Richard left the council yard and drove around the back of the small town, remembering that it was famous for being the birthplace of King Henry V and home of Charles Rolls of Rolls Royce, the first Briton to die in an aircraft crash.
‘I wonder if he had a post-mortem?’ he murmured, as he looked for the cream-painted building that housed Meredith’s family practice. Spotting it in the road behind the ancient Monmouth School, he pulled into a paved space in front and went into the waiting room, causing a doorbell to jangle as if it was a shop.
Morning surgery was over and the row of hard chairs around the walls was bereft of patients. An inner door opened and Brian’s moon face peered out, his heavy glasses giving him the appearance of a benign owl. When he saw who it was, he advanced with hand outstretched. He was as unlike the lean, tanned man from Singapore as could be imagined. Short, portly and starting to go bald, he looked ten years older than Richard, but there was an air of benign prosperity about him that told of years of a settled lifestyle.
‘Richard, nice to see you again. How did the first day go?’ They chatted their way back into his consulting room where the GP sat his old friend down in the patient’s chair. After the inevitable reminiscences about their student days, they got down to business.
‘If you’re happy with the arrangements, Richard, you are welcome to take on the cases in Monmouth and Chepstow. Since Dr Saunders retired, we’ve had to send them either to Newport or Hereford, both of which are outside my jurisdiction.’
Pryor was keen to confirm his agreement to this and also thanked Meredith for putting him on to the solicitor in Lydney.
‘I wondered why those remains from the reservoir went up to Hereford?’ he remarked.
The coroner nodded. ‘There was no one here to deal with them. Mind you, if there’d been anything even slightly suspicious, I’d have had to send them to Cardiff, as Dr Marek in Hereford makes no claim to having any forensic expertise. It’ll be useful having you in the area, I must say.’
Pryor saw a chance to get his feet more firmly under the table.
‘I’d be more than happy to help in that direction, but I’ve got no official standing with the police or the Home Office.’
Brian Meredith tapped the side of his nose, reminding Richard of Jimmy Jenkins’s habit. ‘I may be able to put a word about here and there, Richard. You’re too good a prize not to be used around South Wales.’
Emboldened by the extra four pounds in his wallet, Pryor suggested that as it was almost lunchtime, he might treat his friend to a meal somewhere. Meredith lived a couple of miles outside Monmouth – ‘a doctor should never live in his practice premises, if he wants any peace’ was his favourite saying. He accepted the offer of lunch and took Richard to one of the best hotels near the town centre. As he looked at the prices on the menu, the pathologist felt his wallet getting lighter by the minute, but he reckoned it was worth it if Brian could pull a few strings for him.
‘How did you get on with old Lethbridge and this bone business?’ asked the coroner, over their rather tough steaks.
‘The lady in Newnham is dead set on upsetting your verdict,’ answered Richard. ‘She’s got a private investigator looking into it, as well.’
‘Trevor Mitchell? He’s a good man, I met him a few times when he was still in the CID across the border. Any chance that I’m going to have to eat my words?’
Pryor shrugged. ‘Not so far, but I’m waiting to hear from Mitchell as to what he found when he interviewed Mrs Barnes.’
‘She was a tough little bird, spoke her mind at the inquest!’ said Meredith. ‘It seems she wants to get married again and urgently needs a declaration that her husband is dead.’
The conversation veered towards more personal matters until they finished their meal, when Pryor manfully paid up at the till and walked back to the surgery with Meredith.
‘I’ll have to call you up to an inquest sometime on that lady with the overdose,’ said the coroner as they entered his forecourt.
‘We’ll run an analysis to make sure it was that Seconal,’ said Richard, as he unlocked his car. ‘You should have the result in a day or two, along with the post-mortem reports on both cases.’
Meredith’s pale eyebrows rose on his chubby face.
‘That’s a welcome change!’ he admitted. ‘The forensic lab in Cardiff usually takes at least a couple of weeks!’
They shook hands and Pryor climbed into his car and shut the door. He was about to start the engine, when the coroner came to the window, which Richard wound down.
‘It completely slipped my mind, I almost forgot to ask you,’ said Meredith. ‘My barrister brother, who’s in chambers in Swansea, rang me last night to see if I could recommend someone to give a sound pathological opinion. I don’t know what it’s all about, but I said that there was no need to go looking up in London, as you were on the doorstep, so to speak.’
Suddenly feeling that his outlay on a good lunch seemed to be proving worthwhile, Pryor happily nodded his assent. ‘So what shall I do about it, Brian?’
The other doctor pulled a prescription pad from his side pocket and scribbled a telephone number on the back.
As he handed the sheet through the window, he told Richard to speak directly to his brother Peter to find out more.
‘Best of luck with the new venture,’ he said as he waved goodbye. ‘There should be some more work for you at the Chepstow mortuary later this week.’
Feeling buoyant with these harbingers of future work, Richard let in the clutch and drove off, back down the valley that he already thought of as home.
FOUR
It had been agreed that Sian need not come in on Saturdays unless there was something urgent going on, so when Richard returned with his samples on Friday afternoon, she busily began setting up her equipment for barbiturate analysis, with the promise to ‘get cracking’ first thing on Monday morning. Her enthusiasm was infectious, as she was almost ecstatic at having ‘her first case’, as she put it. Even the usually impassive Angela was smiling benignly at Richard’s news of more work and both the women were itching to know what the barrister in Swansea would have to say.
However, they had to wait over the weekend for it, as Pryor’s attempt to phone the chambers in Swansea where the coroner’s brother was based, produced only a message from a clerk that Peter Meredith had left for the weekend, but that he would get him to return the call on Monday.
The weather had cooled down but was still pleasant and with little else to occupy him over the fallow two days, Richard looked forward to ‘striding his own broad acres’, as he liked to think of his bit of land, as well as sorting out his office and his room upstairs. He was not by nature a very tidy person, unlike Angela who was almost obsessive about ‘a place for everything and everything in its place’, as his grandmother used to say. However, he made an effort, buoyed up by the hope that an increasing workload would make this the last chance he had of getting really organized. His workroom was on a back corner of the house, behind the room used for an office, and he had plans to have a doorway knocked through to save having to walk around the corridor and into the hall to get into the office.
After another scratch meal with Angela in the kitchen – this time more salad and a tin of John West salmon, followed by cheese and biscuits – he percolated some Kardomah coffee and took it into the ‘staff lounge’, as they grandly called it. This was the room between Angela’s office and the kitchen, entered by a door at the foot of the stairs.
Angela was relaxing in one of the large armchairs, part of the three-piece suite they had retained from his aunt’s furniture. The room was much as the old lady had left it, with a good, but faded carpet on the floor, a large sideboard against one wall and a stone Minster fireplace on the other.
‘Should be cosy enough in the winter,’ she said, as she poured coffee into two mugs on the small table in the
