Where Death Delights

by Bernard Knight

  ‘Swimming alone, was she? Not very wise, if you get into trouble,’ said Mitchell, probing.

  The proprietor shrugged. ‘She never came to any harm before and she’s been swimming here regular for a year or more. I often saw her walking in her swimming costume, she used to wear a sort of terry-towel coat over it to get dry on the way back. She only lived along there.’

  He pointed with the handle of his brush to the track that led eastwards from the parking area. It was set back quite a way from the gorse and bracken that covered the undulating cliff top. The roofs and chimneys of several houses could be seen in the distance.

  The detective knew when to stop his questioning, knowing he would get little more of any use. He moved back to his car and after the man had gone back inside the shop, he started the engine and drove very slowly along the rough track, the car rolling and pitching slightly over the irregular stones.

  He passed a house and a bungalow, spaced well apart behind wind-blown hedges, but neither was Bella Capri. There was a gap of a few hundred yards before the next dwelling, the track passing between thick gorse bushes on the cliff side and dense elder and blackthorn on the landward verge. A pair of wrought-iron gates came into view, set back a little from the track and on one of the masonry turn-ins was a metal nameplate bearing the name he was looking for. He did not stop, but drove on a little until he found a gap between the bushes sufficient to make a three-point turn. The track deteriorated beyond this point and there seemed to be no more houses further on.

  Mitchell went back towards Bella Capri and stopped the Wolseley opposite the gates. Without getting out, he looked up the drive from his seat and saw a low house, with bay windows downstairs and two gabled windows in the slate roof. There was a long front garden, entirely grassed, through which the gravelled drive went up the centre, until it swung around the right-hand side of the house, where a separate garage was visible. The main door was in the centre between the bay windows and a few yards in front of it was a circular rockery with a small ornamental pond in the middle.

  Trevor sat looking for a few moments, prepared to act the nosy voyeur of a tragic house if anyone came out to challenge him. But the place remained silent and deserted. The curtains were drawn and no dog barked at him. He pondered what to do next, with such a dearth of anyone to question. Presumably, Michael Prentice would be at his factory, which Massey had told him was in an industrial estate the other side of Swansea, near the docks.

  As he sat there, his problem was unexpectedly solved when an elderly lady appeared from the gate of the next bungalow down and began walking up towards him, a large black retriever running ahead of her, sniffing the bushes and cocking up its leg at intervals. Trevor expected her to pass the car, but she came to his driver’s side and rapped peremptorily on the glass.

  ‘What are you doing here, may I ask?’ she snapped, when he wound the window down. ‘Are you a policeman?’

  Mitchell, who looked every inch a copper and was sitting in what looked like a police car, was glad that he could honestly say that he was not. ‘I’m a journalist, madam, writing an article on the dangers of solitary bathing on this coast. I’ve been looking at some of the more dangerous spots.’

  It was a harmless lie and in fact, he had written a few articles for magazines on various aspects of policing in Britain, which almost made him a journalist. The rather hard-faced woman, her grey hair crushed under a scarf tied tightly under her chin, seemed mollified at his explanation.

  ‘We have to be careful of loitering strangers,’ she snapped. ‘We’ve had several break-ins along here.’

  ‘I understand that this was the house where that poor lady Mrs Prentice lived?’ he asked humbly, pulling out his notebook and pencil to validate his guise as a writer. ‘She was the reason I was asked to write this article, to point out the risks before the summer season gets going. Did you know her well? I presume she was an experienced swimmer.’

  The neighbour fell for the ploy, unable to resist airing her knowledge.

  ‘Oh yes, she loved the sea. In good weather, she was in almost every day. I think that’s partly why they came to live here. I’m not sure that Michael was all that keen on it, I got the feeling he was more of a city man.’

  Trevor also got the feeling that the old lady did not care for the man of the house nearly as much as she did for Linda.

  ‘Did you see her the day of the accident?’ he ventured. ‘No possibility of her being unwell and this contributing to the tragedy?’

  The grey-haired woman looked thoughtful. ‘I didn’t actually see her for a few days before that,’ she admitted, rather regretfully. ‘In fact I thought she looked a little out of sorts for a week or two. I do hope that wasn’t anything to do with her death – getting cramp or something like that.’

  Mitchell felt he would be sailing too near the wind if he probed much more, but he had one last try.

  ‘I suppose there’s no one else I could ask, to get more background on this awful business?’ he said solicitously. ‘Have any local friends or family been here since it happened?’

  The neighbour thought for a moment, then shook her head. ‘They kept very much to themselves, especially the husband. I did see a blonde lady come in with Michael in his car on Friday, but I don’t know if she was family or not.’

  Trevor knew when to bow out gracefully and with thanks to the lady, he said goodbye and let her march away up the track, snapping commands at her uncaring dog.

  He went back into the village, which he saw from a sign was called Southgate, and found a red telephone box.

  With a fistful of change, he rang a Reading number that Leonard Massey had given him, that of the dead woman’s schoolfriend, who had raised all this suspicion after receiving Linda’s letter. When he got an answer, he pressed Button A and spoke to her for several minutes, having to push several more pennies into the slot, then came out with a few more words written in his notebook.

  About twenty-five miles from Pennard, on the main A48 going towards home, Trevor turned the Wolseley off onto a secondary road and made his way towards the seaside town of Porthcawl. As he drove along the promenade and out towards Rest Bay, he could see Gower on the western horizon and even identify the cliffs of Pwlldu Head, on the further side of which Bella Capri lay.

  Here in Porthcawl, Trevor found the coast was very different, low cliffs and beaches giving way to miles of sand dunes, under which lay buried the medieval town of Kenfig. He was not going that far, however, and guided by the sparse information that Marjorie Elphington had given him over the telephone, he found the road that was an extension of the Esplanade, going towards the burrows and golf clubs.

  All Marjorie had been able to tell him on the telephone, was that Linda had learned that her husband’s mistress was a blonde called Daphne and that she lived in a maisonette on the front in Porthcawl. Mitchell parked his car in a side street and began walking along the road which fronted the sea. The houses were built only on the landward side and included thirties modernistic houses with curved corners and flat roofs, mixed with some larger classical dwellings. Further on were smaller bungalows and he could see only one block of maisonettes. This two-storey building had four apartments, each with its own front door, two on the front, the others at each end. He walked slowly past, trying to get a glimpse of the bell pushes to see if there were any names on them, but they were too far away from the pavement for his eyesight.

  Rather stumped as to his next move, he carried on up the road until he came to the next side turning, another suburban collection of houses and bungalows.

  He could hardly walk up to the doors and push all the bells in turn, then ask each occupant whether they were the fancy woman of Michael Prentice! His brief from Leonard Massey was only to confirm the existence of the mystery woman and to obtain her name and address.

  Turning round, he walked slowly back to the main road and ambled towards the maisonettes, hoping for some inspiration. The patron saint of private eyes must have b
een in good form that day, for as he approached the block, the door of the further apartment on the front opened and a woman stepped out and began walking briskly ahead of him. She was young and very blonde indeed, wearing a light sling-back coat and high heels.

  He could not see her face, but making a bet with himself that a smart blonde living in those maisonettes might well be the mysterious Daphne, he followed her at a discreet distance. There were a few other people about and he had little fear of being challenged as a stalker as she turned into the road where he had left his car. Now he could see her face in profile, and decided she was in her mid-twenties, attractive but with rather sharp features. The blonde walked past the Wolseley and headed for the centre of the small town, but stopped after a few hundred yards and turned into a newsagent’s shop.

  Seeing no reason why he should not do the same, as she could not know him from Adam, he went in and saw her at the counter at the back of the shop. He stopped just inside and began looking at magazines on a rack, taking off a copy of Picture Post and looking through the pages. He heard the woman asking for twenty Gold Flake cigarettes and laughing over something with the middle-aged shopkeeper, who she called ‘Tom’. Then she walked out of the shop past Trevor, without glancing at him. He managed a good look at her and confirmed that she was attractive, but perhaps wore too much make-up.

  As soon as she had left, he went to the counter to buy his magazine and as he waited for his change, he spoke casually to the proprietor.

  ‘That was Daphne from the maisonettes, wasn’t it? I live a few doors away, but I can never remember her surname,’ he lied.

  ‘Daphne Squires? Yes, she’s a good looking woman.’

  The shopkeeper was obviously appreciative of young blondes and assumed that Mitchell’s interests lay in the same direction.

  ‘I heard that she was leaving soon, going to live in Gower,’ said Trevor, with false innocence.

  The man behind the counter shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t know. Pity though, she buys fags and magazines from me – and she’s better looking that most of my other customers.’

  Trevor knew when to stop probing and he left to go back to his car. Before he drove off, he was able to write another line in his notebook.

  EIGHT

  When Richard Pryor returned to the Wye Valley late on Wednesday morning, after having done his duty at Newport, he found Sian waiting for him with a tray of microscope slides.

  ‘Here we are, Doctor, a set of ‘H and E’ and one of Perl’s.’

  ‘H and E’ was probably the best-known acronym in pathology, standing for ‘haematoxylin and esosin’, which for a century or more had been the main method of staining tissues for microscopic examination.

  She proudly set the cardboard tray alongside the small microscope that stood on a table in his room. Their big new microscope was in the laboratory for communal use, as it was so expensive that Richard and Angela had to use it between them until their finances improved. However, he had this smaller monocular in his own room, the same one he had had as a student. Sian hovered over him as he sat on his high stool.

  ‘Are they OK?’ she demanded, as soon as his eye was settled on the top of the instrument. He made no answer until he had studied and replaced several of the glass slides on the stage of the microscope, moving them around with the pair of control knobs. Then he looked up at the pert little technician, who was staring at him in tense anticipation, a cloud of blonde hair like a halo around her pretty face.

  ‘Damned good, Sian, first class! Nice and thin, fully dehydrated and beautifully stained!’

  They were good, but he laid the praise on thickly as he knew it meant a lot to her, the first histology she had produced for him. Technicians were very proud of their expertise and took it personally when things went wrong.

  She beamed and looked as if she had just won the football pools.

  ‘Thank God for that,’ she said fervently. ‘I hadn’t used a Cambridge rocker for years, we had a sledge at the Royal Gwent.’ Sian was referring to the devices used to cut slices a few thousandths of an inch thick, gadgets like mini bacon slicers, which passed the paraffin-wax blocks containing tissue against the edge of a blade like a cut-throat razor.

  ‘They’re great, Sian, now I can spend a happy hour looking at your handiwork!’

  She took the hint and almost skipped out of his room in satisfaction. Pryor sat for a long while on his stool, eye glued to the eyepiece of the microscope, except when he changed slides and once when he got up to take a thick textbook from a shelf. Then he sat back and stared out of the window for a while, gazing unseeingly at the trees above Moira’s house further down the valley. When he finally moved, he drew a lined pad towards him and began writing a supplementary report.

  By that afternoon, two conferences with different coroners had been arranged, each requiring Pryor’s presence. Phone calls between the solicitor in Lydney and Trevor Mitchell had resulted in the first appointment being made with Brian Meredith for the following morning.

  ‘You’d better come with me, Angela. I may need some biology expertise, as well as your moral support!’ said Richard as they were having their mid-afternoon tea.

  She nodded and, with a grimace, stretched her legs out from the chair.

  ‘It would be nice to get out for a change, after sitting doing all that blood grouping. You get all the fun, Richard, going to all those glamorous mortuaries.’

  ‘Fun? Abattoirs have more glamour than those awful places I have to work in.’

  Moira and Sian had taken to joining them in the staff lounge – in fact, it was Moira who now made all the tea and coffee. ‘I’ll have that extra report typed up for you to sign in an hour, then I can get it in the post tonight,’ she promised.

  Sian, itching to know whether her efforts with the tissue sections had proved useful, asked Richard to explain.

  ‘I saw the report on Moira’s desk,’ she admitted. ‘What’s it actually mean?’

  ‘The bruises were of different ages,’ he replied. ‘That was obvious to the naked eye from the colour, as fresh ones are blue or purple, but the haemoglobin decays after a time and then they turn green and yellow.’

  ‘My grandmother could have told you that!’ said Angela, softening the sarcasm with a grin.

  ‘Sure, but she couldn’t put a date on them,’ he countered. ‘Neither can I for that matter, except in very approximate terms, as different people react differently, as well as there being other factors.’

  ‘So what use was my histology?’ persisted Sian.

  ‘In a fresh bruise only red blood cells have leaked out from the damaged blood vessels, but soon white blood cells start accumulating to start the clear-up and healing process and their type changes with time.’

  ‘Why did you ask me to do a Perl’s stain on them? That’s to show iron, isn’t it?’

  Pryor nodded, he liked to teach others the mystique of his profession, which was why he was happy to have been given those medical student lectures in Bristol.

  ‘The haemoglobin in the red cells gets broken down and the contained iron is set free, so that it shows up in a Perl’s stain as blue specks. That doesn’t happen for a day or two, usually longer. So if it’s Perl’s-positive, then the person must have lived for at least that length of time after the injury.’

  Sian nodded her understanding.

  ‘That means she couldn’t have sustained the bruises knocking around against the rocks, because she was dead too soon afterwards?’

  ‘That’s it, my girl! Trouble is, I can’t put a definite date on them, apart from some which are undoubtedly fresh. Whether they go back a week or so, to when she was supposed to have had this punch-up with her husband, is hard to tell.’

  Moira listened to this with fascination. After years of humdrum life in a local solicitor’s office, typing letters about house conveyancing, divorces and motor claims, this erudite talk of blood, bruises and suspected homicide brought home to her how a week or two had changed her outlook on
life. Richard had taken her aside early on and tactfully emphasized that everything she heard in Garth House must be kept strictly confidential, as some might be sub judice, though he softened the warning by saying that he was sure that she already appreciated that, after having worked in a lawyer’s office.

  He had given the same homily to Sian, soon after she started with them and he had every confidence that these two sensible women would keep their mouths shut outside working hours.

  The other conference was set up after he had telephoned Massey to give him a cautious interpretation of his examination of the bruises, telling him much the same as he had explained to Sian. Within an hour, he had had a call back from the Gowerton coroner’s officer, asking him to attend a conference with the coroner on Friday, to determine exactly what the significance of his findings were.

  Richard realized that this coroner was treading very carefully in such a sensitive matter. Leonard Massey must have phoned him straight after speaking to Pryor about the bruises and Richard hoped that he had not painted too strong a picture.

  Next morning, a bright but breezy Thursday, he drove up to Monmouth, with Angela sitting in the passenger seat, revelling in the sunlit appearance of the valley as they followed the winding river through meadows and woods. Richard thought she looked very elegant today. Around Garth House, she normally wore a blouse and slacks under her laboratory coat, but for this professional meeting she had on a light grey suit with a narrow waist and long slim skirt. Angela was keen on the fashions of the day, being an avid student of Vogue. He knew she went on shopping expeditions in London with her sister and suspected that her wardrobe was now subsidized by her parents, as their present earnings from the new practice were negligible.

  Brian Meredith’s partner was taking morning surgery for him, as the coroner had put aside the morning for a short inquest, followed by this meeting. They met in the empty magistrates’ court where he had just held his inquest. It was housed in the historic Shire Hall, which bore a statue of locally born King Henry V on its front, but the court itself was a gloomy chamber lined with sombre wood panelling. There were two pews for lawyers and benches at the back for the public, all set below a raised bench for the Justices of the Peace, dominated by a large plaster Royal Coat of Arms.