Where Death Delights (5 page)

‘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.