Where Death Delights (18 page)

‘Must spend a day in the library in Bristol,' he muttered to himself, as he stared down the eyepiece of his microscope. ‘And maybe I can wangle a ticket to the one in Cardiff medical school, as I'm one of their old students.'

After their tea break, he abandoned the sections to give his eyes a rest and wandered out into the plot behind, where Jimmy Jenkins was using a scythe on the patch marked out with stakes for Richard's vines.

The lush grass of early summer had grown up to knee height and with his rhythmic sweeps of the curved blade, Jimmy had already laid almost half the area low.

He stopped to sharpen the scythe with a short rod of carborundum as Pryor approached.

‘You still set on planting this with them grapes?' he demanded, his tone suggesting that he thought his boss was mentally defective for wanting to do such a thing.

‘Yes, of course. But I can't do this until the spring, so we've got time to get the ground into shape ready for them.'

His scanty knowledge of viniculture came from a slim booklet he had bought in Bristol recently. Jimmy grunted, pushing the peak of his cap further up from his forehead. With cooler weather, he had taken to wearing a plaid lumberjack shirt, tucked into corduroy trousers, which were tied below the knees with lengths of binder-twine to keep them clear of the scythe.

‘Far better to plant forty rows of strawberries!' he advised. ‘Grows a treat here in the valley. You could sell 'em to passing tourists or up in the market in Monmouth. Make more money than with your doctoring, I wouldn't wonder!'

That wouldn't be difficult at the moment, thought Richard.

‘Whichever it is, Jimmy, we'll have to get this plot turned over somehow.' He looked at the large area on the slope and wondered how many men with spades it would take to turn the grass in and make a decent tilth. Jimmy seemed to be reading his thoughts.

‘Need machinery for that, Doctor! Near on half an acre, this is! Either a tractor with plough and disc-harrow – or maybe I could borrow one of them “walk-behind” rotavators.'

They talked on for a while about the problem, though Richard was often hazy about what Jimmy was telling him. He had never before shown any interest in horticulture, having been either in the army or living in servant-rich idleness of colonial comfort. But now he felt that this might be a pleasant release from the tensions of a stressful profession, a welcome change from corpses, courts and coroners. He listened to Jimmy extolling the virtue of the various types of strawberry, in his crusade to wean Richard off his determination to plant vines. In the contest between Royal Sovereign and Cambridge Favourite, the pathologist happily forgot his concern about the ratio of polymorphs to lymphocytes in those bruises back in the house.

But later that evening, the concerns crept back with the prospect of the conference next day and he pulled down his textbooks and pored over them yet again to get the salient facts clear in his mind before he went to Swansea next day.

NINE

T
hough the post-mortems on Linda Prentice had been carried out in the mortuary in Swansea, the coroner who covered Gower was not the same official whose jurisdiction was the borough itself. Neither was Pennard in the Swansea police area, but was part of the Glamorgan County Constabulary, the larger force that covered all the county except for the three major towns of Cardiff, Merthyr and Swansea.

So it was not in Swansea itself that the Friday meeting was convened, but in Gowerton, a small industrial town on the northern neck of the peninsula. It was not far from the edge of the Burry Inlet, a vast sandy estuary where the Penclawdd cockle beds lay – totally different from the southern coast of Gower, blessed with miles of cliffs and golden beaches.

Today, the coroner had not commandeered the local magistrates' courts for the meeting, but held it in his office nearby. Like most coroners outside London and some other big cities, where they tended to be medical doctors with an additional legal qualification, he was a local solicitor. These tended to pass the appointment down through their partners for generations – often the deputy coroner and assistant coroner were also part of the same firm.

Mr Donald Moses carried on his practice from all three floors of a terrace house in Mill Street. As senior partner, he had the best room, the first-floor front, and it was here that the meeting assembled at eleven o'clock. Richard Pryor had again been chauffeured by Jimmy Jenkins, who had gone off to find a cup of tea, promising to be back in an hour.

The coroner was a small man of about sixty, with thin black hair spread carefully over his rounded skull. He had a small toothbrush moustache that caused his junior staff to refer to him secretly as ‘Adolf'. Pryor was intrigued to see that he wore a wing collar with his black jacket and striped trousers – almost a stage caricature of a lawyer. But it was soon apparent that though a small-town solicitor, he was a very sharp character with an ability to cut through any waffle.

He sat behind an old leather-topped desk in the bay window, with his coroner's officer, PC Mort, standing against a nearby wall. A motley collection of chairs faced him, as he conducted his inquests in this room, except for ones requiring a jury or where there was a need for lawyers and press to be present.

Already seated were Leonard Massey, Doctor O'Malley and two plain-clothes police officers. One was Detective Inspector Lewis Lewis, who Richard had met before at the mortuary, and Detective Superintendent Ben Evans who headed the local Divisional CID. He was a large, red-faced man with bristly fair hair, looking every inch a policeman.

No tea or coffee were on offer and Donald Moses, after naming all those present, cut straight to the chase.

‘I opened my inquest on the lady Mrs Linda Prentice last week,' he began in a surprisingly deep voice for such a small man. ‘That was for identification purposes only and I issued a burial certificate in the usual way.'

He straightened a buff folder in front of him and placed his fountain pen precisely in its centre.

‘I intended resuming the full inquest into this tragic death in about two weeks' time, but following representations from the father of the deceased, Mr Leonard Massey, I had the funeral postponed so that a second post-mortem examination could be carried out.'

He made a small nod of recognition towards Richard.

‘I did this with some reluctance, due to the inevitable distress that it would cause the relatives, but given the legal experience of Mr Massey here – and the letter he produced from his daughter's friend, I felt I had no option but to accede to his request.'

He produced a wire-framed pair of half-moon spectacles from his top pocket and laid them alongside his pen.

‘Now Doctor Pryor has offered a report that takes this matter a stage further and in view of that, I decided to request the presence of the police here today, in case they feel the need to intervene.'

DS Evans cleared his throat at this point, which sounded like the first rumblings of a volcanic eruption.

‘Mr Moses, I am afraid I come into this with very little background knowledge, except what my inspector here has told me about the post-mortem.'

The coroner nodded jerkily. ‘Very well, perhaps Mr Massey would summarize what made him uneasy about the circumstances of this death.'

The Queen's Counsel opened a folder which was on his lap and took out some sheets of paper. He handed one each to the detectives.

‘These are typed copies of the relevant parts of the letter that my daughter's close friend received from her, as well as a report which I commissioned by a private investigator, who is a former detective superintendent.'

He looked across at Donald Moses.

‘You already have a copy, sir, as well as the original letter. In essence, that contains allegations that there was a serious marital dispute between my daughter and her husband, Michael Prentice, and that he had shown violence towards her during the weeks before her death. The cause was her discovery of his affair with another woman and her refusal to agree to divorce proceedings.'

There was a short delay while the two policemen read through the transcripts, Lewis Lewis getting the fainter carbon copy. At the same time, the coroner put on his glasses and opened the file before him, refreshing his memory from his own copy.

‘The second part is the report of the investigator I employed,' continued Massey. ‘You will see that he confirms the identity of the woman suggested by Linda's friend, as a Daphne Squires who lives in Porthcawl and who I have no doubt was the blonde woman seen by a neighbour in Michael Prentice's house some days after my daughter's death.'

Ben Evans looked up from his copy. ‘So the only knowledge we have of the violence upon your daughter, sir, is this hearsay evidence from the friend?'

Massey nodded, rather impatiently. ‘But you will see that at one point, she says that “I was afraid for my life, he was so violent.” That is very significant, I submit. The friend told me – and as her father, I can vouch for it – that Linda was not given to dramatic exaggerations, in fact she usually played things down.'

The superintendent nodded, but did not look all that convinced. ‘There were no other useful witnesses who could corroborate this, I presume? Friends or neighbours?'

Massey shook his leonine head. ‘They live in a rather isolated house in Pennard. There are neighbours, but everyone drives in and out by car without much social contact. The only thing my investigator found was that the nearest neighbour said that Linda looked “out of sorts” for a while before she died.'

Lewis Lewis scribbled something in his notebook at this, but the coroner began to look a little fretful at being out of the loop for a while.

‘I think we should hear from the medical men now,' he said. ‘Dr O'Malley, you performed the first examination at my request. Was there anything that suggested that death was due to causes other than drowning?'

The retired pathologist shifted rather uneasily on his chair.

‘Absolutely no reason to doubt that the poor lady drowned,' he declared in accents suggestive of County Cork. ‘Of course, there were numerous marks on her body, as I mentioned in my report – scratches and bruises, but she had been washing around in the surf for at least a day, against a very rocky coastline.'

Donald Moses picked up O'Malley's very short report from his file. ‘You say there were many abrasions and bruises on the legs, arms, back and face?'

‘Indeed I did, sir. They were too numerous to describe individually.'

The coroner then picked up and perused the several pages of Pryor's report, in which every injury was described, but he made no comment.

‘Did you do any special tests of any sort – using the microscope, for instance?' he asked at length.

O'Malley looked a little crestfallen at this.

‘Unfortunately, since I retired from my hospital post three years ago, I have no access to any laboratory facilities. If any of your cases require that, the samples must be sent away, as you know. Or if there is any suspicion about the death, the Home Office chap is called.'

‘And you felt there was no such necessity here?' asked Moses.

The pathologist shook his head. ‘None at all, sir. I have dealt with dozens of drownings in my time, and this was typical of the condition.'

Moses now turned his head towards Richard.

‘Doctor Pryor, do you agree that she drowned?'

‘Like Doctor O'Malley, I have no doubt about that,' he said, keen not to embarrass the older doctor. ‘Drowning can often be a difficult diagnosis, especially in sea water, as opposed to fresh – and made more difficult if there is a delay before the recovery and examination of the body. But here there was ample frothy fluid in the air passages and the lungs were waterlogged and showed the typical brownish patchy haemorrhages and alternating areas of emphysema and collapse.'

He spoke rather diffidently, trying not to be too graphic in the presence of the woman's father, but he seemed to show no emotion.

‘But you recorded some other findings, Doctor,' persisted the coroner.

‘Yes, as Doctor O'Malley has said, there were many relatively minor injuries scattered over the body, some consistent with being knocked by the waves against sharp rocks and barnacles. But there were other less explicable injuries in rather characteristic situations.'

This statement injected a new tension into the atmosphere, which until then had been a little soporific.

Ben Evans hauled his big body more upright in his chair.

‘And what were they, Doctor?' he rumbled.

‘The scratches were all very recent, and I have no reason to think that they were not caused when she was in the water. They had no “vital reaction” at all and some or even all of them could have been sustained after death.'

‘What about the bruises?' asked Evans.

‘Ah, that's a bit different. You can't bruise a dead body, as once the heart stops, there's no pressure to force blood out of damaged vessels into the surrounding tissues – which is what a bruise actually is.'

‘So they were all ante-mortem?' ventured Lewis Lewis, who had picked up the term from other cases.

‘Yes, but some could have been caused immediately before death or during the drowning process, as the heart needn't stop instantly, especially in sea water. If, say, she fell off a low cliff, she could hit herself on the way down and get scratches and bruises. Even in the water, before she drowned, she could still sustain some bruises from being battered against rocks by the waves. There were two quite large ones on the back of the head, but again they were very fresh and one could make a case for them knocking her out, so that she drowned. As I understand she was a good swimmer and might well have survived if she was in full possession of her senses.'