Where Death Delights (19 page)

‘So what's the problem, Doctor?' said the senior detective, almost belligerently.

‘The problem is that some of the bruises were in places where you wouldn't expect them to be caused by falling or swilling around in a rock gully. But even more significant is that these were not sustained immediately before death. Some were certainly at least a few days' old.'

This caused a thoughtful silence. The coroner came back first. ‘And you consider the position of these bruises suggestive of violence?' he asked.

‘Some were on the upper arms, each side of the biceps muscle, a typical position for gripping during shaking – and possibly from a punch on an obvious part of the body. One of these was actually greenish-yellow, so it must have been inflicted a number of days previously. Also, there were two small older bruises on the neck, one on each side under the angles of the jaw.'

‘From gripping the throat?' said the superintendent, who in his time had seen his fair share of attempted strangulations – and a few successful ones.

Pryor nodded, but O'Malley raised an objection.

‘With a body being tossed about by big waves on that coast, surely bruises could have been inflicted anywhere on the body?'

Richard shrugged. ‘Maybe, though it's a coincidence that some of them were in just the right place to indicate an assault. But the real proof is that they couldn't have been inflicted in the water, because some were days old!'

‘Could they have been sustained during a previous swim, a couple of days earlier?' asked Lewis Lewis.

‘That's not for me to say, it's not a medical matter,' answered Richard. ‘But it wouldn't explain the position of the injuries, which are classically those of a struggle or assault of some sort.'

The coroner nodded and scribbled something on a notepad with his large pen. ‘Can your microscope date these bruises with any accuracy, Doctor?'

Ruefully Richard had to admit that the science was very approximate in this area. ‘This iron test can pick up injuries more than a day or so old – and then changes in the scavenger and inflammatory cells can suggest a number of days earlier still – but there's no accuracy in it, unfortunately, though researchers abroad are trying to develop new techniques.'

Donald Moses made a few more notes with his pen, then laid it down and looked at the two police officers.

‘How does this appear to you, gentleman?' he asked courteously.

As a mere inspector, Lewis kept his mouth closed and his superintendent answered after a pause.

‘If Doctor Pryor is correct – and I've no reason to doubt him – then the fact that some of these bruises must have been inflicted at least a day or more before death needs investigating, especially as they are the sort that can be suffered in some sort of domestic violence. Coupled with the allegations in that letter, it makes it all the more obvious that we need to interview a few people.'

Leonard Massey nodded his agreement. ‘I'm glad to hear you say that, Superintendent. I've naturally taxed my son-in-law with the matter, but he denied it and became abusive.'

The two detectives murmured together for a moment and then Ben Evans spoke again.

‘I must refer this back to my chief superintendent, at Headquarters in Bridgend, as it may become a sensitive issue, especially when the bloody Press get hold of it, if you'll pardon my language. Then if he agrees, we'll set about seeing the people concerned.'

A few moments later, after exchanging addresses and telephone numbers, the two policemen left, along with a rather subdued Dr O'Malley. The coroner had asked Richard to stay, as he discussed with the dead woman's father the logistics of a funeral.

‘I can't allow cremation until all this is cleared up, one way or another,' he said. ‘Dr Pryor, do you see any reason why the body should not be buried, in view of the perhaps remote possibility of another post-mortem being required by any future defence?'

Richard explained again that in view of the agreement about the actual cause of death, he could see nothing that would help a defence pathologist, given that he already had tissue samples preserved from the bruises and that he had taken samples for blood and urine analysis. At the same time, he pointed out that it was not for him to prejudge the issue and perhaps it might be as well to wait until the police decided whether or not they intended to pursue the matter. Donald Moses eventually decided to wait for another week until issuing Leonard Massey with a burial order and Richard left them to discuss the details, leaving to find Jimmy and the Humber.

Now that they were technically in Gower, he decided to go and look at the scene of the death and with Richard's memories from his motorcycling days, they set off for Pennard. In Bishopston they found a café that catered for passing tourists and he treated Jimmy and himself to cottage pie, chips and peas, followed by apple tart. They washed this down with a glass of beer at a nearby public house, Jimmy bemoaning the recent rise in price of a pint of bitter to nine pence.

‘It'll soon be a shilling at this rate!' he complained. ‘I blame this new Tory Government, battening on us working-class folk!'

Though Jimmy was a good enough worker when the mood took him, Richard grinned to himself at the thought of him being one of the downtrodden masses. The Conservatives had trounced Labour again at the recent General Election, with an increased majority of fifty-eight seats, but neither Jimmy nor Sian Lloyd had taken kindly to having Sir Anthony Eden as Prime Minister.

Their break over, they carried on to Pennard, retracing the route that Trevor Mitchell had taken. He had described the location of the house and Jimmy carefully took the Humber along the stony track past
Bella Capri
.

Richard had no idea what he hoped to gain just by looking at a house, but he always liked to visit crime scenes, if indeed this was one. They stopped outside the gate and looked up the windswept garden, taking in the general appearance of the oddly named house. Then Jimmy noticed a curtain being pulled aside in one of the front rooms and a woman's face stared out. He let in the clutch and moved on quickly.

‘We've been rumbled, Doc,' he said cheerfully. ‘Some blonde giving us the evil eye.'

‘Just keep going,' ordered Richard. ‘According to Trevor Mitchell, the place where the body was recovered was about half a mile further on.'

Mitchell had been given the location by Leonard Massey and had marked it on the one-inch Ordnance Survey map which Richard held, so they bumped along the track until they reached the nearest spot on the road.

‘Park here and we'll go and have a look,' he commanded. Jimmy pulled off on to the rough grass and locked the car, then they walked a few hundred yards across to the edge of the spectacular limestone cliffs.

A jagged, almost sheer drop went down into the sea below, though there were some ravines here and there, where steep slopes of turf ran down to the rocks a few feet above the heavy swell.

‘I suppose you can stumble down there, but it's not easy,' said Richard, looking at the greenish-blue swell that even on a fairly calm day such as this, threw up spray over the rocks.

‘But she didn't go swimming here, surely?' asked Jimmy. ‘Too bloody dangerous by half!'

He was a countryman and the Severn Bore was the only wave he was used to seeing.

Pryor consulted his map again. ‘No, this is where the coastguards hauled her body out. Must have been in that gully down there.' He pointed to a narrow channel cutting into the cliff slightly to their left. It was about twenty feet wide and forty long, lined with jagged grey rocks.

‘So where did she go swimming?'

Richard put a finger on the map, at a spot further west, almost to where
Bella Capri
sat well back from the cliff top. ‘She did her swimming nearer home, according to her father. This map shows a little patch of sand at low tide.'

They paused there to have a look on the way back, but this time driving past the house without stopping, because of the curtain-twitcher.

‘Think that was the fancy woman?' asked Richard. ‘If it is, she didn't waste much time moving in!'

His chauffeur shrugged.

‘Takes all sorts, dunn'it!' he said.

TEN

T
he following week was a busy one for Garth House, as Richard's stint as a locum in Newport produced a steady stream of sudden deaths, a couple of suicides, a fatal road accident, a death under anaesthesia and a fall from a factory roof. Angela was also busy, as her reputation in the blood-grouping field for disputed paternity had spread rapidly and she had half-a-dozen new cases to deal with.

Sian also had her hands full with several blood and urine alcohol estimations, using the time-consuming Widmark method, as well as some more histology for Richard. One of the two suicides needed a carbon monoxide analysis, as the victim had her head in a gas oven – and the other one was more obscure, being a mixture of barbiturates and an unknown number of tablets from an unmarked bottle.

‘We'd better ask the coroner if this can be sent to the Cardiff Forensic Laboratory,' said Richard, after Sian had explained that she had no facilities for doing a blind screening test on the blood and urine samples that he had brought back from the Newport mortuary. The Cardiff laboratory was one of the seven that the Home Office had set up across England and Wales and although it specialized in the forensic examination of documents, it also did the full range of investigations.

In addition to Pryor's work in Newport, there were a number of routine post-mortems in Monmouth and Chepstow, so there was little time to think about the more curious cases.

‘I've heard nothing from Trevor Mitchell so far this week,' observed Richard, as he and Angela sat over the ham and salad supper that Moira had left for them on Wednesday evening.

‘We can't expect any progress on the exhumation yet,' replied Angela, sampling a glass of sweet cider that Jimmy had brought in from a farm a few miles away.

‘Knowing the speed the Home Office reacts, the application is probably still sitting in someone's ‘In' tray in Whitehall.'

Her partner drank some beer, his preferred drink, this time a bottled one from Brain's Brewery in Cardiff.

‘I wonder if the police have decided to lean on Michael Prentice?' he mused. ‘I thought that Superintendent Evans was quite a capable chap, he reminded me of Trevor. If they don't make their minds up soon, the coroner is going to let them bury that poor woman.'

‘Would it matter if they did?' asked Angela. ‘You said there'd be nothing to be gained by a third post-mortem, given that you've got all the samples.'

Richard grunted. ‘All the same, any decent defence counsel would complain that they were at a disadvantage if they couldn't get their own expert opinion. They could hardly get much joy out of O'Malley's report.'

The biologist speared the last piece of local ham with her fork.

‘The coroner won't allow cremation, you said – so they could join our club and get an exhumation order.'

Richard grimaced. ‘The value of what they could get out of that will get less by the week, once the body is buried,' he observed.

Perhaps the Glamorganshire Constabulary had the same concerns, as that evening, a maroon Vauxhall Velox saloon parked at the side of the track across the cliffs at Pennard and two police officers went across to the gate of
Bella Capri
.

Ben Evans led the way up the long gravel drive and his inspector followed, looking about him with a professional eye.

‘He's in, as there's a car at the side of the house,' muttered the superintendent, nodding at a black Jaguar parked outside the garage at the rear of the house.

‘He can't be short of a bob or two,' growled Lewis. ‘That's a Mark Five, and brand new by the look of it.'

The senior officer went to the front door and banged on the brass knocker, discoloured by the constant salt spray that blew up from the sea. He heard some muffled voices, then a shape appeared beyond the coloured frosted glass of the top half of the door. When it was opened, a tall man in a Fair Isle jumper stood there, but there was no sign of anyone behind him.

‘Mr Michael Prentice?' queried Evans. ‘Could we have a word with you, please?'

He identified himself and Lewis Lewis as police officers, but Prentice needed no introduction to know that this pair were detectives. He sighed and stood aside, opening the door fully.

‘You'd better come in, I suppose. No doubt that bloody father-in-law of mine has set you on to me with his crazy notions.'

‘In fact, sir, we are here at the behest of the coroner,' began Ben Evans, heavily. ‘We thought it better to visit you at home, rather than at your place of work.'

Prentice led them into a room on the left of the hall, one of those with a bay window that overlooked the front garden. It was expensively furnished with a leather three-piece suite around a thick patterned carpet. A baby grand piano stood against a further wall and there were two glass-fronted cabinets filled with porcelain.

Prentice motioned them to sit on the settee, but remained standing in front of the stone Minster fireplace in which was fitted a coal-effect electric fire, now switched off.

Lewis produced a notebook and pencil, leaving his DS to do all the talking, but Michael Prentice beat him to it.

‘I know you are only doing your duty, but this is really intolerable! My late wife's father has disliked me since the moment he set eyes on me, years ago! This is a great chance for him to embarrass me, but I must warn you that I intend taking legal action against him for defamation of character.'