Where Death Delights (6 page)

‘Only good for a few sheep, that is,' said Jimmy, leaning on his hoe, with which he had been weeding between a few rows of beetroot, runner beans and carrots. He wore his usual baggy corduroy trousers, but his plaid shirt was hanging on a nearby bush, exposing his barrel-shaped chest to the hot sun.

‘I've got plans to start a vineyard there eventually,' declared Richard. It was one of his recent fantasies to plant vines on the south-east facing slope and make his own wine.

Jimmy looked at him from under his poke cap as if he was mad. ‘You'd be better off with a few sheep. Grow your own meat, boss, not bloody wine!'

Jimmy drank only beer, at least a couple of pints a day down at the Three Horseshoes in Tintern and his tone suggested that he thought wine was a drink fit only for ‘nancy boys', as he called them.

Pryor was in too good a mood to argue, so he raised the matter of a domestic help, explaining that they needed someone part-time to do a bit of cleaning and cooking.

‘Do you know anybody around here who might be interested?' he asked his handyman.

Jimmy pushed up the back of his long-suffering cap to scratch his head with a dirty forefinger.

‘Mebbe I do, must give it a bit of thought, Doc,' he said slowly. ‘An' you could put a card in the post office, they got a board for free adverts there.'

Having said his piece, he started vigorously attacking the weeds with his hoe, so Richard left Jimmy to his task and went indoors, thinking that he might well take the man's advice and put a small advertisement in the local post office.

THREE

A
t the time that Sian Lloyd was painstakingly tapping out Richard's dictation of the advertisement, Trevor Mitchell was parking his car in Ledbury, a small market town between Hereford and Malvern. He had telephoned Edward Lethbridge as soon as the pathologist had left his cottage and by noon, had had a call back to say that Mrs Molly Barnes was willing to talk to him that afternoon.

‘She sounded very reluctant,' the solicitor said. ‘But I pointed out that the coroner had agreed and that as it was an open verdict, the case could be reopened if he was not satisfied.'

Mitchell thought that this smacked of mild blackmail, but he kept his feelings to himself and agreed to meet the lady at her home in Ledbury at two thirty. He parked his Wolseley 6/80 in the High Street, finding a free space near the half-timbered Market Hall and walked up The Homend, a continuation of the main street. A quick enquiry from a passer-by directed him into a side road, where he found Molly Barnes's small semi-detached house, probably of nineteen-twenty vintage. The brass knocker on the front door was answered by a short, wiry woman with a combative expression already on her face. If he looked like a bulldog, then she resembled a rather irritable Yorkshire terrier. In her forties, she had spiky brown hair that stood out untidily from her head. Mrs Barnes wore a faded floral pinafore and clutched a dust pan and brush in her hands.

‘You're the enquiry man, I suppose,' she said ungraciously. ‘You're early, but you'd better come in, I suppose.'

Putting down the pan, she showed him into a front parlour where three gaudy china ducks were flying in formation above a tiled fireplace and a ‘cherry boy' ornament stood on a table in the bay window. She waved him to one of the armchairs of a moquette three-piece suite that was made long before the war began and sat opposite, perched on the edge of the settee, tensing herself to defend her rights.

‘Now what's all this?' she demanded. ‘The coroner held an inquest and his officer gave me a death certificate.'

Mitchell, with thirty years' experience of interviewing people, decided to tread softly with Molly Barnes.

‘Another lady has claimed that the remains might be that of her nephew, who disappeared around the same time,' he said carefully.

‘Has she got a ring and wristwatch to prove it?' asked Mrs Barnes, pugnaciously.

‘It would help your case a lot if you had some other evidence to confirm the identity of your husband,' replied Mitchell gently.

‘I don't have a case!' she retorted. ‘My case was settled by the coroner, it's this other woman who's got to come up with something better!'

The former detective sighed quietly, recognizing a sharp-witted character who was not going to be trodden on.

‘What I mean is, did your husband have any physical characteristics that would help to confirm that it was really him? Had he ever broken an arm or a leg, for example?'

The feisty little woman scowled at him. ‘I thought there had been a post-mortem to look into all that?' she countered. ‘But no, he had had nothing like that. Came all through the war in the Rifle Brigade without a scratch, he did!'

Trevor felt he was getting nowhere, fast.

‘Tell me about the last day, when he went missing,' he asked.

‘He just went off one Saturday morning on his bike, going fishing as usual. Mad keen on fishing, he was.'

‘Did he say where he was going?'

‘No, only that it was over Hereford way. I never took much interest in his fishing.' She sniffed as if that was a pastime beneath her contempt.

‘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 sink 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.