Where Death Delights

by Bernard Knight

  ‘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 Wale
s. 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.