Where Death Delights (2 page)

He climbed to his feet and took off the jacket of his crumpled linen suit, which like all his clothes, was a legacy of more than a decade in the Far East. Before next winter, he reflected wryly, he would have to get something warmer.

Angela looked up briefly from her papers.

‘Sian will be back soon, she can tell you where some of the things go. Then she can start putting the reagent bottles and apparatus in the right places.'

He humped a dozen boxes into the next room, which had been his late aunt's dining room but which now was lined with white Formica-topped kitchen units, a large wooden table standing in the bay window. With the last carton in his arms, he stopped in front of Angela.

‘Where d'you want this microscope?'

She tapped her lists together and stood up, almost as tall as Pryor.

‘I'll come and see, shall I? You'll be using it as well, once we get some histology going.' They spent the next hour in their new laboratory, unpacking boxes and starting to fill cupboards with bottles of chemicals and strangely shaped bits of glass. Even though it was not yet mid-morning, the old mansion was already stifling in the hot June day and Angela Bray mentally added a couple of electric fans to her next list of purchases.

‘Where's that damned girl?' asked Richard eventually. ‘I hope she's going to be reliable.'

Sian Lloyd, their new laboratory technician-cum-secretary had offered to stop off at the post office to get a supply of stamps and a wireless licence.

Angela sighed. ‘She has to get a bus from Chepstow, then walk up from the village. Give her a break, Richard, she doesn't have a car like us.'

‘Talking of a break, we could do with our elevenses.'

He looked hopefully at his partner, who steadfastly ignored his hint that she should assume some domestic duties. ‘There's no milk' she said. ‘But if you want black Nescafé, feel free to make it.'

‘I thought Jimmy was bringing us some groceries and things.'

‘He is, but after shaking a couple of bottles of milk around on that motorbike of his, it will probably be butter by the time he gets here.'

Pryor had inherited Jimmy Jenkins along with the house that Aunt Gladys had left him in her will. He had been her gardener, odd-job man and part-time driver and when Richard had appeared as the new owner, he had materialized again and taken up his old duties virtually by default. Richard had to admit that though at first he had suspected the man was something of an idle scrounger, the house and four acres needed the attention that a pathologist and a forensic scientist were in no position to provide.

Thirst drove him to the old-fashioned kitchen that lay at the back of the big Victorian house, and in the rattling old Kelvinator fridge he found a flagon of local cider. Taking a couple of glasses back to the office, which had once been his late uncle's study, he put them on the table and sat down opposite Angela, who had gone back to check something on her equipment lists.

Abstractly, she murmured some thanks, still immersed in her papers. When she got to the bottom of the last page, she looked up at her partner and caught him staring out of the French window at the distant trees on the English side of the valley. Covertly, she studied his profile and decided again that he was not a bad-looking chap, in a stringy sort of way. Forty-four years old, he had that lean, sinewy appearance, often seen in men who had spent many years in the East. Though not a frequent cinema-goer, she was reminded of actors like Stewart Granger or Michael Rennie with their ‘big white hunter' look, a similarity which Richard Pryor unconsciously reinforced with his belted safari suits with button-down pockets. He suddenly came out of his reverie and his deep-set brown eyes fixed her with a worried gaze.

‘Do you think we've done the right thing? Both giving up good jobs to take a leap in the dark like this?'

‘We've been through this before, Richard,' she said patiently. ‘We agreed that we'd give it two years. If it doesn't pan out then, both of us are well enough established to go back to what we did before.'

Angela took a sip of her cider and shuddered slightly at the acrid flavour.

‘People with our qualifications and experience are not going to starve, you know, even if we have to join the brain drain to the States or Australia.'

Dr Angela Bray had been a forensic scientist at the Metropolitan Police Laboratory in London and Richard Glanville Pryor was formerly the Professor of Forensic Medicine in the University of Singapore.

She had become increasingly frustrated by public service bureaucracy and the lack of any foreseeable advancement in the system, whilst Pryor had been offered a generous ‘golden handshake' after nine years in the university, who wished to appoint a local Chinese in his place. He could have stayed on, but the size of the financial inducement, coupled with a weariness with the tropics and a yearning for his native Wales, tipped the scales.

He and Angela had met the previous year at an International Forensic Science Congress in Edinburgh. After discovering a mutual desire to make a radical change in their professional lives, they decided to combine their talents by setting up a private partnership to offer forensic expertise to anyone who needed it. Angela's decision was reinforced by the prospect of living in the beautiful Wye Valley on the Welsh border, as she had fond memories of holidays in the valley. There was little to keep her in London, so now it was crunch time, to see if their ambitious venture would succeed.

Richard had been living in the house for over a month and Angela had moved down a fortnight earlier, after burning her boats by selling her flat in Blackheath. One thing they had not fully foreseen was that their professional partnership was going to be less of a problem than their personal lives. Though Garth House was a large place with five bedrooms, it was not proving easy to share the accommodation, especially as it possessed only one bathroom.

Angela had made it quite clear from the outset that their relationship was purely professional – she had no intention of becoming housekeeper, cook or surrogate wife. The obvious answer was for her to find somewhere to live nearby, but this seemed ridiculous with such a large house available, especially as their finances were already stretched. After spending the first few nights in a bed and breakfast in Tintern Parva, the nearest village, Angela rebelled at the ongoing cost and inconvenience.

‘I'm moving in to the middle bedroom,' she announced, arriving with her cases in the back of her white Renault Dauphine. ‘The village gossips can call me the scarlet woman from London if they like, but it's crazy to leave a big house like this half empty. As soon as we can afford it, we'll divide it properly into two flats.'

Garth House now belonged to both of them, as they had set up a limited company for their venture, he putting in the house and Angela the proceeds of the sale of her flat. As the courteous Richard had lugged her cases upstairs, he had wondered how this was going to work out. Were there locks on the bedroom doors, for instance?

‘But I'm not cooking or cleaning, remember,' she called up after him. ‘We'll have to camp out for a bit, until we sort out some more permanent arrangement.'

So far, their lifestyle had been spartan, with Shredded Wheat and Typhoo Tips for breakfast, a sandwich lunch and usually something from a tin as supper. Sometimes they splashed out on an evening meal in a café at Chepstow or Monmouth, the towns at each end of the famous winding valley with its steep, wooded sides. Aunt Gladys had died at eighty-six in a nursing home, leaving the house furnished. Though much of it was old and worn, they had kept the better pieces to kit out some of the bedrooms. The downstairs rooms, apart from the kitchen and one turned into a communal lounge, were given over to the needs of their practice. As well as the office, there was a large laboratory and a workroom each for Angela and himself, together with a toilet at the end of the corridor that led back from the central hall. A preparation room and wash-up for apparatus occupied the former scullery and what had been a huge pantry was now to be a storeroom.

As they finished their drinks, there was a throaty roar from outside as a motorcycle climbed the steep drive from the main road below and swung around the back of the house to the yard behind. Here there was a coach-house with space for two cars underneath a large loft that Angela had her eye on for an extension to the laboratory. With a final noisy revving, the engine of the Royal Enfield died and moments later the rider and his passenger marched into the office.

‘Jimmy saw me at the bus stop and gave me a lift,' announced their sole professional employee. Sian Lloyd was a lively, ebullient blonde of twenty-four, small and shapely, with a snub nose and blue eyes. Not a girl to be pushed around, she gazed out at the world defiantly, speaking her mind on anything that concerned her – and some things that did not. Sian came from a working-class family, her father a welder in a local engineering works, a shop steward and fervent socialist, some of which had rubbed off on his daughter. She was fully qualified, having passed all the examinations giving her Fellowship of the Institute of Medical Laboratory Technology, and she had already started on an external degree in biochemistry.

‘Here's the licence – and the stamps.' She placed an envelope on the table in front of Angela. ‘Jimmy's left the groceries in the kitchen.'

Behind her, their odd-job man touched a finger to the greasy cap in which he seemed to have been born. Richard wondered if he even wore it to bed.

‘Got all the stuff on the list, Miss Angela – and I saw some nice-looking sausages in Emery's shop, so I brought you half a pound.'

Jenkins was a broad, powerful man with a short neck and long arms. The fanciful Richard wondered if he had a touch of gorilla in him, after seeing his hairy arms and chest when he was clearing some of the neglected area behind the house. Jimmy, who appeared to be about fifty, had a wide, weather-beaten face with a broken nose and a permanent grin, which exposed irregular teeth yellowed by years of smoking Woodbines. On the rare occasions when he lifted his cap to scratch his head, he revealed stubbly grey hair that stuck up like a scrubbing brush.

‘Goin' to rain tonight, no doubt about it,' declared Jimmy. ‘So I'll get out and trim that hedge down by the front gate while it's still dry.'

Unless Richard gave him some definite task, he seemed to decide for himself what jobs he would do, but in spite of earlier misgivings, his employer had to admit that Jimmy seemed a good worker.

Angela took Sian into the laboratory to carry on sorting out the new equipment, while Richard walked down the corridor from the hall to the room at the back of the house which he had earmarked for his own. His medical books and journals were piled on the floor and he began stacking them on the bookcases that lined one wall. It had been a library-cum-smoking room in the distant days when Uncle Arthur had been alive.

Angela's room was the former drawing room in the front of the house. Like the lab, it had a magnificent view across the valley, with the River Wye meandering at the bottom and steep tree-covered slopes opposite. The large bay window matched the one across in the laboratory, and only Pryor's sense of chivalry prevented him being a little envious of Angela's domain.

It was Wednesday, but there was nothing else for him to do until the following Monday, when he was to start carrying out post-mortems for the coroner at the small public mortuaries in the area – assuming there were any customers that day. Though he wished no one any ill will, he trusted that the mortality statistics would ensure that there be some sudden deaths, suicides and accidents, as this would be almost their only financial income until their reputation spread and business came in from further afield. Thanks to a professional contact in Bristol University, he had been offered twenty lectures a year to medical students. The salary was derisory, but it gave him a nominal academic appointment and hopefully widened his medico-legal contacts which could lead to work from police, lawyers and doctors in the area.

As he hefted up heavy textbooks on to the shelves, he thought that the last time he had opened any of them was six thousand miles away, in the island city at the bottom of the Malay peninsula. He had enjoyed his years in Singapore, but with the Empire rapidly shrinking, it was time to move on, especially when the university had been so generous in wanting to get rid of him.

As he ruminated about his life in the tropics – and his failed marriage – he heard the distant ringing of the telephone on a table in the hall. Pryor had already asked the GPO to put extensions in the office and the two doctors' rooms, but it would be weeks before they got around to it. He started towards it, but his new employee had beaten him to it.

‘There's a call for you, Prof!' said Sian, speaking as excitedly as if the call was from Mars. ‘It's some solicitor, maybe he's got some work for us.'

Sian Lloyd had already identified strongly with the venture and was agog that maybe someone wanted their expertise. Pryor hurried into the hall and picked up the heavy black phone. A carefully measured voice answered his ‘hello'.

‘This is Edward Lethbridge, of Lethbridge, Moody and Savage. We are solicitors in Lydney and I wondered if you could help us?'

Richard felt his own frisson of excitement at this possibility of their first case. ‘I'm sure we can, Mr Lethbridge. We have hardly opened for business yet, but I'm sure that we can do something for you. How did you hear of us so soon?'

‘The coroner, Doctor Meredith, gave us your name and telephone number. I've known him for years, as we have occasional dealings in the coroner's court. This is a little difficult to explain over the telephone, so I wonder whether you could call at my office.'