‘This is where we are developing a new oil additive that will reduce frictional wear on moving parts, like cylinder walls and bearings. It will make engines last longer and use less fuel.’
Lewis, who had been a motorized traffic officer before going into the CID, was intrigued. ‘How can you do that – or is it a trade secret?’
Laskey grinned. ‘The principle’s been known about for years. There are several competitors working on the same problem of getting the correct concentration of molybdenum sulphide to stay suspended in the lubricating oil.’
They passed on to a couple of other experimental ventures, then Lewis took his leave, much to the relief of Laskey, who had been very unhappy at being questioned about his partner.
Back in Gowerton, the said partner had finished writing his statement and signed it with a defiant flourish.
‘There you are, Superintendent! If there are any more questions, I’ll only answer them in the presence of my solicitor, because I’ve had enough of this pointless harassment. I trust that coroner will now let my poor wife be buried with dignity.’
‘That’s up to him, sir,’ said Ben Evans. ‘The next thing we need is to examine your house. You are entitled to be present, as is your solicitor, if you so wish.’
Michael Prentice goggled at the detective, the veins on his forehead standing out like cords.
‘Examine my house? Why in God’s name would you want to do that?’ he exploded. ‘My wife drowned in the sea! What the hell’s my house got to do with it?’
‘Until we get an explanation of how those injuries were sustained, sir, we need to carry out all necessary investigations.’
‘Well, I’m not having it, d’you hear! What right have you to intrude on my property?’
Imperturbable as ever, as he’d heard all these protests before, Ben Evans offered him a choice.
‘We would like to do this with your consent, that’s the easy way. Otherwise, we’ll have to obtain a magistrate’s warrant. It’s up to you.’
‘Do what the hell you like!’ snarled Prentice, going to the door of the interview room. ‘I’m going straight to Swansea to see my solicitor.’
Ben Evans followed him as he stalked out of the building and jumped into his car. After the Jaguar had scorched out of the yard, the detective superintendent shrugged and turned back into the building.
Richard Pryor and Angela Bray were up early on Tuesday morning, with breakfast at six o’clock. They were on the road well before seven and in Ledbury before eight.
‘I don’t know why it has always been traditional to have exhumations so blessed early,’ complained Richard, as he drove the Humber through the gates of the cemetery. ‘It used to be at dawn, for God’s sake!’
‘If it was December, it would be dawn now,’ said Angela brightly, as unlike her partner, she was a morning person. ‘I suppose it was to avoid the press and the public, though that’s a faint hope these days.’
However, there was no sign of curious crowds as they drove into the deserted cemetery. All they met was a local police constable, who directed them to a parking space near a hut where the staff kept their shovels and made their tea.
‘The others are up at the top end, Doctor,’ he said helpfully, as Richard clambered out with his black bag.
They walked the length of the tree-lined path, Angela noticing that the headstones of the graves became more modern as they went. Soon they saw a police car and a plain black van parked opposite a canvas screen. It was stretched on poles around a few recent graves, which were still mounds of turf with wooden crosses instead of headstones. Inside, one of these had been excavated and a heap of red soil was piled to one side. A pair of undertaker’s men lounged against their van, smoking until they were needed.
Also inside the screens was John Christie, the Monmouth coroner’s officer, attired as usual in his tweeds and trilby.
With him was a council official from the Parks and Cemeteries Department, clutching a plan of the burial sites and two gravediggers, who had been removing all the earth that they had laboriously filled in a few weeks earlier.
‘I’ve had the soil removed down to the top of the coffin, Doctor,’ said the official importantly. ‘Once the coffin plate is checked, my men can get it up for you.’
He stepped to the edge of the hole and waved his papers.
‘I can confirm that this is Plot 275 E, occupied by Albert John Barnes.’
‘Mebbe, mebbe not!’ muttered Christie, under his breath, as one of the gravediggers went down the short ladder into the hole and, with a trowel, began excavating two tunnels under the coffin for ropes to be passed through. The soil was fairly dry and not hard-packed, as it had so recently been disturbed. Within a few minutes, the veneer-covered chipboard had been hauled out and laid on two timbers set across the top of the grave. One of the workers rubbed at the brass plate to remove the earth. The council official peered at it and nodded.
‘Albert John Barnes, it says. Would one of you gentlemen please confirm that?’
John Christie bent to look at the nameplate and nodded.
‘That’s the one! We’ll have it away to Hereford now.’
As the two undertaker’s men carted it off to their van, Richard wondered what would happen to the empty grave if the remains proved not to be Barnes – but that was not his problem.
Angela was very quiet on the journey to Hereford.
‘I’ve never been to an exhumation before,’ she said suddenly.
‘If you want the truth, neither have I!’ confessed Richard. ‘The need never arose in the Army, nor in Singapore. They are pretty uncommon events.’
Angela shuddered. ‘I’ve led a sheltered life in a laboratory, I suppose. Seeing where you end up at the bottom of a deep hole is a powerful reminder of your mortality.’
Hereford was not many miles away and the road from Ledbury came in past the County Hospital, so within a short time the cortège arrived at the mortuary. In the small office, a police photographer was waiting, organized by John Christie, as well as Dr Bogdan Marek, whose territory this was. In addition, Edward Lethbridge was there. He had had no desire to attend the exhumation nor view the disputed remains, but he felt that he should represent his client, on whose behalf he had set all this performance in motion.
The undertakers wheeled the coffin in on a trolley to the outer room where the body store was situated and proceeded to unscrew the lid. Richard Pryor put on a rubber apron and offered one to Angela.
‘It’ll keep the earth off your clothes, if nothing else,’ he said cheerfully.
They stood at the side of the coffin as the lid was taken off and propped against the wall. As the contents were virtually skeletal and very incomplete, there was no satin lining, but a sheet of rubberized fabric covered the bottom and was folded over the remains, which were laid out in an approximately correct pattern.
‘Better push the whole lot into the post-mortem room,’ said Pryor to the mortuary attendant and they followed the trolley into the stark chamber next door. Angela had seen plenty of dead bodies when called out to London scenes of crime, some in all stages of decay and mutilation, so she had no qualms about being in such close proximity to what was left of a corpse, though after lying about in the open air for several years, it was not particularly offensive, being mainly bones.
Pushing the coffin close to the porcelain table, Richard took charge and folded back the flaps of fabric to expose what was left of the body. After he had had a good look, he asked the hovering photographer to take pictures in situ and, for a few moments, the room was dazzled by flashes of home-made lightning.
Then the pathologist began taking the bones out one by one and reassembling them in proper anatomical order on the white table, when Dr Marek began peering intently at them.
‘There’s quite a lot missing,’ observed Richard. ‘Some of the ribs and quite a few vertebrae, as well as the skull. A lot of the smaller hand and foot bones have gone, too. There are small teeth marks on some of
them, foxes and rats, probably.’
He waited until he had all the skeleton laid out before addressing the vital point.
‘Thank God we’ve still got the sternum!’ he muttered and though he had already handled it, he picked it from between the ribs and held it between the fingers and thumbs of each hand. The breastbone was blade-shaped, about six inches long and an inch and a half wide, tapering to a point. Richard studied it, turned it over, then held it out to the others, who were clustered around.
‘Flat as a pancake!’ he announced. ‘Doctor Marek was quite right, no sign of a pec rec there!’
The Polish pathologist looked pleased at being proved right, though he had had no doubts about his memory of it. While the photographer took some close-ups of the bone, the coroner’s officer wanted some firm assurance to take back to Brian Meredith.
‘So we can definitely say that this is not Albert Barnes, Doc?’
Richard was more cautious. ‘We mustn’t jump to conclusions, there’s a lot more we can do yet. Certainly there’s nothing unusual about his sternum, but of course we’re relying on Dr Welton’s clinical examination for the truth of that. Mind you, I can’t see any possible reason for him being wrong about Barnes having a depressed sternum, but after all the fuss we’ve caused, we’ve got to be a hundred per cent sure.’
Angela volunteered to write a list of all the bones for Richard, being a good enough biologist not to need advice about any but a couple of small wrist and ankle bones. While she was doing this, Pryor examined every bone minutely, looking for any signs of old injury, but he found nothing.
‘There are still a few tendon tags here and there,’ he said. ‘As well as some joint cartilage, so death must have been within about the last five years.’
‘But it could have been less, I suppose?’ asked Marek.
‘Yes, it depends on the appetite of all those predators out there. They haven’t left much.’
When he had finished looking at the remains, Richard measured the surviving long bones of the legs and arms. He used an osteometry board which he had made himself in Singapore, a two-foot plank with a long ruler screwed to one edge. At one end was a ledge and a slider moved along a groove in the middle. He put a bone against the ledge, then slid the moving part until it touched the other end of the bone, reading off the length on the scale.
Angela wrote down all the measurements and after some hurried calculations on a sheet of paper, he turned again to the others.
‘I’ll do it properly when I get home, but I reckon that he was about five feet ten inches, with an error of up to two inches either way.’
John Christie nodded wisely. ‘That’s against it being Barnes, too. He was supposed to be only about five-seven.’
The photographer left, after being assured that there were no more pictures needed and Dr Marek went off to more pressing duties in his laboratory.
‘What else can we do, Doc?’ asked the coroner’s officer, anxious to come to a final decision.
‘We need some X-rays, certainly. Can you fix that? Tell the hospital that the coroner will pay!’ Richard turned to Angela, who was finishing off her notes.
‘What do you need for blood grouping? There’s hardly any soft tissue left.’
‘Any chance of some marrow? A vertebra or a small section out of a long bone would be enough.’
‘His clinical X-rays would be from a leg, so I can’t take any from a femur or tibia. A piece of ulna should do.’
Under the statutory Coroner’s Rules, a pathologist was not only allowed, but was obliged, to retain any material which might assist the coroner in his enquiries. Richard used a small saw to cut a sliver from an arm bone that exposed the marrow inside, which was ideal for determining the blood group. Then he collected his instruments, washed his hands and went out to see the solicitor in the office.
He told him what had transpired so far and that it looked very much as if the remains could not be those of Albert Barnes. ‘When I see the X-rays, I’ll be in a position to give a definite answer,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I can phone you later today.’
The elderly lawyer remained impassive, but as he left, he gave a sigh. ‘This means that Mrs Oldfield will be convinced that the remains are those of her nephew! I’ll get no peace now, mark my words!’
While they waited for the radiographers to arrive, which was forecast as being at least an hour, Richard drove down to the town centre and found a parking place.
‘A celebratory coffee is called for, partner,’ he declared and taking Angela’s arm they walked past the old jail and police station into the shopping streets. Finding a café of the ‘Olde Tea Shoppe’ style, they each ordered coffee and a cream cake, exhumation having done nothing to impair their appetite.
‘It’s nice to have things in the shops again,’ said Angela. ‘Ten years since the war finished and at last things are now virtually back to normal.’
They talked about their memories of pre-war days for a while. Both were from well-off families, Angela more so that the doctor’s son Richard, who remembered the South Wales valleys in the depression of the early thirties. He had more sympathy with Sian Lloyd’s pink politics than Angela, a ‘true blue’ who had been brought up in an affluent Home Counties’ environment.
The hour went quickly and he realized again how much he enjoyed talking to his partner, who was highly intelligent, well educated and sensitive to other people’s feelings. He began to wonder if their partnership would eventually take on another meaning.
When they got back to the hospital, a middle-aged woman was pushing a portable X-ray machine into the outer room of the mortuary. The device was like a washing machine with a thick chrome pole sticking out of the top, carrying a cabled tube on a side arm.
‘Sorry about this,’ apologized Richard, helping her push the machine into the post-mortem room ‘Must be a bit different to your usual patients – but these don’t smell or anything.’
The woman smiled and shook her head. ‘Saw a lot worse than this in the war! What exactly do you want done?’
John Christie was there with the X-rays from Barnes’s admission four years previously and he handed them to Pryor. There was an X-ray viewing box screwed to the wall and he held the four large films in front of the light.
‘A right femur and tibia, AP and lateral. Is that OK?’ he asked the radiographer.
She nodded and busily set about connecting up her set to a power socket, while he separated the appropriate bones from the collection on the slab. The mortuary attendant brought a small wooden table over, on which the lady put a large metal cassette containing the first blank film, with a clean towel over the top.
Pryor laid the first bone on it in the position he wanted and the radiographer swivelled the X-ray tube directly above it.
‘Right, everybody out!’ she commanded and the room was cleared to avoid stray radiation. She retreated to the doorway with a long wire in her hand and pressed a button. There was a whirring sound and she walked back to retrieve the cassette. Richard repeated this for another three exposures and when they were finished, the radiographer went off to develop the films, promising to return them in about half an hour. The mortuary man promised to trundle her machine back to the X-ray department and Richard, Angela and Christie had to sit in the cramped office, swapping stories of past cases to fill the time.
Eventually, the woman came back, carrying the developed films on metal hangers.
‘They’re still wet, but I thought you might like a quick look,’ she offered. ‘One of the radiologists will see them later and send you a report.’
Richard took one of the hangers and held it in front of the illuminated viewing box, then put up the corresponding film from Barnes’s records. He did this for each of the four views before saying anything.
‘That clinches it! Those bones are quite different.’
‘Show me why you can say that,’ demanded Angela and with Christie looking over her shoulder, Pryor shifted one of the old films across
under the clips on the box, so that he could hold the corresponding damp one to the side of it.
‘Look, a different length to the thigh bone, to start with. But the internal structure is different, especially up here towards the hip joint.’
‘You mean that lacy-looking stuff, radiating up to the femoral head?’ asked Angela, her biology expertise extending to quite a bit of anatomy.
‘That’s it, they’re mechanical struts responding to weight bearing. I know they can change with age and injury, but in a man in his forties, there’s no way they could alter this much in a few years.’
He showed similar differences to them in the other views and then told John Christie that he could confirm to the coroner that the remains were not those of Albert Barnes.
‘I’ll send him a written report as soon as we can get the blood groups done. Any joy with finding what Barnes’s blood group was?’
For reply, Christie opened the folder he was carrying and produced a sheet of paper. ‘I copied this from the pathology lab records. For some reason, the report form wasn’t stuck into his ward notes.’
Richard took the sheet and looked at it, then handed it to Angela.
‘“Albert John Barnes – Group A, Rhesus Positive”,’ she quoted. ‘Well, that’s the second most common in Britain. Thank heaven the bones were more unique.’
By later that day, Angela had determined that the remains were Group O Rhesus Positive, the first most common. Though Richard had had little doubt that the bones were not those of Albert, it was nice to have further cast-iron confirmation to give the coroner and Edward Lethbridge.
He phoned Brian Meredith at the end of the afternoon and told him of the findings. The coroner was not very enthusiastic about the news, but accepted the truth stoically.
‘Now I’ve got to tell the wife and reopen the inquest. She’ll make a bloody fuss, no doubt, but I’ll get John Christie to have a word in her ear about giving misleading evidence, as she must have known that the ring and the watch didn’t belong to her husband.’
Where Death Delights Page 17