out the risks before the summer season gets going. Did you know her well? I presume she was an experienced swimmer.’
The neighbour fell for the ploy, unable to resist airing her knowledge.
‘Oh yes, she loved the sea. In good weather, she was in almost every day. I think that’s partly why they came to live here. I’m not sure that Michael was all that keen on it, I got the feeling he was more of a city man.’
Trevor also got the feeling that the old lady did not care for the man of the house nearly as much as she did for Linda.
‘Did you see her the day of the accident?’ he ventured. ‘No possibility of her being unwell and this contributing to the tragedy?’
The grey-haired woman looked thoughtful. ‘I didn’t actually see her for a few days before that,’ she admitted, rather regretfully. ‘In fact I thought she looked a little out of sorts for a week or two. I do hope that wasn’t anything to do with her death – getting cramp or something like that.’
Mitchell felt he would be sailing too near the wind if he probed much more, but he had one last try.
‘I suppose there’s no one else I could ask, to get more background on this awful business?’ he said solicitously. ‘Have any local friends or family been here since it happened?’
The neighbour thought for a moment, then shook her head. ‘They kept very much to themselves, especially the husband. I did see a blonde lady come in with Michael in his car on Friday, but I don’t know if she was family or not.’
Trevor knew when to bow out gracefully and with thanks to the lady, he said goodbye and let her march away up the track, snapping commands at her uncaring dog.
He went back into the village, which he saw from a sign was called Southgate, and found a red telephone box.
With a fistful of change, he rang a Reading number that Leonard Massey had given him, that of the dead woman’s schoolfriend, who had raised all this suspicion after receiving Linda’s letter. When he got an answer, he pressed Button A and spoke to her for several minutes, having to push several more pennies into the slot, then came out with a few more words written in his notebook.
About twenty-five miles from Pennard, on the main A48 going towards home, Trevor turned the Wolseley off onto a secondary road and made his way towards the seaside town of Porthcawl. As he drove along the promenade and out towards Rest Bay, he could see Gower on the western horizon and even identify the cliffs of Pwlldu Head, on the further side of which
Here in Porthcawl, Trevor found the coast was very different, low cliffs and beaches giving way to miles of sand dunes, under which lay buried the medieval town of Kenfig. He was not going that far, however, and guided by the sparse information that Marjorie Elphington had given him over the telephone, he found the road that was an extension of the Esplanade, going towards the burrows and golf clubs.
All Marjorie had been able to tell him on the telephone, was that Linda had learned that her husband’s mistress was a blonde called Daphne and that she lived in a maisonette on the front in Porthcawl. Mitchell parked his car in a side street and began walking along the road which fronted the sea. The houses were built only on the landward side and included thirties modernistic houses with curved corners and flat roofs, mixed with some larger classical dwellings. Further on were smaller bungalows and he could see only one block of maisonettes. This two-storey building had four apartments, each with its own front door, two on the front, the others at each end. He walked slowly past, trying to get a glimpse of the bell pushes to see if there were any names on them, but they were too far away from the pavement for his eyesight.
Rather stumped as to his next move, he carried on up the road until he came to the next side turning, another suburban collection of houses and bungalows.
He could hardly walk up to the doors and push all the bells in turn, then ask each occupant whether they were the fancy woman of Michael Prentice! His brief from Leonard Massey was only to confirm the existence of the mystery woman and to obtain her name and address.
Turning round, he walked slowly back to the main road and ambled towards the maisonettes, hoping for some inspiration. The patron saint of private eyes must have been in good form that day, for as he approached the block, the door of the further apartment on the front opened and a woman stepped out and began walking briskly ahead of him. She was young and very blonde indeed, wearing a light sling-back coat and high heels.
He could not see her face, but making a bet with himself that a smart blonde living in those maisonettes might well be the mysterious Daphne, he followed her at a discreet distance. There were a few other people about and he had little fear of being challenged as a stalker as she turned into the road where he had left his car. Now he could see her face in profile, and decided she was in her mid-twenties, attractive but with rather sharp features. The blonde walked past the Wolseley and headed for the centre of the small town, but stopped after a few hundred yards and turned into a newsagent’s shop.
Seeing no reason why he should not do the same, as she could not know him from Adam, he went in and saw her at the counter at the back of the shop. He stopped just inside and began looking at magazines on a rack, taking off a copy of
As soon as she had left, he went to the counter to buy his magazine and as he waited for his change, he spoke casually to the proprietor.
‘That was Daphne from the maisonettes, wasn’t it? I live a few doors away, but I can never remember her surname,’ he lied.
‘Daphne Squires? Yes, she’s a good looking woman.’
The shopkeeper was obviously appreciative of young blondes and assumed that Mitchell’s interests lay in the same direction.
‘I heard that she was leaving soon, going to live in Gower,’ said Trevor, with false innocence.
The man behind the counter shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t know. Pity though, she buys fags and magazines from me – and she’s better looking that most of my other customers.’
Trevor knew when to stop probing and he left to go back to his car. Before he drove off, he was able to write another line in his notebook.
EIGHT
When Richard Pryor returned to the Wye Valley late on Wednesday morning, after having done his duty at Newport, he found Sian waiting for him with a tray of microscope slides.
‘Here we are, Doctor, a set of ‘H and E’ and one of Perl’s.’
‘H and E’ was probably the best-known acronym in pathology, standing for ‘haematoxylin and esosin’, which for a century or more had been the main method of staining tissues for microscopic examination.
She proudly set the cardboard tray alongside the small microscope that stood on a table in his room. Their big new microscope was in the laboratory for communal use, as it was so expensive that Richard and Angela had to use it between them until their finances improved. However, he had this smaller monocular in his own room, the same one he had had as a student. Sian hovered over him as he sat on his high stool.
‘Are they OK?’ she demanded, as soon as his eye was settled on the top of the instrument. He made no answer until he had studied and replaced several of the glass slides on the stage of the microscope, moving them around with the pair of control knobs. Then he looked up at the pert little technician, who was staring at him in tense anticipation, a cloud of blonde hair like a halo around her pretty face.
‘Damned good, Sian, first class! Nice and thin, fully dehydrated and beautifully stained!’
They were good, but he laid the praise on thickly as he knew it meant a lot to her, the first histology she had produced for him. Technicians were very proud of their expertise and took it personally when things went wrong.
She beamed and looked as if she had just won the football pools.
‘Thank God for that,’ she said fervently. ‘I hadn’t used a Cambridge rocker for years, we had a sledge at the
