Where Death Delights

by Bernard Knight

  ‘Obviously, he would have had his rods and things with him?’

  ‘Of course he would – he had a long canvas bag slung on his back, the rods came to pieces to fit in.’

  Mitchell enquired about his health and if Albert Barnes had had any heart trouble that might explain a sudden collapse.

  ‘He had a terrible cough sometimes – he smoked too much. But I never heard he had a bad heart.’

  ‘Did he go to his doctor at all? Have any X-rays?’

  She shook her head emphatically. ‘Fit as a fiddle, my Albert. He had to be in his job, he worked on the railway, humping heavy tools about.’

  Trevor was running out of questions and had one last shot in his locker.

  ‘Could I see the watch and the ring, please?’ he asked.

  Molly Barnes looked at him suspiciously. ‘What would you want to look at them for?’ she demanded. ‘The police and the coroner had them for over a week.’

  ‘Just to tie up any loose ends,’ he answered humbly. ‘I have to look as if I’m earning my fee,’ he added in an attempt to lighten her mood.

  Muttering under her breath, she went out and he heard her going upstairs. A few minutes later she returned with an old Cadbury’s chocolate box with a faded picture on the lid looking very much like his own cottage in St Brievals. Opening it, she sorted through a tangle of bead necklaces, brooches and shiny buttons and retrieved a gold ring and a steel-cased wristwatch without any strap.

  ‘The coroner’s officer told me the strap had rotted away,’ she volunteered, as she handed them over.

  ‘This was his wedding ring, I presume?’

  ‘Yes, my Albert always wore it,’ she said bleakly.

  ‘Which year were you married?’ he asked idly.

  ‘Nineteen forty-one, in the war. He was on a week’s embarkation leave, before going to Egypt.’

  Mitchell held the narrow band between his finger and thumb, squinting at it briefly. ‘What about the watch? Where did he get that, d’you know?’

  The widow shrugged her thin shoulders. ‘I don’t know, he brought it back when he was demobbed at the end of the war. Picked it up in Germany perhaps, he was posted there later on. He said you could buy anything there with a packet of fags.’

  The watch had a black dial with the famous logo above the word ‘Omega’. In tiny letters at the bottom, it said ‘Swiss Made’. There was nothing written on the plain metal of the back.

  ‘So how did you know that this ring and the watch belonged to your husband?’ he asked, handing them back.

  ‘I just did!’ she snapped. ‘I’ve been looking at them every day for the past nine years, since he came home from the army.’

  ‘But one gold ring looks much the same as any other,’ pointed out Mitchell. ‘And this watch isn’t particularly unusual.’

  The woman slammed the lid down on the chocolate box.

  ‘I tell you I knew them! I knew every scratch and mark on that watch,’ she spat angrily. ‘You’re just trying to make me out to be a liar, you should be ashamed of yourself.’

  She jumped out of her chair and went to hold the door open.

  ‘I think you’d better go, I’ve got nothing else to say to you. I’m going to complain to my solicitor.’

  Trevor had had a similar threat a hundred times in his career in the police, but hauled himself to his feet and meekly left the house, thanking her civilly for her help before she slammed the front door on him.

  On the pavement outside, he took out a small notebook and made a very short entry, before walking back to his car.

  On Monday morning, the coroner’s officer in Monmouth telephoned to say that there were two cases for post-mortem. Richard happily agreed to come up straight away to begin his new career in one of the local mortuaries. Sian and Angela shared in his satisfaction and even went to the back door to wave him off, as he drove out of the yard and down the steep drive, to turn left up the winding valley.

  ‘Looks like a schoolboy who’s been promised a new football!’ said the technician, with an apparent wisdom beyond her years. As they went back into the house, Angela had to agree with her.

  ‘He’s blissfully happy at the prospect of cutting up a couple of corpses! But good luck to him, it was a big step to go solo like this. We need all the work we can get.’

  Richard drove up the twists and turns of the famous valley, where British tourism had really begun in the eighteenth century when rich people began taking boat trips down from Ross to Chepstow.

  When he arrived at Monmouth, he followed the directions to the mortuary given by the coroner’s officer. Though he was a serving police constable, it was several years since he had worn a uniform, as he was permanently seconded to be the coroner’s right-hand man. His directions sounded ominous, but from the few cases Pryor had done before the war, he was not surprised at the location of public mortuaries. The local authorities had an obligation to provide such a facility and although some larger hospitals hired out their mortuaries to the coroner, most of these other places were pretty low on the list of priorities of the cash-strapped councils.

  As he suspected, when the Humber nosed its way through the high wooden gates to which John Christie had directed him, Richard found himself in a municipal refuse depot. It had rained hard during the night and the large yard was inches deep in dirty mud, which a rubbish truck was slowly churning into even worse mire.

  There were several shabby buildings around the yard, including a large open garage for council vehicles, a pound for stray dogs and a blockhouse which still bore a faded wartime sign declaring it to be a ‘Gas Decontamination Centre’.

  Several other council trucks were parked there and as he weaved his way past them, he wound the window down to ask a man in oily dungarees for directions to the mortuary. The council worker, whose drooping cigarette appeared to be welded to his lower lip, pointed past the dog pound, from which a furious barking was shattering the peace of Monmouth.

  ‘Jus’ round the corner, mate,’ he advised. ‘Can’t miss it, looks like a gents’ lavatory.’

  His description was perfect, as when the pathologist parked around the corner, he saw an oblong building of dirty brick, with a flat concrete roof. It was pierced by some narrow windows high up on the wall and at one end there was a set of double doors which had last been painted green about the time Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich.

  Pryor stepped out into the grimy slush of the yard and got his square doctor’s bag from the boot of his car.

  There was no bell push on the door, so he hammered on it with his knuckles. One half was soon opened and he was greeted by a large man in a greenish tweed suit. He wore a shirt with a small check pattern and a woven wool tie. On his head was a matching tweed trilby, which only needed a few fish hooks in the band to make him the complete countryman. He had a craggy face with a square jaw, his big nose set between deep-set brown eyes. He introduced himself as John Christie, the coroner’s officer.

  ‘Welcome, Doctor, welcome!’ greeted Christie effusively, holding out his hand. ‘Nice to have a pathologist up here again, since Doctor Saunders retired. All our cases have had to go down to Newport, costs a lot more in undertaker’s fees.’

  He led the way into the building, which consisted of two dismal rooms. The one just inside the doors held the body store, an eight-foot high metal cabinet which, from the three labels stuck on its door, was a triple-tier refrigerator of doubtful antiquity. The rest of the space contained a battered desk to hold the mortuary register and several trolleys for moving coffins and bodies.

  ‘The “pee emm” room is through here, sir,’ said Christie, in a booming voice that suggested that he had been at least a warrant officer during the war. He pushed open another pair of doors into the other half of the building. Richard was half expecting to see a large slab of slate as the autopsy table, as he had once seen in Bridgend, but was relieved to find a porcelain version on a central pillar. There was very little else in there, just a large white si
nk with one cold-water tap, a sloping draining board and a gas water heater above it. A small table stood against one wall, with a glass cupboard above it containing bottles of formalin and disinfectants.

  ‘Doctor Saunders always did his organ-cutting on this,’ explained John Christie, indicating a contraption standing on the autopsy table. It looked like the tray that invalids take their meals on in bed, a large board with four legs to stand across the lower half of the corpse.

  Pryor looked around the rest of the chamber which hopefully was to be his regular place of work. The usual paraphernalia of a morgue was there, mops and buckets standing in a corner, a butcher’s scales hanging over the draining board and several pairs of grubby Wellington boots under the table. A few red rubber aprons with chains around the neck and waist, hung from hooks on the wall.

  ‘There’s no mortuary attendant, then?’ he asked tentatively.

  The officer shook his head. ‘Not enough work to warrant the expense, says the council. We’ve got one down in Chepstow, though. Here one of the chaps in the depot sees bodies in and out for the undertakers.’

  ‘So I have to do all the donkey work myself?’ hazarded Richard. Maybe this wasn’t going to be such a windfall after all, he thought.

  The policeman’s rugged face cracked into a grin.

  ‘Don’t worry, Doctor, I’ll give you a hand. I’ll sew up and clean down – and take off the skull when you need it.’

  He was as good as his word, too. While the pathologist put on boots and a rubber apron, then took his instruments from his black bag, the coroner’s officer had trundled a body in from the fridge, sliding it off the trolley on to the table and placing a wooden block under the head. He wore no apron and his green trilby stayed firmly on his head throughout the whole proceedings.

  Before Pryor began his examination, Christie produced some papers from his breast pocket and laid them on the table.

  ‘This first gent is a sudden death, sir. Collapsed in the pub, probably just heard that the price of beer had gone up,’ he added heartily. ‘Seventy-one years old, history of chest pains, but hasn’t seen a doctor for a month, so had to be reported to us.’

  ‘What’s the other one?’ asked Pryor.

  ‘Probably an overdose, there’ll be an inquest on her. Lady of sixty-five, lives alone. History of depression, not seen for three days. Found dead in bed, empty bottle of Seconal on the floor, but we don’t know how many were left in it. I’m chasing the prescription date today.’

  ‘Have to have an analysis on that one,’ said Richard. An extra fee and some work for Sian in the laboratory, he thought.

  Both autopsies went off smoothly and he took his samples for analysis into bottles he carried in his capacious case, which had three large drawers stuffed with equipment. He had had it made to his own design in Singapore and the sight and feel of it made him aware again of how much life had changed in a few short months.

  Christie was busy with a sacking needle and twine, restoring both bodies to a remarkable degree of normality, given the primitive facilities. Richard was secretly amazed at how the officer did everything so calmly and efficiently in his tweed suit and hat, without getting a single drop of blood on himself. He seemed to be able to work from a distance, bending over and reaching far out with his long arms. His only concession to hygiene was the wearing of a thick pair of household rubber gloves.

  Pryor washed his hands under the trickle from the gas heater, using soap kept in a Player’s glass ashtray. There was a clean towel on the table, God knows from where, he thought. As he dried his hands, the busy officer asked about his report.

  ‘How d’you want to do it, Doctor? I used to jot down a few notes for Doctor Saunders and he’d add a conclusion and sign it. The coroner seemed satisfied with that, just in longhand.’

  The new broom shook his head. ‘No, I’ll just make a few notes myself, then I’ll dictate a report back at the office and have it typed up, then post it to you.’

  He hoped Sian was up to the task, if they started getting more than a few cases at a time. As he leaned over the table to write some notes on a pad taken from his case, he heard John Christie dragging the second corpse on to a trolley.

  ‘I’ll put them away when you’ve gone, Doc,’ he said.

  ‘Business to be done now.’ He approached the table, pulling a wallet from his jacket and then laying four one-pound notes alongside Richard’s notebook.

  ‘The going rate is two guineas a case, sir. I don’t know what happens in Singapore, but here there’s been a long tradition that the coroner’s officer gets the shillings off the guineas.’

  Pryor recalled that in the few coroner’s autopsies he had done before going to the Forces, the same regime had operated, though then he hadn’t got the pounds, they went to the senior pathologist!

  ‘The coroner said he’d like you to call in on him, if you’ve the time, sir,’ said the officer, as he saw him to the outer door.

  Richard knew where his old college friend had his surgery, as he had called on him soon after he arrived at Garth House, unashamedly touting for any work that was going. Brian Meredith was almost exactly the same age, but had escaped being called up during the war, due to poor sight, which required him to wear spectacles with lenses like the bottom of milk bottles. He was a surgeon’s son from Cardiff and had been in general practice since soon after qualifying, most of it in Monmouth. Well connected, with one brother a barrister and the other a solicitor, he had been appointed a couple of years ago as the coroner for East Monmouthshire.

  Richard left the council yard and drove around the back of the small town, remembering that it was famous for being the birthplace of King Henry V and home of Charles Rolls of Rolls Royce, the first Briton to die in an aircraft crash.

  ‘I wonder if he had a post-mortem?’ he murmured, as he looked for the cream-painted building that housed Meredith’s family practice. Spotting it in the road behind the ancient Monmouth School, he pulled into a paved space in front and went into the waiting room, causing a doorbell to jangle as if it was a shop.

  Morning surgery was over and the row of hard chairs around the walls was bereft of patients. An inner door opened and Brian’s moon face peered out, his heavy glasses giving him the appearance of a benign owl. When he saw who it was, he advanced with hand outstretched. He was as unlike the lean, tanned man from Singapore as could be imagined. Short, portly and starting to go bald, he looked ten years older than Richard, but there was an air of benign prosperity about him that told of years of a settled lifestyle.

  ‘Richard, nice to see you again. How did the first day go?’ They chatted their way back into his consulting room where the GP sat his old friend down in the patient’s chair. After the inevitable reminiscences about their student days, they got down to business.

  ‘If you’re happy with the arrangements, Richard, you are welcome to take on the cases in Monmouth and Chepstow. Since Dr Saunders retired, we’ve had to send them either to Newport or Hereford, both of which are outside my jurisdiction.’

  Pryor was keen to confirm his agreement to this and also thanked Meredith for putting him on to the solicitor in Lydney.

  ‘I wondered why those remains from the reservoir went up to Hereford?’ he remarked.

  The coroner nodded. ‘There was no one here to deal with them. Mind you, if there’d been anything even slightly suspicious, I’d have had to send them to Cardiff, as Dr Marek in Hereford makes no claim to having any forensic expertise. It’ll be useful having you in the area, I must say.’

  Pryor saw a chance to get his feet more firmly under the table.

  ‘I’d be more than happy to help in that direction, but I’ve got no official standing with the police or the Home Office.’

  Brian Meredith tapped the side of his nose, reminding Richard of Jimmy Jenkins’s habit. ‘I may be able to put a word about here and there, Richard. You’re too good a prize not to be used around South Wales.’

  Emboldened by the extra four pounds in
his wallet, Pryor suggested that as it was almost lunchtime, he might treat his friend to a meal somewhere. Meredith lived a couple of miles outside Monmouth – ‘a doctor should never live in his practice premises, if he wants any peace’ was his favourite saying. He accepted the offer of lunch and took Richard to one of the best hotels near the town centre. As he looked at the prices on the menu, the pathologist felt his wallet getting lighter by the minute, but he reckoned it was worth it if Brian could pull a few strings for him.

  ‘How did you get on with old Lethbridge and this bone business?’ asked the coroner, over their rather tough steaks.

  ‘The lady in Newnham is dead set on upsetting your verdict,’ answered Richard. ‘She’s got a private investigator looking into it, as well.’

  ‘Trevor Mitchell? He’s a good man, I met him a few times when he was still in the CID across the border. Any chance that I’m going to have to eat my words?’

  Pryor shrugged. ‘Not so far, but I’m waiting to hear from Mitchell as to what he found when he interviewed Mrs Barnes.’

  ‘She was a tough little bird, spoke her mind at the inquest!’ said Meredith. ‘It seems she wants to get married again and urgently needs a declaration that her husband is dead.’

  The conversation veered towards more personal matters until they finished their meal, when Pryor manfully paid up at the till and walked back to the surgery with Meredith.

  ‘I’ll have to call you up to an inquest sometime on that lady with the overdose,’ said the coroner as they entered his forecourt.

  ‘We’ll run an analysis to make sure it was that Seconal,’ said Richard, as he unlocked his car. ‘You should have the result in a day or two, along with the post-mortem reports on both cases.’

  Meredith’s pale eyebrows rose on his chubby face.

  ‘That’s a welcome change!’ he admitted. ‘The forensic lab in Cardiff usually takes at least a couple of weeks!’

  They shook hands and Pryor climbed into his car and shut the door. He was about to start the engine, when the coroner came to the window, which Richard wound down.