oldfield, though he spent a few minutes getting a better idea of how her nephew had vanished. It seemed that in June 1952, he had checked out of his private hotel in Cheltenham with all his belongings and arrived at his aunt’s house in Newnham, saying that he wanted to stay with her until he found another hotel or a flat in Bath, where he fancied living for a time. After a few weeks, he set off with a suitcase, saying he was going to stay a few days in Bath to look around – and never came back.

‘I never heard another word from him,’ she said finally.

Feeling that further poking into these matters was a job for Mitchell, rather than a forensic pathologist, Pryor rose to his feet, saying that everything possible would be done and that she would be kept informed – hopefully by Edward Lethbridge, he told himself.

After a perfunctory shake of a crippled hand, he took his leave and Lucas let him out into the street, which felt light and warm after the gloomy interior of the old house.

He drove home through Blakeney and Lydney and arrived at Garth House about twelve thirty. Deciding he could face no more corned beef or egg-and-bacon for lunch, he recklessly invited Angela out for a meal.

‘It’s Friday, so let’s celebrate having survived our first week!’ he said gaily. Angela was already beginning to recognize his swings of mood and today he was obviously upbeat, so she went along with it.

Sian always brought sandwiches, to which she added an apple and a bottle of Tizer, so leaving her to man the telephone, Richard ushered his colleague into the Humber and drove off down the valley towards Chepstow. None of the local pubs offered anything but drink and crisps, apart from the large hotel opposite the abbey, so he was aiming for a small café-cum-restaurant he knew of in the main street of the ancient town near the mouth of the Wye.

‘What’s brought this on, partner?’ asked Angela, reclining in the passenger seat, which was much more comfortable than her little Renault.

‘We’ve got to talk about organizing the house better than at present,’ said Richard. ‘So look on this as a business lunch and charge it against expenses.’

‘Expenses! We haven’t got any income yet to charge it against,’ she said scornfully, but secretly she was pleased to be pampered a little, even if it was probably only for a plaice and chips.

They parked in the town, the ruins of the huge brooding castle above them on the edge of its cliff over the swirling river. The restaurant was little more than a large shop, with a dozen tables and a counter with a huge hissing coffee machine alongside a glass case displaying an assortment of cakes. However, to Angela’s surprise, they were presented with a typed menu card which offered fresh salmon, steak and kidney pie, gammon or cold ham, all with either chips or three vegetables.

‘I still can’t get used to so much food becoming available,’ she said. ‘You were out of it for years, gorging in Malaya with your fried rice and prawn curries. It’s hardly any time since we finished with ration books here!’

She settled for salmon and new potatoes, while Richard went for the steak and kidney. The place had no licence, so they drank water until it was time for a coffee.

‘Now then, madam, we’ve got a lot to discuss,’ said Richard firmly, after they had finished apple tart and custard and were on a second cup of coffee.

‘Domestic or professional?’ she asked.

‘Both, because one affects the other,’ he replied.

‘We can’t go on pigging it in Garth House, we’d be better off camping in a tent in the garden. We need a decent meal at least once a day and someone to keep the place clean and generally look after us.’

The scientist nodded. ‘I don’t disagree with you, Richard. But how are we going to pay for it?’

‘I’ve still got a few quid left from my golden handshake and I’m sure we’ll soon be picking up some more work. If it comes to the crunch, we can take out a small mortgage on the house.’

In spite of her resolution, Angela took her Kensitas from her handbag and lit up. ‘First and last today,’ she declared. ‘But what are you thinking of doing?’

She recognized that one of his intense moods was coming on, which she applauded, except she knew it tended to fade away fairly quickly, unless she badgered him.

‘We need some sort of housekeeper, who can clean the place up and do a bit of cooking. Somebody local, who can come in each day, not a live-in servant like that old biddy has in Newnham.’

He had described his morning’s activities to her during the drive down from Garth House.

‘It would be good if she could type as well,’ added Angela. He looked at her suspiciously for a second, wondering if she was being sarcastic, but she was serious.

‘Look, we thought Sian might be able to type the reports, as well as work in the lab,’ said Angela. ‘But have you seen her trying to use that typewriter? I can do better with two fingers.’

‘I thought she had been to a secretarial college in Newport?’ he objected.

‘For two months after she left school, that’s all,’ said Angela. ‘She hated it, she told me, that’s why she got a job in a hospital lab.’

‘OK, so we need someone who can cook, clean and type! A bit of a tall order out here in the sticks, isn’t it?’

‘It was your idea, Richard. We can only try, as like you, I’m fed up with living out of tins and making my own bed. Thank God there’s a good laundry service in Chepstow.’

He gave her a brilliant smile, making her think that he wasn’t such a bad looking fellow after all, with that wavy brown hair. A pity about those awful safari suits, though.

‘Right, I’ll see what we can do. Maybe Jimmy will know someone, he probably knows every single person between here and Monmouth.’

Angela looked doubtful. ‘God knows what sort of people he knows – probably find us a gypsy who can only cook hedgehogs!’

‘Who cares, as long as she can type!’ he said facetiously.

They both burst out laughing, almost euphoric with a sudden realization of how much of a task they had taken on with their new venture.

In the car on the way back, she told him that while he was out that morning, she had had a phone call from a solicitor in Newport wanting to arrange a blood test in a disputed paternity case.

‘A doctor in the Royal Gwent Hospital recommended us,’ she said. ‘He was in your year in medical school in Cardiff.’

Richard was delighted at some new business coming in already. ‘Who the hell would that be, I wonder? How did he know I was here?’

‘Your pal the coroner, it seems. He’s spreading the word around, thank God.’

‘Have you got all the necessary stuff for your serology yet?’ he asked, as Garth House came into view.

‘Yes, it’s all under control. Though we’ll need a new fridge to keep the sera and other things in, especially in this weather. We can’t put everything in that old relic in the kitchen, alongside our food.’

Encouraged by the prospect of cases and income, Angela went off with Sian to continue their blitz on the laboratory shelves and cupboards, while Pryor went outside to look for Jimmy Jenkins. The land belonging to Garth House sloped up fairly steeply from the main road towards the dense woodland beyond. The house was built in the lower part, within fifty yards of the road below. There was a patch of kitchen garden near the house, just behind the outhouses, but the rest of the four acres was rough grass and bushes, neglected since his aunt and uncle had died.

‘Only good for a few sheep, that is,’ said Jimmy, leaning on his hoe, with which he had been weeding between a few rows of beetroot, runner beans and carrots. He wore his usual baggy corduroy trousers, but his plaid shirt was hanging on a nearby bush, exposing his barrel-shaped chest to the hot sun.

‘I’ve got plans to start a vineyard there eventually,’ declared Richard. It was one of his recent fantasies to plant vines on the south-east facing slope and make his own wine.

Jimmy looked at him from under his poke cap as if he was mad. ‘You’d be better off with a few sheep. Grow your own meat, boss, not bloody wine!’

Jimmy drank only beer, at least a couple of pints a day down at the Three Horseshoes in Tintern and his tone suggested that he thought wine was a drink fit only for ‘nancy boys’, as he called them.

Pryor was in too good a mood to argue, so he raised the matter of a domestic help, explaining that they needed someone part-time to do a bit of cleaning and cooking.

‘Do you know anybody around here who might be interested?’ he asked his handyman.

Jimmy pushed up the back of his long-suffering cap to scratch his head with a dirty forefinger.

‘Mebbe I do, must give it a bit of thought, Doc,’ he said slowly. ‘An’ you could put a card in the post office, they got a board for free adverts there.’

Having said his piece, he started vigorously attacking the weeds with his hoe, so Richard left Jimmy to his task and went indoors, thinking that he might well take the man’s advice and put a small advertisement in the local post office.