Where Death Delights

by Bernard Knight

  The Crowner John Series by Bernard Knight

  THE SANCTUARY SEEKER

  THE POISONED CHALICE

  CROWNER’S QUEST

  THE AWFUL SECRET

  THE TINNER’S CORPSE

  THE GRIM REAPER

  FEAR IN THE FOREST

  THE WITCH HUNTER

  FIGURE OF HATE

  THE ELIXIR OF DEATH

  THE NOBLE OUTLAW

  THE MANOR OF DEATH

  CROWNER ROYAL

  A PLAGUE OF HERETICS

  WHERE DEATH DELIGHTS

  A forensic mystery of the nineteen-fifties

  Bernard Knight

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First world edition published 2011

  in Great Britain and in the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

  Copyright © 2010 by Bernard Knight.

  All rights reserved.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Knight, Bernard.

  Where Death Delights.

  1. Forensic pathologists–Fiction. 2. Wye, River, Valley

  (Wales and England)–Fiction. 3. Detective and mystery stories.

  I. Title

  823.9'14-dc22

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-117-0 (ePub)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-6874-9 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-222-2 (trade paper)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to thank fellow crime writers Brian Innes and Michael Jecks for information on forensic chemistry, document examination and weapons; Judge John Prosser QC for some advice on legal history; Dr Wayne Jones of Linköping University, Sweden, and Professor Derrick Pounder of Dundee University for historical data on toxicological analysis – and Peter Haig and Jeremy Wills of Molyslip Atlantic Ltd for information on lubrication additives. Any errors are due to my misinterpretation of their kind assistance.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In this tale of crime and detection, you will find no mention of CSI, DNA, SOCOS, PCA, PCR, PACE, CPS, HOLMES, FME or any of the endless forensic acronyms, as the action is deliberately placed in 1955. This was the year the author first became a pathologist and is a blatant piece of nostalgia, though the era has now become very popular in books, radio and television, possibly as a form of escapism.

  To write an authentic crime novel nowadays, one has to defer to Health and Safety Regulations, Crime Scene Managers, Team Initiatives, Mission Statements, Human Tissue Act, Data Protection Act, Home Office Directives and all the depressing panoply of the bureaucratic Nanny State and political correctness.

  Maybe our overcrowded world now needs these Orwellian strictures, but the stress levels were far less fifty years ago, when a trilby-wearing detective inspector in a belted raincoat could lean against the autopsy table with a fag and a mug of Typhoo Tips and chat to the pathologist about last Saturday’s game!

  Though the geography is authentic, considerable trouble has been taken to make all the characters and situations totally fictitious.

  ‘Taceant colloquia, effugiat risus. Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae . . .’

  ‘Let conversation cease, let laughter flee. This is the place where death delights to help the living’

  Inscription on the marble wall of the City of New York Chief Medical Examiner’s Office and Morgue

  PROLOGUE

  The Welsh Marches – May 1955

  A small lorry was perched on the rim of the wide concrete bowl. Two hundred yards across, it sat in the green countryside like a giant saucer. Fields sloped down on one side and woods rose on the other. The purple mass of the Black Mountains loomed on the horizon, beyond the fertile undulations of the borderland between England and Wales. Away on the left, the Skirrid could be seen, its profile split by the earthquake said to have occurred on the day of the Crucifixion.

  Three men sat in the cab of the Austin one-tonner, squeezed together in the comfortable manner of workmen who have a legitimate reason to do nothing and still get paid for it. The driver had a copy of the News Chronicle spread over the steering wheel, while the older man in the middle was marking a folded copy of the Sporting Times with the stub of a pencil. On the nearside, the youngest member of the trio, an acne-scarred youth waiting to be called-up for National Service, stared down into the bowl of the small reservoir, where the steel-grey surface reflected the clouds.

  ‘They’re a ’ell of long time coming, in’t they?’ he complained in a nasal version of a Forest of Dean accent.

  The driver raised his head from his paper. ‘You did tell ’em it was urgent, din’t you?’

  ‘Course I did! But the copper on the other end was as thick as two short planks. I hope he passed it on, after me walking best part of mile to the bloody phone box.’

  As if to allay his concern, there was the sound of an engine labouring up the steep slope of the lane from the main road and a moment later, a black Ford Consul, with a ‘Police’ sign on the roof, appeared through the open gateway on the other side of the reservoir. Reluctantly, the Water Board men climbed out and leaned against the back of the truck, which was filled with barrows, spades and the other implements of their trade. They waited impassively for the car to come up the ramp on to the circular apron. A uniformed inspector and a large man in plain clothes emerged and walked towards them, looking down at the water below.

  ‘What’s all this, then?’ boomed the inspector, in the time-honoured greeting of policemen everywhere. He was a thin man with a lined face and a bushy moustache, almost certainly ex-RAF, thought the youth.

  The driver stepped a pace forward, touching a finger to the peak of his flat cap. ‘I’m the foreman, Ted Reynolds. I sent the lad to phone you when we found this stuff.’ He pointed the finger away from the water, towards the bushes that filled the area between the concrete and the perimeter fence twenty yards away. The man in the tweed suit and a trilby with a turned-down brim introduced himself as PC Christie, the coroner’s officer. The five of them walked the few paces to the edge of the rim and stared across the water to the distant hills.

  ‘What exactly is this place?’ asked Christie.

  ‘An old holding reservoir, gives a head of pressure down to the villages round Pontrilas and Grosmont,’ responded the foreman. ‘We come up now and then to clean the sluices and check the inlet valves.’

  ‘Best show us what you’ve found,’ grunted the inspector.

  Ted Reynolds turned and led the way across the concrete into the rough ground beyond, filled with saplings and brambles. The lad hung well behind, not too keen on a reunion with what he had discovered two hours ago. Reynolds halted behind a scraggy elder bush, then bent and pointed down with a calloused forefinger.

  ‘Yer ’tis, I reckon there’s more under the surface,’ he prophesied, poking at a brown object with a piece of twig. The inspec
tor and the coroner’s officer squatted one each side of him, staring down at the thing projecting from a drift of last autumn’s leaves.

  ‘The lad came over here for a pee,’ explained the foreman. ‘Then he called us to have a look.’

  He beckoned to the young labourer, who reluctantly came nearer.

  ‘I thought it was some old dead sheep, but when I kicked at it, it looked different,’ he muttered.

  The foreman gave it another prod with his stick. ‘I used to work in an abattoir, so I know what the top end of a thigh bone looks like. But this ain’t no cow nor sheep – it’s yooman!’

  The inspector took the twig from him and carefully scraped away some of the damp leaf mould from around the knob which projected above the surface, revealing a discoloured bone that went down into the soil.

  Then he looked up and spoke to the coroner’s officer.

  ‘John, what d’you want to do about this? Call in CID or deal with it like a sudden death?’

  Christie was a calm, avuncular man who looked and dressed like a prosperous farmer. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

  ‘Better tell the DI, I suppose. Let him have a look at it and then get the remains taken to the County Hospital in Hereford. They can deal with them there, unless anything naughty turns up and we have to call in the Home Office chap.’

  He turned to the Water Board foreman. ‘Don’t touch anything, and make sure nobody else comes near until we get another officer up here.’

  Reynolds nodded, glad of an excuse to postpone working for another hour or so. The two policemen went back to their car, where the inspector radioed to get a local constable to stand guard until the CID appeared. Then with a wave to the workers, he made a cautious three-point turn on the concrete and vanished in the direction of Monmouth.

  ONE

  The Wye Valley – June 1955

  ‘If I’d realized that setting up house was as hellish as this, I’d have stayed in bloody Singapore!’

  He staggered through the office door with a large cardboard box and dumped the heavy typewriter on a new desk, whose five-ply top creaked ominously.

  ‘Stop complaining, Richard! We’ve broken the back of it now.’

  He stifled the obvious retort about breaking his own back and dropped into the swivel chair behind the desk, wiping the sweat from his face with a large khaki handkerchief. It was very warm and the confines of the Wye Valley seemed to hold in the summer heat, even though he should be used to it, having lived in the tropics for the past thirteen years. Looking across at Angela Bray, he almost resented how cool and fresh she looked in a yellow summer dress. His business partner sat at a table, checking lists of laboratory equipment, ticking off delivery notes against her own inventory of what they needed. The rest of the room and the one next door, which was to be their main laboratory, were piled with crates and cardboard boxes, most carrying labels bearing the name of suppliers in Cardiff and Bristol.

  ‘All we need now are some clients, or it’ll soon be overdraft time!’ he muttered, thinking of their rapidly dwindling bank balance.

  Angela slapped down her pencil and glared at Richard Pryor. ‘Come on, Richard, the coroner has promised you regular post-mortems in Chepstow and Monmouth. And you’ve got those medical school lectures in Bristol, so that’s a good start. We agreed that it would take us at least a year to break even.’

  Her level-headed pragmatism was a counterpoint to his swinging moods, for she was always calm and self-possessed whatever the crisis. Pryor sometimes thought of her as the ‘ice maiden’, except that the thick mane of brown hair that framed her handsome face was hardly that of some Nordic beauty.

  ‘That’s the last of the stuff from the car,’ he announced, his good humour returning. ‘So I’ll start shifting some of this stuff into the lab.’

  He climbed to his feet and took off the jacket of his crumpled linen suit, which like all his clothes, was a legacy of more than a decade in the Far East. Before next winter, he reflected wryly, he would have to get something warmer.

  Angela looked up briefly from her papers.

  ‘Sian will be back soon, she can tell you where some of the things go. Then she can start putting the reagent bottles and apparatus in the right places.’

  He humped a dozen boxes into the next room, which had been his late aunt’s dining room but which now was lined with white Formica-topped kitchen units, a large wooden table standing in the bay window. With the last carton in his arms, he stopped in front of Angela.

  ‘Where d’you want this microscope?’

  She tapped her lists together and stood up, almost as tall as Pryor.

  ‘I’ll come and see, shall I? You’ll be using it as well, once we get some histology going.’ They spent the next hour in their new laboratory, unpacking boxes and starting to fill cupboards with bottles of chemicals and strangely shaped bits of glass. Even though it was not yet mid-morning, the old mansion was already stifling in the hot June day and Angela Bray mentally added a couple of electric fans to her next list of purchases.

  ‘Where’s that damned girl?’ asked Richard eventually. ‘I hope she’s going to be reliable.’

  Sian Lloyd, their new laboratory technician-cum-secretary had offered to stop off at the post office to get a supply of stamps and a wireless licence.

  Angela sighed. ‘She has to get a bus from Chepstow, then walk up from the village. Give her a break, Richard, she doesn’t have a car like us.’

  ‘Talking of a break, we could do with our elevenses.’

  He looked hopefully at his partner, who steadfastly ignored his hint that she should assume some domestic duties. ‘There’s no milk’ she said. ‘But if you want black Nescafé, feel free to make it.’

  ‘I thought Jimmy was bringing us some groceries and things.’

  ‘He is, but after shaking a couple of bottles of milk around on that motorbike of his, it will probably be butter by the time he gets here.’

  Pryor had inherited Jimmy Jenkins along with the house that Aunt Gladys had left him in her will. He had been her gardener, odd-job man and part-time driver and when Richard had appeared as the new owner, he had materialized again and taken up his old duties virtually by default. Richard had to admit that though at first he had suspected the man was something of an idle scrounger, the house and four acres needed the attention that a pathologist and a forensic scientist were in no position to provide.

  Thirst drove him to the old-fashioned kitchen that lay at the back of the big Victorian house, and in the rattling old Kelvinator fridge he found a flagon of local cider. Taking a couple of glasses back to the office, which had once been his late uncle’s study, he put them on the table and sat down opposite Angela, who had gone back to check something on her equipment lists.

  Abstractly, she murmured some thanks, still immersed in her papers. When she got to the bottom of the last page, she looked up at her partner and caught him staring out of the French window at the distant trees on the English side of the valley. Covertly, she studied his profile and decided again that he was not a bad-looking chap, in a stringy sort of way. Forty-four years old, he had that lean, sinewy appearance, often seen in men who had spent many years in the East. Though not a frequent cinema-goer, she was reminded of actors like Stewart Granger or Michael Rennie with their ‘big white hunter’ look, a similarity which Richard Pryor unconsciously reinforced with his belted safari suits with button-down pockets. He suddenly came out of his reverie and his deep-set brown eyes fixed her with a worried gaze.

  ‘Do you think we’ve done the right thing? Both giving up good jobs to take a leap in the dark like this?’

  ‘We’ve been through this before, Richard,’ she said patiently. ‘We agreed that we’d give it two years. If it doesn’t pan out then, both of us are well enough established to go back to what we did before.’

  Angela took a sip of her cider and shuddered slightly at the acrid flavour.

  ‘People with our qualifications and experience are not going to starv
e, you know, even if we have to join the brain drain to the States or Australia.’

  Dr Angela Bray had been a forensic scientist at the Metropolitan Police Laboratory in London and Richard Glanville Pryor was formerly the Professor of Forensic Medicine in the University of Singapore.

  She had become increasingly frustrated by public service bureaucracy and the lack of any foreseeable advancement in the system, whilst Pryor had been offered a generous ‘golden handshake’ after nine years in the university, who wished to appoint a local Chinese in his place. He could have stayed on, but the size of the financial inducement, coupled with a weariness with the tropics and a yearning for his native Wales, tipped the scales.

  He and Angela had met the previous year at an International Forensic Science Congress in Edinburgh. After discovering a mutual desire to make a radical change in their professional lives, they decided to combine their talents by setting up a private partnership to offer forensic expertise to anyone who needed it. Angela’s decision was reinforced by the prospect of living in the beautiful Wye Valley on the Welsh border, as she had fond memories of holidays in the valley. There was little to keep her in London, so now it was crunch time, to see if their ambitious venture would succeed.

  Richard had been living in the house for over a month and Angela had moved down a fortnight earlier, after burning her boats by selling her flat in Blackheath. One thing they had not fully foreseen was that their professional partnership was going to be less of a problem than their personal lives. Though Garth House was a large place with five bedrooms, it was not proving easy to share the accommodation, especially as it possessed only one bathroom.

  Angela had made it quite clear from the outset that their relationship was purely professional – she had no intention of becoming housekeeper, cook or surrogate wife. The obvious answer was for her to find somewhere to live nearby, but this seemed ridiculous with such a large house available, especially as their finances were already stretched. After spending the first few nights in a bed and breakfast in Tintern Parva, the nearest village, Angela rebelled at the ongoing cost and inconvenience.