Where Death Delights

by Bernard Knight

  Richard Pryor was an attractive fellow, with that frequent wry grin or a ready smile. He seemed free of any vices, never angry or sarcastic or mean-spirited. Impulsive, yes, and sometimes swinging between exuberance and depression, but his moods were like quicksilver, never lasting long. He sometimes needed pulling back from going down some irrelevant diversion, but on the whole, he was a really nice guy.

  But what did she want with another really nice guy? The last one had left her in the lurch after four years’ apparent happiness, with an imminent walk up to the altar in view. No, she would try a bit of celibacy for a time, until something really special came along – and if it didn’t, well, she wasn’t going to risk another shaming debacle.

  Looking out at Richard’s antics in the plot, she wondered what had gone wrong with his own love life. They had met at a forensic congress in Edinburgh last year and had hit it off from the first moment. Both recently crossed in love – or in his case, a bitter divorce – and she disgruntled with her employers, they had hatched this plan to set up in business together.

  Angela mused over what might have gone wrong with his marriage. He had leaked out bits of information over the months, as he was much less secretive than she. Her private life was always played close to her chest, but he had told her that his wife Miriam had been playing the field with the limitless supply of men available in Singapore – the army officers and expatriate businessmen who abounded in the Singapore Swimming Club, the Golf Club and the famous hotels like Raffles.

  Angela wondered if the fault had all been on Miriam’s side, but then decided that it was none of her business and that she should be glad that meeting him had led to her coming to live in this lovely valley in a job where she could be her own boss. Please God, let it succeed, she prayed to herself, as she finished her coffee and took one last look at a sweating Richard wielding his brick.

  As she went downstairs to the kitchen with her empty mug, the phone started to ring again. Far from being irritated at a disturbed Sunday, she picked it up, knowing that it must be something to do with their business, as virtually no one else knew they were here.

  It was Trevor Mitchell, another man she had taken to at first sight. A typical senior detective, he was impassive and dependable and though they had only met once, she liked him and trusted him, not like another senior detective who had let her down so badly.

  ‘What can we do for you, Mr Mitchell? Do you want to speak to Richard?’

  ‘Please call me Trevor, Doctor!’ he said. ‘And you’re in this bones job as much as him, so shall I tell you what I’ve found so far?’

  She liked him even more for that, for not assuming that the male half of the partnership was the chief honcho.

  ‘Sure, Trevor, what’s new?’ she replied.

  ‘Remember those cryptic words on Albert Barnes’s medical notes? Well, I’ve tracked down the doctor that wrote them.’

  ‘That’s great!’ she enthused. ‘Who is he?

  Mitchell explained that he had got John Christie to persuade the hospital to look up their staff records at the request of the coroner. The consultant mentioned in the notes had an SHO named Andrew Welton at the time of Barnes’s admission. By searching the Medical Register, he had found that he was currently a Senior Registrar in neurosurgery at Frenchay Hospital near Bristol.

  ‘Maybe Doctor Pryor could arrange to see him and take the notes, hoping that this chap would remember something about it?’

  Angela promised to tell Richard and he would get back to him. ‘Anything else happening?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, big stuff!’ replied Trevor enthusiastically. ‘A barrister called Massey rang me last night and said that Doctor Pryor had recommended me as an enquiry agent in a case he’s involved in. He’s going back from Swansea to London tomorrow and he’s breaking his journey at Newport to meet me and explain what it’s all about. All I know is that it’s an eternal triangle job.’

  Angela gave a quick summary of the problem and their involvement, saying that Massey wanted to know more about this alleged ‘other woman’.

  ‘Well, it’s all grist to the mill – thank the doctor for mentioning me, I can see we’re going to be a good team!’

  Angela told her partner about Trevor’s call, when he came in from his vineyard planning. ‘Would it be best if I went to see this chap in Frenchay or could I just ring him up?’ he asked.

  ‘I think you’ll have to see him, you could be anyone on the phone,’ she advised. ‘Maybe you ought to get a note from the coroner, as it concerns a patient’s confidential record, even if he is dead.’

  ‘Especially if he isn’t!’ added Richard, cynically.

  Monday took Pryor to the large Royal Gwent Hospital in Newport, about fifteen miles away, where he was pleased to have the coroner’s work for the next fortnight while the resident pathologist was on holiday in Spain. It was a change to have a proper hospital mortuary to work in, rather than skulk in council yards or under boarded-up arches. There were three cases there that morning and after he had gone home and enjoyed another of Moira’s lunches, he drove up to Monmouth to deal with a single autopsy rung in by PC Christie.

  ‘Trevor Mitchell told you that we found the name of that surgeon at Hereford?’ asked Christie, as he was sewing up the victim of a carbon monoxide suicide who had killed himself with car-exhaust gas in his garage. Pryor nodded as he picked up the two pound notes that the coroner’s officer had left on the table.

  ‘Thanks for your help. I rang Frenchay this morning and I’m driving over tomorrow to see him. My partner thinks I should have some kind of authorization from the coroner to show him, so I’ll call on Dr Meredith after this and get some sort of billet-doux.’

  Rather guiltily, he was glad that as it was mid-afternoon, he could avoid buying another expensive lunch for his portly friend. He found him in his surgery, just returned from house calls in time for his four o’clock clinic and explained the situation. As Meredith wrote out a quick authorization on a sheet of headed notepaper, the coroner asked about the likelihood of finding any more information.

  ‘I’ve never heard of this pec.rec either, Richard. It seems a bit unlikely that it’s relevant.’

  ‘I agree, but without something new, we’re not going to be able to twist your arm for consent to an exhumation,’ he admitted.

  Next morning, armed with his piece of paper, Pryor drove to Bristol after another three-body stint at Newport. Rather than drive an extra sixty miles around Gloucester, he decided to take the Beachley–Aust ferry across the Severn, just above Chepstow. A ferry had been there from ancient times, being given to the monks of Tintern Abbey in the twelfth century.

  Richard queued up behind a dozen cars at Beachley, a small village on the riverbank and waited for the return of the flat-bottomed vessel from Aust on the other side. Thankfully, it was not the busiest time of day and soon he was gingerly driving the Humber down the ramp on to the open deck. As they glided across the water on the Severn Queen, he wondered if this bridge they were talking about would ever be built.

  Half an hour after reaching the muddy shore at Aust, he was turning into Frenchay Hospital. Originally an old sanatorium, it had been expanded into a military hospital for American servicemen during the war and now was a large general hospital providing various surgical specialities.

  The head porter’s kiosk directed him to the neurosurgical department and as he trudged down long corridors in the wartime blocks of single-storey brick buildings, he wondered if Welton was still ‘Doctor’ or had advanced to ‘Mister’ in the strange way that British surgeons do after gaining the Fellowship of their Royal College, a memory of the times when surgeons were barbers, not proper physicians. He decided that as it was seven years since Welton had written those notes in Hereford, he must surely by now have passed his final examinations to land a job as Senior Registrar in these competitive times. When he eventually found the cubbyhole that was his office, a cardboard label on the door confirmed that it was indeed ‘Mr A W
elton’.

  The surgeon was a thin, rather haggard-looking man in his mid-thirties, with a cow-lick of fair hair hanging over his forehead. He had a strong Liverpool accent when he spoke. He greeted Pryor courteously and he spent a few moments reminiscing about Hereford and the Royal Army Medical Corps, in which Welton had done his two years’ National Service in Catterick.

  Then Richard produced his coroner’s clearance and the copy of the County Hospital notes and they stood over a cluttered desk in the tiny room to look at them. The pathologist explained the problem and then pointed to the cryptic two words with his forefinger.

  ‘I’m sure you don’t recall Albert Barnes after all this time, but I wondered if you could explain this abbreviation – it’s a new one on me!’

  Welton’s response was rather unusual. He opened his white coat, threw his tie over his shoulder and unbuttoned the middle three buttons of his shirt.

  Pulling aside the material with both hands, he looked down at his bared chest.

  ‘That’s one – a pec.rec!’ he said, almost proudly.

  Richard stared at the surgeon’s thorax and saw that his breastbone was pushed deeply inwards in its lower part.

  ‘Well, I’m damned – a funnel-chest! That’s what we used to call them, or a “salt-cellar sternum”!’

  Andrew Welton grinned. ‘I was always interested in the abnormality, as I have one myself. Doesn’t matter tuppence, unless it’s part of Marfan’s syndrome.’

  Richard dug around in his memory, but failed to find anything left on the matter from his long-ago student days. He looked enquiringly at the surgeon, who responded.

  ‘Whenever I saw a patient with a depressed sternum, I could never resist mentioning it in the notes. Pec.rec is my shorthand for pectus recurvatum, the proper Latin name for it.’

  ‘And this patient Barnes must have had one?’

  Welton nodded. ‘No doubt about it. I don’t recall him now, but no way would I have written that unless he had one. Does it help at all?’

  Pryor closed the folder with the notes and picked it up.

  ‘It may well do, as the thorax was still present amongst the remains. It all depends now on whether the first pathologist has any recollection of it.’

  After thanking Welton for his time and patience, Pryor found his way back to his car and began the journey home. Was this another useful step on the quest, he wondered? If the older pathologist in Hereford had no clear memory of whether the benign deformity was present in the bones or not, they were no further forward.

  Feeling more like Sherlock Holmes than a doctor, he decided that there was only one way to find out. Instead of going back to the ferry, he drove up the A38 to Gloucester, then turned to Hereford through Ross-on-Wye. Near there, he stopped at a small roadside café with a National Benzole petrol pump alongside. After egg and chips and a pot of tea, he had the Humber filled with petrol, scowling at the recent price increase which had taken it up to four shillings and sixpence a gallon.

  By mid-afternoon he was in Hereford, where he found the County Hospital and sought out the pathologist who a month earlier had examined the remains from the reservoir.

  Dr Bogdan Marek was about sixty, a thickset man with cropped grey hair. He rose from behind his microscope when a technician brought Pryor in and as they shook hands, the visitor noticed a pile of cardboard slide-holders on the bench alongside the instrument.

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Doctor Marek, you look as if you’re snowed under with biopsy reports. I know the feeling!’

  This broke the ice nicely and soon the two pathologists were exchanging common ground. Marek, who still had a thick Polish accent, had escaped from his home country in 1939 and come across to join the Polish Forces as a medical officer. Already a pathologist before the war, he had stayed on in Britain in 1945 and was now an SHMO in the speciality.

  ‘I make no claims to knowing much forensic medicine,’ he admitted frankly. ‘But someone has to do the coroner’s work here. If there’s anything suspicious, of course, the police get someone from Birmingham or Cardiff.’

  He gave Richard a sudden beaming smile. ‘Maybe in future, it should be you, I’ve heard a lot about you lately!’

  Pryor said he would be only too happy to come up at any time, but that it was really up to coroners and the police to decide.

  ‘They didn’t think it was worth getting a Home Office fellow up here for this one,’ said Marek, when Pryor told him the purpose of his visit. ‘So has it turned suspicious now?’

  ‘No, it’s a bit of a dispute over identity. I’ve just turned up a piece of evidence that might possibly help.’

  He showed the other pathologist the medical notes and pointed to the words pec.rec.

  ‘I’ve just discovered what the clinician meant by that,’ he explained.

  Bogdan Marek looked at him in mild surprise.

  ‘Surely that must refer to pectus recurvatum?’ he said mildly.

  Richard’s mouth did not sag in astonishment, but he felt deflated at Marek’s instant recognition.

  ‘Good God, I’ve just been all the way to Bristol to find that out!’

  ‘Maybe it is because I qualified some time before you, when we used much more Latin in my medical faculty in Krakow!’ he answered with another broad smile.

  Pryor swallowed his chagrin and came straight to the point.

  ‘The man whose wife claims the remains are his, undoubtedly had this abnormality of the sternum. Now you are the only doctor who has seen those bones, as they’ve been buried since then. Can you by any chance remember whether the sternum you saw had this defect?’

  He felt tense as he waited for the answer, hoping that Marek would dig deeply enough into his recollections of the case. But the wait was but a few seconds, as the Pole soon shook his head.

  ‘I can definitely say that it did not,’ he said firmly. ‘As I said, I’m no forensic expert or a physical anthropologist, but I would undoubtedly have noticed a pectus recurvatum and I would have written it in my report to the coroner.’

  Richard felt a surge of relief that his efforts had not been wasted. ‘And you’d be willing to confirm that to the Monmouth coroner?’

  Bogdan Marek turned up his hands in a typically continental gesture. ‘Of course! Why not!’

  Trevor Mitchell’s Wolseley was travelling across Clyne Common, a large area of rough heathland and bog, a few miles to the west of Swansea. He was reminding himself to keep a strict check on his mileage, as this job was likely to generate a lot of travelling.

  The former superintendent liked his ‘Six-Eighty’ model, as it was a favourite with so many police forces and he admitted to a bit of nostalgia after having spent so much of his life in similar black cars.

  On the seat alongside him was a road atlas opened at the appropriate pages, as well as a folded Ordnance Survey map at a one inch to the mile scale. He was making his way to Pennard, just beyond Bishopston, with no clear idea in his mind how he was going to proceed. The London barrister who had hired him was not very specific about his needs; he had said that he just wanted to confirm that his son-in-law had been unfaithful to his wife and to discover the other woman’s identity and whether this alleged demand for a divorce was true. As he could hardly knock on Michael Prentice’s door and ask him those questions, he would have to use a more roundabout method.

  A few miles farther on, he turned down to Pennard, a small hamlet ending on the high cliff tops between Three Cliffs Bay and Pwlldu Head. Passing a golf course, he drove slowly through a quarter-mile ribbon settlement of houses and bungalows, with a post office, chemist and a general shop at the end, where the road petered out into stony tracks running right and left across the cliffs. He was hoping for a pub, which was often a useful place to pick up local gossip, but here in common with much of Gower, the place seemed to be teetotal.

  At the far end of the road, some cars were parked on the grass, where there was a breathtaking view down a steep valley that intersected the limestone
cliffs. He pulled in amongst them and went in search of information. Massey had given him the address of Michael Prentice, a house called Bella Capri, presumably from some romantic episode in a former owner’s life. However, he wanted a more ‘softly-softly’ approach and went across to the small shop and ice-cream parlour that was the last building on the approach road. He went to the counter, got himself a cup of over-milked coffee and a jam doughnut, and went to one of the small tables in the outer half of the shop. There were a dozen other people sitting there, all trippers brought out by a dry day, though the hot weather had gone and it was cloudy for June.

  Trevor soon decided he would get nothing from either the visitors nor the adenoidal girl serving in the shop, so he finished his snack and went outside. Here he found a middle-aged man in a brown warehouse coat, sweeping ice cream and sweet wrappers from the concrete patch in front of the shop.

  ‘Not the best weather to attract the crowds, eh?’ he said, to strike up a conversation. The man, who he guessed was the proprietor, leaned on his broom, ready for a chat.

  ‘Bit early in the season, mind,’ he said. ‘Things should buck up soon and then we’ll get the crowd when the schools go on holiday.’

  Trevor brought the conversation round to the direction he wanted.

  ‘I suppose most of the kids want sandy beaches, like Three Cliffs and Oxwich? It’s a bit dangerous for nippers down there, isn’t it?’

  He pointed to the valley, where grey rocks could be seen where the grass and bracken ended, several hundred feet below. The shopkeeper nodded and said the very thing that Mitchell had angled for.

  ‘That’s true enough. We had a nasty accident a bit further along the cliffs. It was only a week or so ago, when a swimmer got drowned.’

  ‘Some tripper who didn’t know the dangers, I suppose?’ said Trevor, guilelessly.

  ‘No, it was a local lady, as it happens. Strange, because she often went swimming along here, she lived in the village and knew the coast well enough.’