Where Death Delights (24 page)

The superintendent had no idea what they looking for, but after a phone call to his chief superintendent, who was head of CID at Headquarters, they agreed that they should go through the whole routine. Then, if it turned out to be nasty, they would not be left with egg on their faces for not covering all possibilities.

‘You've got a woman dead and an accusation that she was being ill-treated by her husband,' the chief had said. ‘Now this pathologist says she has bruises indicative of gripping on her arms and neck – and not least, a London QC is her father and is raising hell. That's enough for me to give it the full Monty!'

Evans watched as the photographer took some establishing shots of the house, both from outside and indoors, while the inspector and two DCs made a methodical search of each room.

‘Are we looking for anything in particular, guv'nor?' asked the older detective constable, an experienced man who had been involved in many searches.

Ben Evans shrugged. ‘Flying blind, I'm afraid. She had an injury on the back of her head, so look for anything that might have blood and hair on it. Could be a corner of furniture or the fireplace – or it could be the good old blunt instrument.'

However, every effort to find evidence of a fall or a struggle came to nothing. They searched everywhere, including the garden, the garage and the shed. They even put a head up into the loft, which from the layer of dust, appeared never to have been entered.

‘Are we interested in papers and stuff like that?' asked Lewis, as he pulled open a desk drawer in the right hand front room, which appeared to have been used as an office, as it had a portable typewriter on top and a small filing cabinet alongside.

Evans came across and began looking through some of the papers, but they seemed to be either household bills or documents relating to the factory in Swansea.

‘No sign of a diary she might have kept?' he asked the searchers, but was answered by shaken heads.

He shrugged off his disappointment. ‘I thought she might have left some record of him knocking her about, as she had written to her friend,' he said. ‘Maybe he's clean after all.'

They gave up after about two hours, having covered every inch of the house, even pulling back carpets and moving beds. The superintendent was last out and slammed the door shut, leaving the keys inside on the hall table. They had a final conference in the front garden, Ben Evans perching his large backside on the low wall of the circular rockery. He looked morosely into the murky water of the small pond that lay in the middle, where two sad-looking goldfish swam around.

‘We've got nothing, lads, and I'm not sure where we go from here. Any suggestions?'

Lewis Lewis scratched his head, then pulled out a packet of Players Navy Cut and offered them around. ‘We've never actually seen where she went into the sea and where the body was found, have we?'

Two of his colleagues took a cigarette, Evans and the photographer declining. When they had lit up, the senior detective constable queried what could be gained.

‘It's almost a couple of weeks now, and we've had some rain and plenty of wind. What's going to be left?'

Ben Evans thought for a moment, then whistled and beckoned to the uniformed man, who had been standing guard at the gate into the road. When he came up the path, Evans asked him if he was the one who had answered the call of the fisherman who had found the body.

‘Yes, sir – and I was there when the coastguards hauled her ashore.'

‘What about the place where she went swimming? Have you been down there since?'

The PC, a middle-aged man nearing retirement, nodded.

‘I was the one who found her dressing-gown thing, behind a gorse bush above the rocks.'

‘Can you show us both those places, Constable? We may as well have a look now we're here.'

They trooped off behind the officer, who went a few yards along the track to the right, then turned down between stunted bushes and across to the top of the cliff.

Here a wide, shallow amphitheatre sloped steeply down to the rocks below, lined with coarse grass and patches of gorse. There was a narrow, ankle-twisting path going down to the sea, marked by muddy earth and outcropping stones.

The PC set off, followed more cautiously by the others and eventually they reached a band of flatter grass immediately above the rocky gullies, in which grey water surged and sucked with the swell.

‘Do people swim in that?' said Evans, pointing down to the water, ten feet below.

‘Yes, plenty of them, especially at the weekends and in better weather than this.' The constable pointed up at the low clouds from which an intermittent drizzle came down.

‘And this is where Mrs Prentice must have gone in?' asked Lewis.

The uniformed man pointed to a nearby gorse bush, where a few bright yellow flowers resisted the wind and salt. ‘That's where I found her clothing, sir. One of these thick white towelling jobs, with a tie-belt, like you get in Turkish baths on the films. There was a blue bath-towel as well.'

‘What about shoes?' asked the photographer. ‘She'd hardly have come down that flaming path we just used in her bare feet?'

The constable shook his head. ‘No shoes, nothing but that dressing gown and towel.'

Ben Evans looked at Lewis.

‘That's a bit odd, unless she was one of these “back to nature” folks and despised shoes.'

‘She may have some sort of sandals or rubber shoes and kept them on until she got down on the rocks,' explained the PC. ‘I've seen a lot of people with those, it saves the feet until they're right at the water's edge.'

He pointed down at the grey rocks that formed the walls of the gullies. ‘They get right down there, then jump or clamber down into the water. They say it's more fun than just walking in off a sandy beach, though at low tide, there's a little stretch of sand exposed here.'

‘So where are the shoes now?' demanded one of the search team.

‘Well they weren't there when I came down to find the clothes,' retaliated the constable. ‘But that was a day later, they could have been washed off by a big wave or blown off by the wind.'

The superintendent had a few photos taken of the site, then they clambered back up to the top of the cliffs. Once on the track to the houses, Ben Evans decided to cover all his bases and look at the place where the body was recovered.

‘It's about a quarter of a mile, sir. Do you want to walk or drive?' asked their guide. Opting to do it the hard way, the posse set off eastwards and passed the last of the houses, when the stony road became even more uneven.

‘Really need a Land Rover along here,' observed Lewis, as they came to another dip in the high cliffs which went down to the rocks a couple of hundred feet below.

‘That's Pwlldu Head further on,' said the local man, pointing to a blunt promontory beyond the dip.

He led them cautiously down another even more difficult path to a similar ledge above the waves and pointed out the place where the body had been seen in the water.

‘Up against the back end of that narrow crack, it was,' he told them.

Ben Evans nodded. ‘You reckon it could have washed along from where we were just now?'

The constable had no doubts about it. ‘Twelve years I've been here, sir, I've seen many accidents in that time. They can end up anywhere from anywhere – as far as Porthcawl or even right up-channel. Sometimes, we never find them, they get pulled back out to sea.'

There was nothing else to look at, so they grunted and puffed their way back to the top. Once on the track again the group stood for a breather and a smoke, the photographer and the two DCs hoping that the search was over and that they could make for home.

The superintendent stood, deep in thought.

With absolutely nothing found, he failed to see that this case was going anywhere. Though he instinctively disliked Michael Prentice for an arrogant womanizer, that was no reason to accuse him of murder – and there was very poor evidence to even consider charging him with assaulting his late wife. He stood rubbing the bristles on his chin and staring at the ground, then realized that his eyes were actually focused on something.

Ben nudged his inspector and pointed to the ground near his feet. ‘Reckon this is recent, Lewis?'

He squatted down and peered more closely at a dark stain on the grey limestone on the edge of the track. Just where the uneven surface gave way to thin grass was a smear of jet black, about six inches long and half as wide. In the middle, a jagged spike of stone poked up through it, the top clean and almost white.

Lewis Lewis crouched down and delicately touched the black stain.

‘It's obviously engine oil. Somebody's stopped here and some has dripped from their sump.'

‘Looks as if they've run the sump over the top of that rock. That's a fairly fresh scrape on it.'

Evans motioned to the photographer to unpack his kit again and get a couple of close-ups of the oil patch. Then he told the detective constable who was acting as Exhibits Officer to take a sample from it. The DC took a small screw-top glass pot from his case, the type used in hospital laboratories. With a clean wooden spatula, he carefully scraped off as much of the black smear as possible and put it inside, labelling it and attaching a brown cardboard exhibits ticket, which he signed after the place, date and time.

‘Could be anyone, guv,' cautioned Lewis.

‘Any port in a storm, lad,' replied Evans. ‘We've got bee-all else. But let's go back to the house, before our golfer gets home.'

They retraced their steps to
Bella Capri
and Evans led them to the side of the house, in front of the garage.

‘We left the keys inside,' pointed out Lewis.

Evans shook his bull-like head. ‘Doesn't matter, he was leaving his car out here, while his floozie's was in the garage.'

He looked at the concrete hardstanding outside the garage and saw with satisfaction that a much longer black stain disfigured the ground.

‘We'll have a bit of that, too,' he told the exhibits man and the DC repeated his operation, harvesting another sample in a different bottle.

Somewhat mystified, the party broke up, the others going off in the van and Evans driving away with Lewis in the Vauxhall. As they crossed Fairwood Common on the way back to Gowerton, the superintendent gave some instructions to Lewis.

‘I want you to go back to that factory of his while Prentice is not there and speak again to that chap you saw. He seems to know all about the technology that's going on.'

He gave his inspector some more detailed instructions and when they reached the police station, he turned the car over to Lewis to make the journey into Swansea.

THIRTEEN

A
s Edward Lethbridge had gloomily anticipated, Agnes Oldfield was cock-a-hoop, as soon as she had the news that Molly Barnes's claim had been demolished by the exhumation. She insisted on a meeting with both her solicitor and Trevor Mitchell, so the lawyer thought it wise to invite Richard Pryor along as well, partly in order to deflect the inevitable demands concerning her own claim.

They arranged to meet at his office in Lydney on that Wednesday afternoon and the three men were already there when she arrived. As they rose, she swept in through the door opened by a secretary and imperiously took her seat alongside the desk. Richard, a keen cinema-goer, was reminded of Dame Edith Evans's portrayal of Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde's
The Importance of being Earnest
, as she wore a long black coat and an ornate hat. As it was raining outside, she also had a thin umbrella, upon which she rested a gloved hand, as she sat ramrod straight on her chair.

‘Well, I told you it was Anthony!' she began without any preamble. ‘I knew from the start that the Barnes woman was an impostor.'

As she had never laid eyes on the woman, Richard wondered how she knew that, but he kept his peace.

It was Lethbridge's task to try to put the brakes on Agnes Oldfield's certitude.

‘Madam, we have only managed to prove that the remains were not those of Albert Barnes,' he said rather nervously. ‘It does not advance us one inch in establishing that they are those of your nephew.'

She glared at the solicitor. ‘Of course it must be Anthony. Now we must prove it!'

‘That's what we've been trying to do for over a year, Mrs Oldfield,' said Lethbridge, in gentle exasperation. ‘We have spent a lot of time – and I may add, you have spent a lot of money – in trying to trace your nephew, with no success whatsoever.'

‘But now it's different,' she said triumphantly. ‘You have had the actual remains to examine by a specialist.'

She gave Pryor a regal wave and a fleeting smile.

Richard felt he should make some contribution to help out poor old Edward.

‘Yes, Mrs Oldfield, but unless we can discover some unique characteristic in your relative that can be matched to the bones, we are no further forward.'

‘Such as what?' she demanded.

‘Did he have any old injuries, for example? Had he been in hospital for anything?'

As he said it, he knew he was being false, because there was no sign of any old injuries or disease in the remains that could be matched to anything. In fact, if the missing Anthony had had any such features, it would exclude him from being the body at the reservoir.

The old lady pondered for a moment. ‘I just don't know, Professor! You see, until the last year or so, my nephew was often abroad. For all I know, he might have broken a leg in the Alps or caught beriberi in Africa!'