Where Death Delights

by Bernard Knight

  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.

  ‘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

  At 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 wer
e 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.