lunches, he drove up to Monmouth to deal with a single autopsy rung in by PC Christie.
‘Trevor Mitchell told you that we found the name of that surgeon at Hereford?’ asked Christie, as he was sewing up the victim of a carbon monoxide suicide who had killed himself with car-exhaust gas in his garage. Pryor nodded as he picked up the two pound notes that the coroner’s officer had left on the table.
‘Thanks for your help. I rang Frenchay this morning and I’m driving over tomorrow to see him. My partner thinks I should have some kind of authorization from the coroner to show him, so I’ll call on Dr Meredith after this and get some sort of billet-doux.’
Rather guiltily, he was glad that as it was mid-afternoon, he could avoid buying another expensive lunch for his portly friend. He found him in his surgery, just returned from house calls in time for his four o’clock clinic and explained the situation. As Meredith wrote out a quick authorization on a sheet of headed notepaper, the coroner asked about the likelihood of finding any more information.
‘I’ve never heard of this
‘I agree, but without something new, we’re not going to be able to twist your arm for consent to an exhumation,’ he admitted.
Next morning, armed with his piece of paper, Pryor drove to Bristol after another three-body stint at Newport. Rather than drive an extra sixty miles around Gloucester, he decided to take the Beachley-Aust ferry across the Severn, just above Chepstow. A ferry had been there from ancient times, being given to the monks of Tintern Abbey in the twelfth century.
Richard queued up behind a dozen cars at Beachley, a small village on the riverbank and waited for the return of the flat-bottomed vessel from Aust on the other side. Thankfully, it was not the busiest time of day and soon he was gingerly driving the Humber down the ramp on to the open deck. As they glided across the water on the
Half an hour after reaching the muddy shore at Aust, he was turning into Frenchay Hospital. Originally an old sanatorium, it had been expanded into a military hospital for American servicemen during the war and now was a large general hospital providing various surgical specialities.
The head porter’s kiosk directed him to the neurosurgical department and as he trudged down long corridors in the wartime blocks of single-storey brick buildings, he wondered if Welton was still ‘Doctor’ or had advanced to ‘Mister’ in the strange way that British surgeons do after gaining the Fellowship of their Royal College, a memory of the times when surgeons were barbers, not proper physicians. He decided that as it was seven years since Welton had written those notes in Hereford, he must surely by now have passed his final examinations to land a job as Senior Registrar in these competitive times. When he eventually found the cubbyhole that was his office, a cardboard label on the door confirmed that it was indeed ‘Mr A Welton’.
The surgeon was a thin, rather haggard-looking man in his mid-thirties, with a cow-lick of fair hair hanging over his forehead. He had a strong Liverpool accent when he spoke. He greeted Pryor courteously and he spent a few moments reminiscing about Hereford and the Royal Army Medical Corps, in which Welton had done his two years’ National Service in Catterick.
Then Richard produced his coroner’s clearance and the copy of the County Hospital notes and they stood over a cluttered desk in the tiny room to look at them. The pathologist explained the problem and then pointed to the cryptic two words with his forefinger.
‘I’m sure you don’t recall Albert Barnes after all this time, but I wondered if you could explain this abbreviation – it’s a new one on me!’
Welton’s response was rather unusual. He opened his white coat, threw his tie over his shoulder and unbuttoned the middle three buttons of his shirt.
Pulling aside the material with both hands, he looked down at his bared chest.
‘That’s one – a
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.
‘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 cafe 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
‘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
Richard’s mouth did not sag in astonishment, but he felt deflated at Marek’s instant recognition.
