‘Bit small, ain’t they?’ growled Jimmy, holding up a foot-long twig with a piece of sacking wrapped around the root.
‘They’ll grow like crazy once they’re established,’ said Richard with a confidence born of inexperience. ‘They’ll need drastic pruning when they’re bigger.’
‘Are you sure you should plant them in the autumn like this?’ grunted the countryman, who had an almost instinctive feel for what was right.
‘Many vineyard owners prefer the spring, but this valley is one of the most frost-free places in the country,’ said Pryor, repeating the wisdom he had gleaned from half a dozen books on the subject.
‘You’d have been better off with bloody strawberries,’ growled Jimmy, half to himself, but he went to work with a will and soon they had a hundred plants laid out on the yard.
‘They look a bit dry, God knows how long they’ve been on the railway,’ advised Jimmy. ‘The sooner we get them in the ground the better.’ After a dousing with the hosepipe, they barrowed the vines up to the plot and began planting. Jimmy dug a hole with a spade and threw in a shovelful of rotted manure, while Richard unwrapped the sacking from each plant and held it at the right level while Jimmy refilled the hole. They stuck at it for two hours, until Richard decided that he would leave the remaining fifty for next day.
They celebrated with a flagon of beer drunk on the seat outside the back door, Richard glowing with satisfaction and manual labour, though he suspected that with all that bending and crouching his back would be killing him in the morning.
‘So when will we be drinking this wine, doctor?’ asked Jimmy with thinly veiled sarcasm.
‘Give the vines two years and we’ll be picking a crop,’ said Richard confidently. ‘And the next year we’ll be drinking Chateau Wye Valley!’
On Monday the usual routine held sway, as both Chepstow and Monmouth demanded Richard Pryor’s services. A fatal two-car road accident on the A48 near Caerwent was a possible Section Eight, according to John Christie, the coroner’s officer. He meant that the surviving driver might be charged with causing death by dangerous driving, contrary to Section Eight of the Road Traffic Act. This was a potentially serious offence, punishable by up to five years in prison, so often a Home Office pathologist was asked to carry out the post-mortem.
‘He’d been drinking, doctor, no doubt of that! Our police surgeon was called to the nick late on Friday night to make him walk the chalk line.’
John Christie was the right-hand man of the local coroner, Richard’s medical school pal, Brian Meredith, who was also a family doctor in Monmouth. The officer looked more like a prosperous farmer than a policeman, always attired in thorn-proof tweed suits with a matching trilby with a turned-down brim. He doubled up as the mortuary attendant in Monmouth, managing to assist in the dissection and restore the body without getting a drop of blood on his clothes – all with his hat firmly in place.
As Dr Meredith’s coronial patch extended over most of east Monmouthshire, he also came down to Chepstow for post-mortems, but at that public mortuary there was a part-time assistant. Richard dealt with a sudden death from natural causes and a sleeping-pill overdose before going back to Garth House in time for his lunch.
Though Moira had cooked roast pork with apple sauce for Angela and himself, she was more concerned with giving him a message from Stow-on-the-Wold than with her culinary labours.
‘Mr Lovesey rang to say that he had had some of the material you wanted from abroad,’ she reported cheerily. ‘Can you give him a ring as soon as you can, please?’
As he tackled his welcome meat and veg, Richard wondered what had arrived from foreign parts. As Germany was so much nearer than the centre of the United States, he thought it was more likely to be something from Wolfgang Braun in Cologne.
After his meal he hurried through their usual coffee session in the staffroom to get to the phone in his office and ring George Lovesey in Stow.
‘Dr Pryor, I’ve had several responses from your requests for written material. One was from Germany, by mail – and another from Chicago.’
‘That was quick work!’ responded Richard. ‘I didn’t think anything could get here by mail that fast.’
‘It didn’t – at least only from London! Apparently, it was sent by something called photo-telegraph service to a GPO office in London and they sent it on here by post.’
‘That’s extraordinary, but welcome. No sign of anything from Minnesota yet?’
‘Afraid not, but I’ll get these others to you as quickly as I can. If I sent them by taxi today, would you be able to study them tonight? Time is really pressing now.’
Richard readily agreed, and by the time that Siân and Moira had left for the day he had a large envelope delivered by a man driving a rather aged Austin Fourteen. He called Angela and they both sat in the kitchen with an extra pot of tea and some of Moira’s home-made cheese straws, while they looked at what George Lovesey had sent.
The large envelope contained a smaller one with airmail stickers and West German stamps on it, together with another holding half a dozen pages of thin, rather brittle sheets covered in typescript and some graphs and tables.
‘Funny-looking paper – the print is a bit blurred, but it’s readable,’ said Angela. The German envelope also had a few pages of regular paper, the typing obviously a carbon copy of an original. There were short covering letters from the senders, hoping that the accompanying material would be of some use.
‘What happens next?’ asked Angela as she began to read the missive from America.
‘I’ve got to read it all and see if it helps to support my hypothesis,’ he answered, looking intently at the pages from Cologne. ‘Thank God it’s in English. We’d be delayed again if we had to wait for a translation from German.’
They read steadily for ten minutes, then exchanged papers, absently drinking their tea between pages. ‘Does it help?’ asked Angela when they finally dropped the documents on the table.
Richard nodded. ‘Just the job! I don’t know how strong the evidence is for these chaps’ own research – estimating the time of death – but that’s no concern of mine in relation to our veterinary surgeon.’
‘What happens next?’ she asked again.
‘I’ll have to go through all this stuff carefully, then draft a summary of the aspects that we need for this defence. George Lovesey wants it urgently, to send to them and get affidavits sworn and returned for submission to the court in Gloucester.’
‘How’s he going to do that in time? We haven’t even had the second lot from America.’
Her partner shook his head. ‘That’s his problem. I expect he’ll find a way – lawyers usually do, especially when they’re going to stick it all on the bill!’
Next morning Richard monopolized Moira and her typing skills so completely that lunch had to be cold ham and salad. He had spent all evening until midnight going through the papers from Stow and roughing out drafts for affidavits. Now Moira was banging out fair copies on her big Imperial as Richard had arranged with the solicitor to take them to Stow that afternoon.
For once, he was free, as there were no post-mortems at his two regular mortuaries, though he had agreed to go next morning to the big hospital in Newport. Here he had been asked to act again as an independent pathologist over a death in the operating theatre, as according to the coroner’s officer the relatives were unhappy.
When he had checked through the final copies, Richard dropped them into his old oriental briefcase. ‘Let’s hope these do the trick,’ he murmured to Moira.
‘You’ve got the other American one to deal with as well,’ she replied, getting up to start setting out lunch. ‘I hope you understand all that stuff. It’s gibberish to me!’
‘We’ve got to convince a court, so I’ll have to put it over as simply as I can,’ he answered soberly. ‘That’s the problem with our jury system. When it comes to technical evidence, the jurors tend to switch off – or go to sleep!’
Thi
s led to an argument about whether the Continental system of a trio of professional judges was better than the Anglo-Saxon reliance on the good sense of a dozen solid citizens. Angela was all for a jury, but Richard had his doubts.
‘It’s fine when it comes to straightforward facts, like whether Bill was in the pub that night or whether Joe beat his wife,’ he argued. ‘But start a long lecture about temperatures and time of death or some obscure explanation about the concentration of some poison, then you’ve lost them. You really need experts to evaluate expert evidence.’
Siân, always the champion of the common man, was strongly with Angela, but Moira sided with Richard, saying that she had read in the newspaper about a fraud trial that was still going on after three months, with the bemused jury trapped under a welter of accounts and statistics. Soon after lunch, Richard decided he had better leave for Gloucestershire.
The Humber made good time across the full width of the big county, and he arrived at Stow soon after three o’clock. As soon as he was shown into the lawyer’s chamber, George Lovesey rose to meet him, waving another sheaf of papers at him.
‘Dr Pryor, the other American material has arrived! Almost as quickly as that telegraphed batch.’
Richard sat down on the other side of the desk and they exchanged documents. The lawyer began reading the draft affidavits that Pryor had written, while the pathologist pored over the notes that the researcher in Minnesota had sent. It was an outline for a future article to be submitted to the American Journal of Forensic Sciences, generally similar in concept to the ones from Chicago and Germany but with different experimental results in respect of timing death.
When he had finished studying his papers, the lawyer looked over his glasses at Richard Pryor.
‘You’ve made it quite clear; even I can understand it!’ he said warmly. ‘But it seems that the three experts have come to somewhat different conclusions about the potassium levels. Is that going to be a problem for us? In cross-examination, prosecuting counsel will seize on any opportunity to discredit us.’
Richard nodded and tapped his own papers, the ones from Minnesota. ‘I know what you mean, but happily that doesn’t concern us. They can argue between themselves until the cows come home, about the implications of their findings, but that’s not what matters to us.’
He explained at length what he meant, and eventually George Lovesey was satisfied. ‘We’ll have to have at least one pretrial conference with Nathan Prideaux to get this really sorted out,’ he observed. ‘Now what about the other prong of your attack on the prosecution case?’
‘You mean Professor Lucius Zigmond? He seems the most authoritative person to fire that particular broadside.’
Lovesey waited for a few moments as one of his office staff had tapped the door and brought in the inevitable tray of tea and biscuits. When she had served them and left the room, he continued.
‘As you suggested, I contacted him and he is quite happy to give a statement and attend court if necessary. He seemed quite tickled by the idea, especially when I mentioned the fee and expenses. I think you should go to see him, to explain exactly what is required. That seems to be the most effective way, given how short of time we are.’
Over the teacups, they discussed details of the affidavits, the solicitor suggesting a few editorial changes to fall in line with legal conventions. Then Richard settled down to write a version of the affidavit based on the new material from Minnesota. It was fairly straightforward, as it followed the others almost exactly, apart from substituting some of the different analytical data of the potassium concentrations in the eye fluids at varying periods after death. When they had agreed on final versions, Lovesey said that he would get his legal agents in London to send them by the fastest route, the one that the Chicago papers had arrived by.
‘I hadn’t realized that the GPO had this photo-telegraph service from London,’ he said. ‘Apparently, it’s been there since 1935, but the place was bombed out during the war and they restarted it on the Victoria Embankment in 1948.’
‘I’ve never heard of it either,’ admitted Richard. ‘Probably damned expensive, but useful.’
‘It’s used mainly for sending photographs for newspapers, but apparently it will accept text just as well,’ explained George. ‘Our agent can use it to send these drafts back to the three researchers, to save time. But, of course, the actual sworn statements will have to be airmailed back to us. The court would never accept anything but original signatures and the stamp of the attorneys who administered the oaths.’
Richard grinned to himself at the archaic language of the law, though he knew that medicine’s vocabulary was just as mystical.
Before he left, he promised Lovesey that he would make arrangements to talk to Professor Zigmond in London and agree on a form of words that could be used in a deposition of the biochemist’s evidence in court.
‘Make it soon, doctor,’ were the solicitor’s final words. ‘We’ll be at the door of the Assize Court before we know it!’
SIXTEEN
The next day, Wednesday, was too busy with post-mortems for any expeditions to ‘the Smoke’, as Angela was fond of calling the city where she had worked for so many years.
However, Moira kept Thursday clear by phoning a couple of coroners’ officers to postpone cases for a day, and by just after eight that morning Richard Pryor was on the up-platform at Newport Station waiting for the eight twenty-five to Paddington.
Thankfully, the crippling industrial disputes of the early summer, which had seen Fleet Street closed down and a total national rail strike for weeks back in June, were over, and the nationalized British Railways system was back to normal working.
He still found it thrilling to see the huge bulk of the Caerphilly Castle hauling the coaches of the daily Red Dragon as it rolled into the station, shaking the platform as it passed him. Brought up in a thrifty Welsh home, he usually travelled Third Class – not that he often went by train since he had returned to Britain and bought the Humber. However, as George Lovesey had pressed him to submit all his expenses, today he launched out with a First-Class ticket and settled back in one of the end coaches in relative luxury. He had thought of suggesting to Angela that she came with him and had a half day beating up the dress shops in the West End, but he could hardly claim for her on Lovesey’s expenses, much as he would have enjoyed her company on a day out.
A copy of the Western Mail occupied him until Swindon, and as the great steam locomotive pounded along the second half of the journey he was content to look out of the window at the autumn scenery of the Thames Valley. He still found it slightly unreal, after some fourteen years of the lush colours of Ceylon and Malaya. Dead on time, the Red Dragon coasted into the smoky glass cupola of Paddington Station and Richard alighted, dawdling past the great engine as he walked up the platform. Like many of the men nearby, he gazed appreciatively at the huge driving wheels and massive connecting rods, sniffing the smoke and oil like some rare perfume.
He made for the Tube and took the Bakerloo Line to Piccadilly Circus. Richard was not all that familiar with London, but he had spent a few weeks there when he first joined the Royal Army Medical Corps, during hurried basic training at the RAM College at Millbank. That had been during the height of the Blitz, and his subsequent active service in the Far East had seemed like a holiday in comparison with London in 1941.
However, he knew some of the major teaching hospitals and was able to walk leisurely along the lower end of Piccadilly to Hyde Park Corner, where, on the other side of a daunting stream of traffic, the cream bulk of St George’s Hospital stood. A solid early-Victorian building, it dominated the busy junction where Hyde Park, Green Park and Buckingham Palace Garden met.
Unwilling to risk his life crossing the road, he found a subway and came up near the hospital, where after a few enquiries he made his way to the medical school section and found the Clinical Biochemistry Department. Everywhere was cramped and overfilled with temporary cubicles for the e
ver-expanding staff, but eventually a secretary took pity on him and led him through corridors cluttered with equipment to a door hidden in a corner. A faded sign indicated that Professor L. Zigmond resided within.
Lucius Zigmond turned out to be a larger-than-life character, very Jewish and amiably rotund. Richard had spoken to him on the telephone when he had arranged this meeting, so he was prepared for his marked Central European accent, even though the medical directory had shown that he had been at St George’s since 1937. A frizz of grey hair around a shiny bald head and a pair of small gold-rimmed glasses perched on the end of his large nose made him almost a cartoon version of an eccentric professor, aided by the crumpled white coat and a floppy bow tie. However, his keen eyes and direct manner were sharply at odds with his appearance.
As he shook hands and then dragged a hard chair out for Richard, he got straight to the point. ‘Professor Pryor, nice to meet you. I gather you want my help in saving a man from the gallows?’
Richard went through his usual deprecating routine of saying that he had reverted to ‘doctor’ after giving up his university chair in Singapore. Though he had briefly explained the situation over the telephone, he now went through the problem in detail and described the two grounds on which he felt the prosecution medical evidence could be challenged.
Zigmond listened with genuine interest and seemed intrigued with the ongoing research from America and Germany that Richard described, especially when he produced copies of the papers obtained from abroad.
‘It’s not what you want from me, but fascinating all the same,’ he enthused, peering keenly over his glasses. ‘One works for years at a particular topic, without the faintest idea what other people might be doing by applying it to a new problem.’
This led them to despair about the ‘compartmentalization’ of science, where researchers beavered away at their own super-speciality, with no idea what others might be doing, which would have shed light on each other’s problems.
According to the Evidence Page 16