Where Death Delights (15 page)

‘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.'

‘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?'