Where Death Delights (14 page)

SEVEN

A
s a Shakespearean performance was being played out in a Cardiff cinema, another drama was taking place in a Swansea hotel.

The Osborne was a small, but exclusive, hotel perched on the edge of a low cliff at Rotherslade. About six miles from the town centre, it was at the eastern end of the Gower peninsula, overlooking the popular Langland Bay.

In one of the best bedrooms, with a perfect sea view, a furious row was going on.

‘You've got a bloody nerve, interfering in my affairs like this!' ranted Michael Prentice, his face suffused an angry red. He was a tall man, though not so heavily built as his father-in-law, who stood facing him in a colder type of fury.

‘Your affairs! That's what's led to this, according to Linda's best friend,' he responded scathingly.

‘Watch what you say, Leonard, or I'll have you for slander, barrister or not!' snarled the younger man, his handsome face contorted with hate. ‘You accuse me of assaulting my wife and I'll break you!'

The two large men stood just inside the door, squaring up to each other like a pair of boxers before the fight.

‘Do you deny pushing and punching Linda when she discovered you were having it off with some tart?' said Leonard, in intense but measured tones.

‘Don't you call her a tart, damn you!' howled Michael, then stopped dead, as he realized he had been tricked by the experienced advocate.

The Queen's Counsel gave a cynical smile. ‘No use denying it now, Michael? Who is she?'

‘Mind your own damned business. If Linda and I did have a row, what's that to you?'

‘As I'm her father, a great deal, blast you!' rasped Massey, losing his temper for a moment. ‘She writes to her friend that you want a divorce and that you assaulted her, then within a couple of weeks, she ends up dead! Do you wonder that I feel that it's my business?'

Prentice glowered at the barrister. ‘Are you accusing me of murder now, instead of assault? Good God, man, I could sue you for thousands for this!'

Massey looked around the room with exaggerated care.

‘Indeed? Where are the witnesses? I think you'll be talking to people soon who have no fear of slander. I'm talking about the police, Michael.'

The younger man took a threatening step nearer Massey.

‘You wouldn't dare, damn you! Your reputation would be ruined when the farce was exposed!'

The barrister did not flinch, but glared at his daughter's husband with utter contempt. ‘It won't be my decision, it's up to the coroner. It's his duty to report any suspicious circumstances to the CID. You'll be getting a visit from them soon, I don't doubt.'

He turned away and went to a table, where he picked up a cheque and handed it to the other man.

‘Meanwhile, we have to do the decent thing and see that my poor daughter is put to rest. The coroner will be calling you on Monday about a disposal order for burial, so this is for whatever funeral director you choose.'

Michael Prentice snatched the cheque and violently ripped it in half, dropping the pieces on the floor.

‘I don't want your damned money, blast you! I can bury my own wife, thank you very much!'

He swung around, and went out, slamming the door behind him.

Massey stood for a moment looking down at the fragments of paper on the floor, then he took a diary from his breast pocket and looked up a telephone number. He went to the phone and asked for an outside line.

‘Is that Trevor Mitchell? . . . this is Leonard Massey.'

On Sunday, Richard Pryor spent much of the afternoon in his large plot behind the house. He was increasingly keen on starting a vineyard, in spite of Jimmy's scathing remarks and with the help of a long tape measure, was pacing off a large patch about the size of two tennis courts.

In the house, Angela was standing in the window of one of the back bedrooms with a mug of coffee in her hand, watching him as he banged lengths of wood into the ground with a brick, making off the margins of his chosen area. She smiled, much as a mother would humour a child who wanted to build a spaceship in the garden.

‘Enjoy yourself, Richard, but it'll never happen,' she murmured. Probably by this time next year, he would be full of keeping turkeys or pigs there instead, or some other impulsive and equally impracticable scheme.

As she stood sipping her Nescafé, she idly tried to analyse her feelings towards him. It was a strange situation, she thought, living alone in a house with a man in a totally platonic relationship. Or was it all that platonic, she wondered?

Richard Pryor was an attractive fellow, with that frequent wry grin or a ready smile. He seemed free of any vices, never angry or sarcastic or mean-spirited. Impulsive, yes, and sometimes swinging between exuberance and depression, but his moods were like quicksilver, never lasting long. He sometimes needed pulling back from going down some irrelevant diversion, but on the whole, he was a really nice guy.

But what did she want with another really nice guy? The last one had left her in the lurch after four years' apparent happiness, with an imminent walk up to the altar in view. No, she would try a bit of celibacy for a time, until something really special came along – and if it didn't, well, she wasn't going to risk another shaming debacle.

Looking out at Richard's antics in the plot, she wondered what had gone wrong with his own love life. They had met at a forensic congress in Edinburgh last year and had hit it off from the first moment. Both recently crossed in love – or in his case, a bitter divorce – and she disgruntled with her employers, they had hatched this plan to set up in business together.

Angela mused over what might have gone wrong with his marriage. He had leaked out bits of information over the months, as he was much less secretive than she. Her private life was always played close to her chest, but he had told her that his wife Miriam had been playing the field with the limitless supply of men available in Singapore – the army officers and expatriate businessmen who abounded in the Singapore Swimming Club, the Golf Club and the famous hotels like Raffles.

Angela wondered if the fault had all been on Miriam's side, but then decided that it was none of her business and that she should be glad that meeting him had led to her coming to live in this lovely valley in a job where she could be her own boss. Please God, let it succeed, she prayed to herself, as she finished her coffee and took one last look at a sweating Richard wielding his brick.

As she went downstairs to the kitchen with her empty mug, the phone started to ring again. Far from being irritated at a disturbed Sunday, she picked it up, knowing that it must be something to do with their business, as virtually no one else knew they were here.

It was Trevor Mitchell, another man she had taken to at first sight. A typical senior detective, he was impassive and dependable and though they had only met once, she liked him and trusted him, not like another senior detective who had let her down so badly.

‘What can we do for you, Mr Mitchell? Do you want to speak to Richard?'

‘Please call me Trevor, Doctor!' he said. ‘And you're in this bones job as much as him, so shall I tell you what I've found so far?'

She liked him even more for that, for not assuming that the male half of the partnership was the chief honcho.

‘Sure, Trevor, what's new?' she replied.

‘Remember those cryptic words on Albert Barnes's medical notes? Well, I've tracked down the doctor that wrote them.'

‘That's great!' she enthused. ‘Who is he?

Mitchell explained that he had got John Christie to persuade the hospital to look up their staff records at the request of the coroner. The consultant mentioned in the notes had an SHO named Andrew Welton at the time of Barnes's admission. By searching the Medical Register, he had found that he was currently a Senior Registrar in neurosurgery at Frenchay Hospital near Bristol.

‘Maybe Doctor Pryor could arrange to see him and take the notes, hoping that this chap would remember something about it?'

Angela promised to tell Richard and he would get back to him. ‘Anything else happening?' she asked.

‘Yes, big stuff!' replied Trevor enthusiastically. ‘A barrister called Massey rang me last night and said that Doctor Pryor had recommended me as an enquiry agent in a case he's involved in. He's going back from Swansea to London tomorrow and he's breaking his journey at Newport to meet me and explain what it's all about. All I know is that it's an eternal triangle job.'

Angela gave a quick summary of the problem and their involvement, saying that Massey wanted to know more about this alleged ‘other woman'.

‘Well, it's all grist to the mill – thank the doctor for mentioning me, I can see we're going to be a good team!'

Angela told her partner about Trevor's call, when he came in from his vineyard planning. ‘Would it be best if I went to see this chap in Frenchay or could I just ring him up?' he asked.

‘I think you'll have to see him, you could be anyone on the phone,' she advised. ‘Maybe you ought to get a note from the coroner, as it concerns a patient's confidential record, even if he is dead.'

‘Especially if he isn't!' added Richard, cynically.

Monday took Pryor to the large Royal Gwent Hospital in Newport, about fifteen miles away, where he was pleased to have the coroner's work for the next fortnight while the resident pathologist was on holiday in Spain. It was a change to have a proper hospital mortuary to work in, rather than skulk in council yards or under boarded-up arches. There were three cases there that morning and after he had gone home and enjoyed another of Moira's lunches, he drove up to Monmouth to deal with a single autopsy rung in by PC Christie.

‘Trevor Mitchell told you that we found the name of that surgeon at Hereford?' asked Christie, as he was sewing up the victim of a carbon monoxide suicide who had killed himself with car-exhaust gas in his garage. Pryor nodded as he picked up the two pound notes that the coroner's officer had left on the table.

‘Thanks for your help. I rang Frenchay this morning and I'm driving over tomorrow to see him. My partner thinks I should have some kind of authorization from the coroner to show him, so I'll call on Dr Meredith after this and get some sort of billet-doux.'

Rather guiltily, he was glad that as it was mid-afternoon, he could avoid buying another expensive lunch for his portly friend. He found him in his surgery, just returned from house calls in time for his four o'clock clinic and explained the situation. As Meredith wrote out a quick authorization on a sheet of headed notepaper, the coroner asked about the likelihood of finding any more information.

‘I've never heard of this
pec.rec
either, Richard. It seems a bit unlikely that it's relevant.'

‘I agree, but without something new, we're not going to be able to twist your arm for consent to an exhumation,' he admitted.

Next morning, armed with his piece of paper, Pryor drove to Bristol after another three-body stint at Newport. Rather than drive an extra sixty miles around Gloucester, he decided to take the Beachley–Aust ferry across the Severn, just above Chepstow. A ferry had been there from ancient times, being given to the monks of Tintern Abbey in the twelfth century.

Richard queued up behind a dozen cars at Beachley, a small village on the riverbank and waited for the return of the flat-bottomed vessel from Aust on the other side. Thankfully, it was not the busiest time of day and soon he was gingerly driving the Humber down the ramp on to the open deck. As they glided across the water on the
Severn Queen
, he wondered if this bridge they were talking about would ever be built.

Half an hour after reaching the muddy shore at Aust, he was turning into Frenchay Hospital. Originally an old sanatorium, it had been expanded into a military hospital for American servicemen during the war and now was a large general hospital providing various surgical specialities.

The head porter's kiosk directed him to the neurosurgical department and as he trudged down long corridors in the wartime blocks of single-storey brick buildings, he wondered if Welton was still ‘Doctor' or had advanced to ‘Mister' in the strange way that British surgeons do after gaining the Fellowship of their Royal College, a memory of the times when surgeons were barbers, not proper physicians. He decided that as it was seven years since Welton had written those notes in Hereford, he must surely by now have passed his final examinations to land a job as Senior Registrar in these competitive times. When he eventually found the cubbyhole that was his office, a cardboard label on the door confirmed that it was indeed ‘Mr A Welton'.

The surgeon was a thin, rather haggard-looking man in his mid-thirties, with a cow-lick of fair hair hanging over his forehead. He had a strong Liverpool accent when he spoke. He greeted Pryor courteously and he spent a few moments reminiscing about Hereford and the Royal Army Medical Corps, in which Welton had done his two years' National Service in Catterick.

Then Richard produced his coroner's clearance and the copy of the County Hospital notes and they stood over a cluttered desk in the tiny room to look at them. The pathologist explained the problem and then pointed to the cryptic two words with his forefinger.

‘I'm sure you don't recall Albert Barnes after all this time, but I wondered if you could explain this abbreviation – it's a new one on me!'

Welton's response was rather unusual. He opened his white coat, threw his tie over his shoulder and unbuttoned the middle three buttons of his shirt.

Pulling aside the material with both hands, he looked down at his bared chest.