‘If it’s a scientific paper, it would be a hell of long telegram,’ said Richard. ‘And they couldn’t include graphs and diagrams and things like that.’
‘The newspapers send photographs by wire,’ said Sian stubbornly. ‘I don’t see how written material is any different.’ She was the keenest of the lot to see her chief getting his teeth into something that might save the vet from hanging.
‘I know the Met used to get copies of fingerprints by wire from police forces overseas,’ said Angela. ‘But I’ve no idea how they did it.’
This topic exhausted, the conversation moved on, over a creamy rice pudding, to current events. Sian, an avid cinema fan, had been particularly upset by the news on the wireless that James Dean had been killed in car crash in California, especially as fellow actor Alec Guinness had met him less than a week earlier and had announced his premonition of Dean’s death. Angela preferred discussing the new fashions in her latest
Afterwards, they went back to work, Richard to his microscope and Sian to her fume cupboard, where she was digesting tissue in nitric acid to look for diatoms. Ever since their first success in helping the police with a homicidal drowning some months earlier, she had taken a great interest in these microscopic algae and was trying out different methods of extraction, described in some journals that Richard had passed on to her.
Angela was involved in a new procedure – at least new for the Garth House partnership, though she had dealt with hundreds at the Met lab. A solicitor had sent in an item of a lady’s undergarments, provided by a suspicious husband seeking a divorce. An alleged stain was claimed to be evidence of adultery, and Angela had to determine whether it was, in fact, seminal and, if so, whether or not it came from someone with a different blood group from that of the husband. Like the growing trade in paternity tests, it opened up a new avenue for increasing their revenue, and she was keen to get a reliable report out as soon as possible to encourage the lawyer to recommend her to his colleagues in the divorce business.
Several days went by in the same pattern. Richard had post-mortems in Monmouth and Chepstow, as well as being asked to go to Hereford for a ‘special’ case. This was a death under anaesthetic, which had to be reported to the coroner if it occurred within twenty-four hours of an operation. It was customary for the coroner to ask an outside pathologist to conduct the examination, rather than the resident pathology consultant, in order that no suggestion of a cover-up could be made.
In this case the issue was straightforward, as Richard Pryor found that the relatively young patient had severe coronary artery disease, which had been symptomless and impossible to foresee as a fatal complication – even a preoperative electrocardiogram had shown no abnormality.
On Friday still no word had come from Stow-on-the-Wold about receipt of the reports from abroad, but Richard was diverted by the arrival of a British Railways Scammell lorry. The three-wheeled ‘mechanical horse’ laboured up the drive to the back yard, where the flat-capped driver waved a delivery form at Jimmy Jenkins, who came out of his shed to see what was making the racket. By the time he and the driver were dropping the tailboard, Richard had appeared, beaming with anticipation.
‘Your grape plants have arrived, doctor,’ announced Jimmy ungraciously as he helped lift off the first of six large boxes from the lorry. As soon as the truck had gone, Richard insisted that they prise off the thin slats and inspect the contents.
‘Bit small, ain’t they?’ growled Jimmy, holding up a foot-long twig with a piece of sacking wrapped around the root.
‘They’ll grow like crazy once they’re established,’ said Richard with a confidence born of inexperience. ‘They’ll need drastic pruning when they’re bigger.’
‘Are you sure you should plant them in the autumn like this?’ grunted the countryman, who had an almost instinctive feel for what was right.
‘Many vineyard owners prefer the spring, but this valley is one of the most frost-free places in the country,’ said Pryor, repeating the wisdom he had gleaned from half a dozen books on the subject.
‘You’d have been better off with bloody strawberries,’ growled Jimmy, half to himself, but he went to work with a will and soon they had a hundred plants laid out on the yard.
‘They look a bit dry, God knows how long they’ve been on the railway,’ advised Jimmy. ‘The sooner we get them in the ground the better.’ After a dousing with the hosepipe, they barrowed the vines up to the plot and began planting. Jimmy dug a hole with a spade and threw in a shovelful of rotted manure, while Richard unwrapped the sacking from each plant and held it at the right level while Jimmy refilled the hole. They stuck at it for two hours, until Richard decided that he would leave the remaining fifty for next day.
They celebrated with a flagon of beer drunk on the seat outside the back door, Richard glowing with satisfaction and manual labour, though he suspected that with all that bending and crouching his back would be killing him in the morning.
‘So when will we be drinking this wine, doctor?’ asked Jimmy with thinly veiled sarcasm.
‘Give the vines two years and we’ll be picking a crop,’ said Richard confidently. ‘And the next year we’ll be drinking Chateau Wye Valley!’
On Monday the usual routine held sway, as both Chepstow and Monmouth demanded Richard Pryor’s services. A fatal two-car road accident on the A48 near Caerwent was a possible Section Eight, according to John Christie, the coroner’s officer. He meant that the surviving driver might be charged with causing death by dangerous driving, contrary to Section Eight of the Road Traffic Act. This was a potentially serious offence, punishable by up to five years in prison, so often a Home Office pathologist was asked to carry out the post-mortem.
‘He’d been drinking, doctor, no doubt of that! Our police surgeon was called to the nick late on Friday night to make him walk the chalk line.’
John Christie was the right-hand man of the local coroner, Richard’s medical school pal, Brian Meredith, who was also a family doctor in Monmouth. The officer looked more like a prosperous farmer than a policeman, always attired in thorn-proof tweed suits with a matching trilby with a turned-down brim. He doubled up as the mortuary attendant in Monmouth, managing to assist in the dissection and restore the body without getting a drop of blood on his clothes – all with his hat firmly in place.
As Dr Meredith’s coronial patch extended over most of east Monmouthshire, he also came down to Chepstow for post-mortems, but at that public mortuary there was a part-time assistant. Richard dealt with a sudden death from natural causes and a sleeping-pill overdose before going back to Garth House in time for his lunch.
Though Moira had cooked roast pork with apple sauce for Angela and himself, she was more concerned with giving him a message from Stow-on-the-Wold than with her culinary labours.
‘Mr Lovesey rang to say that he had had some of the material you wanted from abroad,’ she reported cheerily. ‘Can you give him a ring as soon as you can, please?’
As he tackled his welcome meat and veg, Richard wondered what had arrived from foreign parts. As Germany was so much nearer than the centre of the United States, he thought it was more likely to be something from Wolfgang Braun in Cologne.
After his meal he hurried through their usual coffee session in the staffroom to get to the phone in his office and ring George Lovesey in Stow.
‘Dr Pryor, I’ve had several responses from your requests for written material. One was from Germany, by mail – and another from Chicago.’
‘That was quick work!’ responded Richard. ‘I didn’t think anything could get here by mail that fast.’
‘It didn’t – at least only from London! Apparently, it was sent by something called photo-telegraph service to a GPO office in London and they sent it on here by post.’
‘That’s extraordinary, but welcome. No sign of anything from Minnesota yet?’
‘Afraid not, but I’ll get these others to you as quickly as I can. If I sent them by taxi today, would you be able to study them tonight? Time is really pressing now.’
Richard readily agreed, and by the time that Sian and Moira had left for the day he had a large envelope delivered by a man driving a rather aged Austin Fourteen. He called Angela and they both sat in the kitchen with an extra pot of tea and some of Moira’s home-made cheese straws, while they looked at what George Lovesey had sent.
The large envelope contained a smaller one with airmail stickers and West German stamps on it, together with another holding half a dozen pages of thin, rather brittle sheets covered in typescript and some graphs and tables.
