Where Death Delights (30 page)

‘From what I've heard, the feelings of her family, especially her father, weren't very high in your list of priorities!' retorted the detective.

‘It seemed the best solution at the time,' muttered Prentice, sullenly.

‘So what was the next act in this remarkable drama?' demanded Ben Evans.

‘It must have been gone midnight before I made up my mind what to do,' muttered Prentice. ‘I wrapped her in a blanket and put her in the boot of the Jaguar. There was no one about, so I drove down towards Pwlldu and stopped where that bloody oil must have leaked out.'

‘Then you just carted your dead wife down the path and chucked her into the sea,' said Evans harshly.

‘Why go to all that trouble?' asked Lewis. ‘She was already in the water back nearer the house. One bit of sea is much the same as another, if you want to drown.'

Michael swung his head from side to side, as if he was a bull being baited by dogs.

‘I don't know, I just don't know!' he groaned. ‘I had brought her up to the house on impulse, it seemed the right thing to bring her home, not leave her almost naked on that lonely beach. Then when I decided to put her back in the water, I thought that deeper water near the headland might take her out to sea.'

‘Oh, charming! You wanted to save yourself the cost of a funeral, did you?' snapped the superintendent.

‘What difference would it make, if you were fabricating an accident?' contributed Lewis.

Michael Prentice grabbed at his hair with both hands.

‘I don't know, I tell you!' he shouted. ‘I can hardly remember that awful night, I came back here and drank half a bottle of whisky!'

‘So what about your wife's dressing gown – the one found under a bush?' asked Evans, remorselessly.

‘I don't even remember seeing it that evening,' grated the husband. ‘It was found where it should have been, I suppose. I don't know where she usually left it while she was in the water.'

Evans looked at his inspector, who closed his notebook.

Then he turned back to Michael, who was still sitting on the edge of the chair, staring at the carpet.

‘Mr Prentice, we're going to take you back to the police station in Gowerton now, where for a start, you'll be formally charged with obstructing Her Majesty's coroner in the pursuance of his duties. Other charges may follow in due course.'

Michael Prentice rose slowly to his feet, his face drained of all colour. ‘I want to telephone my solicitor,' he said dully.

‘You'd better do that from here, and ask him to arrange representation for you at Gowerton as soon as possible. You won't be going home tonight, I can assure you, so you'd better collect a few things in a bag now.'

He nodded at Lewis to accompany the man to his bedroom, in case he either tried to make a run for it or even cut his wrists.

As the inspector passed his boss on the way out of the room, he murmured ‘You still owe me twenty Gold Flake.'

SEVENTEEN

A
couple of days later, Trevor Mitchell called at Garth House, perhaps not altogether accidentally at the time of their afternoon tea break. He sat with the team in the staff room and brought several items of news.

‘The first thing will probably make you groan,' he said, as he accepted a McVities Digestive from the biscuit tin.

‘I've tracked down Anthony Oldfield's blood group at last.'

‘Don't tell me,' said Angela, with a sigh. ‘He was A-Positive?'

The private detective nodded. ‘Murphy's Law, I suppose, though it is very common.'

‘How did you find out?' asked Moira.

‘The obvious way, I suppose. Mrs Oldfield couldn't find a donor card in the stuff her nephew left behind in the house, but that didn't necessarily mean that he had never given blood.'

‘So you went to the BTS records,' suggested Angela. ‘Would they give you confidential medical information?'

‘I got a letter from Edward Lethbridge explaining the problem and one from Mrs Oldfield giving her consent as next of kin. As some people have it engraved on a bracelet or tattooed on their arm, it's not all that confidential, anyway. The problem was that there are quite a number of Blood Transfusion Service centres and each keeps it own records, unless the groups are very rare and needed for making antisera.'

‘And you struck lucky – or unlucky, depending on how you look at it!' said Richard.

‘Yes, after a few false starts, I tried the Bristol centre, who turned up a record of Anthony Cyril Oldfield who was a single-time donor back in 1947.'

There was a thoughtful silence as they digested the implications.

‘There's nothing more we can do about it,' said Angela eventually. ‘The coroner isn't going to get very excited about a marker that exists in about thirty-five per cent of the British population.'

Trevor's broad face creased into a grin. ‘And who's going to convince Agnes Oldfield of that?' he asked.

‘But while you're worrying about that, I've got a bit more news. Have you seen this morning's
Western Mail
?'

Moira lifted a folded copy from the chair beside her.

‘I've only looked at the headlines so far – why?'

Trevor leaned back on his chair, his bulk making it creak.

‘Inside, you'll see a short report of a hearing yesterday at Gowerton Magistrates' Court. “
Swansea Industrialist remanded on charges of obstructing the coroner
”, but there are no details worth talking about.'

Richard leaned forward, intensely interested.

‘What's it all about, Trevor? They haven't charged him with murder, have they?'

The former police officer shook his head. ‘I rang Ben Evans, I've known him for years. He gave me the bare bones of it, there'll be a lot more to come.'

Mitchell passed on what the Gowerton superintendent had told him, that Prentice had claimed that his wife had killed herself and that he had suppressed the suicide note to make it look like an accident.

‘Then he dropped her back in the sea at a different place! Ben doesn't believe a word he said, but the lawyers are going to have a field day with this.'

Moira and Sian were agog with excitement at this first major case they had become involved with and their housekeeper hurried to open her newspaper and find the report. The headline on the second page was prominent, but the actual content was notable only for its brevity.

‘It says he was released on bail until the next appearance in two weeks' time,' announced Moira in a somewhat disappointed voice. ‘I thought he would have been locked up until the trial.'

‘So did Ben Evans,' agreed Trevor. ‘Prentice must have a pretty persuasive solicitor. The father-in-law will be spitting tacks at the fact that Prentice wasn't held on remand.'

‘I suppose obstructing the coroner isn't exactly a capital offence,' observed Angela. ‘Richard, you'll be called as a witness for the prosecution in this case, as it was you who confirmed the bruises. They are bound to go into that aspect.'

Trevor nodded his agreement. ‘No doubt about it. I expect Ben Evans will be in touch with you soon, the prosecution will probably have a conference, before the full preliminary proceedings.'

‘I wonder if the defence will want their own autopsy?' said Pryor. ‘That would be the third, but they're still entitled to one.'

Later that afternoon in the front laboratory, Sian was still excited about the increase in their workload.

‘We've had a mass of stuff from Doctor Pryor's fortnight in Newport, as well as the Chepstow and Monmouth cases. I'll have to start a proper filing system for these microscope slides and tissue blocks. And now we've had two murders in the same week!'

Angela smiled at her enthusiasm. ‘Hold on, we don't know what the Swansea case is going to turn out to be. The chap is only charged with a technical offence, not the violence.'

She relented when she saw that her technician looked a little crestfallen. ‘But the Gloucester one is real gangster-style – and with the Gower body, you played an important part in making such nice sections for Richard to base his opinion on concerning those bruises.'

This cheered Sian up and she went off to her microtome humming happily. The mention of the shooting the other night brought back to Angela the image of Paul Vickers marching unexpectedly into the mortuary. Though she had firmly closed the door on that unpleasant episode, she was often depressed about the fact that life was passing her by when it came to romance – and yes, to her sex life, or rather lack of it.

The years were passing all too quickly and she wasn't getting any younger. Though she had no burning desire to jump into marriage and motherhood, she missed the social life she had with Paul, even though he turned out to be a rat. She determined to get about more, maybe join a golf club or go riding or do something to meet people. Yet she was enjoying this relaxed life in the Wye Valley and it would be an effort to start ‘putting herself about' more. With a sigh, she rolled her laboratory stool nearer the bench and got down to more paternity tests, her trade having increased as the reputation of Garth House spread ever more widely.

Trevor Mitchell was right when he forecast that Richard would be required at a conference about Linda Prentice's death. Ben Evans phoned him the next day and more or less repeated what Trevor had revealed.

‘You'll learn all the details next week, Doc,' said the superintendent. ‘The prosecuting solicitor wants a meeting in his office in Swansea next Tuesday, as the case is coming before the magistrates again the following week and we want to oppose an extension of bail. I don't see why the bastard should be walking the streets when I'm sure he killed his wife.'

‘Is he going to be charged with murder?' asked Richard

‘I don't know, that's what's got to be discussed next week. It will need the consent of the DPP to send this to trial.'

The ‘DPP' was the Director of Public Prosecutions and as he was in London, it was a cumbersome business dealing with major offences. The lesser cases were handled by local solicitors who acted as agents for the police, but the big stuff had to be considered by the famous offices in St Anne's Gate, Westminster.

At the urging of the three women in the house, Richard had gone to Cardiff and bought a ready-made suit in Evan Roberts, an outfitters opposite the castle. It was of dark grey flannel, double-breasted and with wide lapels. Though he preferred his ‘big white hunter' outfits, which had served him well in the Singapore courts, he had to give into Angela's pleas for him to have more of the Spilsbury look when appearing professionally. He drew the line at the wide-brimmed trilbies favoured by police and newspaper men and instead decided on a smart Homburg with a rolled brim to go to the conference in Swansea.

As the solicitor's office was in a busy street, he again decided to use Jimmy Jenkins as a chauffeur and at two o'clock, he was dropped outside a large Edwardian house in St Helen's Road, near Swansea General Hospital. Jimmy promised to pick him up at four o'clock and to cruise around if he was later than that.

He was shown into a spacious upstairs room, where the prosecuting solicitor, Maldwyn Craddock, was presiding from behind a large desk. Craddock was a very fat man, his neck bulging over his collar and his pink face rounded by comfortable living. He had sparse silver hair parted in the middle above a misleadingly jovial face with blue eyes and a small purse-like mouth.

Already ranged before him on hard chairs were Ben Evans, Lewis Lewis, Dr O'Malley and the Gowerton coroner, Donald Moses. Richard took the empty seat next to the other pathologist and after being greeted cordially by Maldwyn Craddock, the lawyer got straight down to the main issues.

‘Right, gentlemen, I need to know what we are charging Michael Prentice with next week. At the first hearing, it was only a charge of obstructing the coroner, but are we going to be able to improve on that, given that the DPP agrees?'

Donald Moses looked a little put out at this.

‘It's not a trivial offence, Maldwyn, like riding a bike without lights!' he complained. ‘For a start, it's made a nonsense of my original inquest verdict of accident. It will all have to be done again and the paperwork chased up to London and back.'

The fat lawyer held up a conciliatory hand. ‘I wasn't belittling it, Donald. Just wanting to know if we can turn the screw a bit more, so to speak. Mr Evans, what's the position from where you're sitting?'

‘I think Prentice is lying through his teeth, sir. Why would he carry the body all the way up one cliff, then drive half a mile and carry it down another? And this suicide note sounds phoney to me.'

‘And why go to the trouble of wire-brushing his oil leak off the track?' added Lewis Lewis.

Craddock nodded benignly. ‘But our problem is proof! We would need enough to convince the magistrates to send him for trial for murder or manslaughter – and to be frank, we haven't got there yet. Already he has to be committed to the assizes on the obstructing of the coroner's charge – and possibly the DPP might crank that up to ‘perverting the course of justice', but homicide is a different kettle of fish! What about this suicide note, Superintendent?'

Evans shifted his bulk on the uncomfortable seat. ‘Inspector Lewis has already taken it up to Cardiff. The lab there is the acknowledged document examination centre for the whole country. We want to know who typed the letter, the wife or the husband.'

‘Will they be able to tell us?' asked the solicitor.

‘The problem is that though there's no doubt that it was typed on the machine in the house, that's not the issue,' answered Lewis, who had spoken at length to the expert in Cardiff. ‘I was told that differentiating between two typists is very difficult. It depends on things like the heaviness of keystrokes, the repetition of mistakes and the style of writing, but it's not an exact science, unlike comparing defects in the machine itself.'