‘As far as I can make out, a coroner has jurisdiction over a body lying within his area, up to the point where he arrives at a verdict at an inquest,’ explained Richard. ‘Once that verdict is given and the certificates issued, then he loses control over what happens to it.’
‘So then he can’t tell the chap with the shovel to go and dig it up?’ concluded Sian, still harbouring her image of some arbitrary bodysnatching.
‘I’m no lawyer,’ said the pathologist. ‘But I understand that an “open verdict”, as was given in this case, really means “no verdict yet” and therefore the inquest can be reopened at any time in the future if new evidence is found. So the coroner still keeps his jurisdiction!’
‘Where are these remains, as you call them?’ asked Moira, with a slight shudder at her mental image of what they must look like by now.
‘Buried in the public cemetery in Ledbury, according to John Christie. But knowing how slowly the Home Office wheels grind, it’ll be some time before we get our hands on them.’
‘If we prove that they are not those of Albert Barnes, what happens then?’ demanded Moira, already using the ‘we’ as an indication of her immersion in the Garth House team.
‘That’ll be a totally different ball game,’ said Angela. ‘No doubt Mrs Oldfield will be back on the warpath, championing the cause of her nephew. But how she’s going to get any further, I can’t imagine.’
‘Maybe she’ll find a new set of bones to send Lethbridge chasing after,’ suggested Sian, cynically.
‘How could she claim that these remains were that of her nephew?’ asked Moira. ‘Did she also say that the ring and the watch were his?’
Richard Pryor shook his head. ‘I asked Trevor Mitchell about this. It seems she never noticed his watch, she said all men’s watches looked the same to her. But as for the ring, apparently he
‘But the hallmark would be as wrong for him as it was for Barnes,’ objected Sian. ‘He couldn’t have been married as far back as 1931.’
Angela got up to go back to her workbench.
‘The coroner wouldn’t dismiss Molly Barnes’s claim on either the ring or the watch,’ she observed. ‘So he’ll have to apply the same logic to Agnes Oldfield.’
Richard also pushed himself to his feet.
‘She’ll have to do better than that, though! Brian Meredith will be much more cautious next time, if we rubbish his Barnes identity,’ he said as he went to the door. ‘He’ll demand cast-iron proof before putting another name to the bones.’
‘We can only do our best!’ said Angela philosophically, as she went back to her racks of blood-grouping tubes.
With the next day’s conference in Gowerton in mind, Richard spent another hour that afternoon looking at the microscopic sections of the bruises from Linda Massey.
Sian had stained some spare sections with other staining techniques that he had asked for, but he felt that they didn’t add anything to more accurate dating of the injuries. He had heard of some new research from Finland, involving these new methods of ‘histochemistry’ where enzymes were used on fresh tissue, but he knew nothing of the details. He was discovering that ‘going solo’ had its disadvantages compared with working in a university or large teaching hospital, where library facilities and all the current medical journals were available. He subscribed to a couple of forensic journals, but it was too expensive to take a whole raft of publications.
‘Must spend a day in the library in Bristol,’ he muttered to himself, as he stared down the eyepiece of his microscope. ‘And maybe I can wangle a ticket to the one in Cardiff medical school, as I’m one of their old students.’
After their tea break, he abandoned the sections to give his eyes a rest and wandered out into the plot behind, where Jimmy Jenkins was using a scythe on the patch marked out with stakes for Richard’s vines.
The lush grass of early summer had grown up to knee height and with his rhythmic sweeps of the curved blade, Jimmy had already laid almost half the area low.
He stopped to sharpen the scythe with a short rod of carborundum as Pryor approached.
‘You still set on planting this with them grapes?’ he demanded, his tone suggesting that he thought his boss was mentally defective for wanting to do such a thing.
‘Yes, of course. But I can’t do this until the spring, so we’ve got time to get the ground into shape ready for them.’
His scanty knowledge of viniculture came from a slim booklet he had bought in Bristol recently. Jimmy grunted, pushing the peak of his cap further up from his forehead. With cooler weather, he had taken to wearing a plaid lumberjack shirt, tucked into corduroy trousers, which were tied below the knees with lengths of binder-twine to keep them clear of the scythe.
‘Far better to plant forty rows of strawberries!’ he advised. ‘Grows a treat here in the valley. You could sell ’em to passing tourists or up in the market in Monmouth. Make more money than with your doctoring, I wouldn’t wonder!’
That wouldn’t be difficult at the moment, thought Richard.
‘Whichever it is, Jimmy, we’ll have to get this plot turned over somehow.’ He looked at the large area on the slope and wondered how many men with spades it would take to turn the grass in and make a decent tilth. Jimmy seemed to be reading his thoughts.
‘Need machinery for that, Doctor! Near on half an acre, this is! Either a tractor with plough and disc-harrow – or maybe I could borrow one of them “walk-behind” rotavators.’
They talked on for a while about the problem, though Richard was often hazy about what Jimmy was telling him. He had never before shown any interest in horticulture, having been either in the army or living in servant-rich idleness of colonial comfort. But now he felt that this might be a pleasant release from the tensions of a stressful profession, a welcome change from corpses, courts and coroners. He listened to Jimmy extolling the virtue of the various types of strawberry, in his crusade to wean Richard off his determination to plant vines. In the contest between Royal Sovereign and Cambridge Favourite, the pathologist happily forgot his concern about the ratio of polymorphs to lymphocytes in those bruises back in the house.
But later that evening, the concerns crept back with the prospect of the conference next day and he pulled down his textbooks and pored over them yet again to get the salient facts clear in his mind before he went to Swansea next day.
NINE
Though the post-mortems on Linda Prentice had been carried out in the mortuary in Swansea, the coroner who covered Gower was not the same official whose jurisdiction was the borough itself. Neither was Pennard in the Swansea police area, but was part of the Glamorgan County Constabulary, the larger force that covered all the county except for the three major towns of Cardiff, Merthyr and Swansea.
So it was not in Swansea itself that the Friday meeting was convened, but in Gowerton, a small industrial town on the northern neck of the peninsula. It was not far from the edge of the Burry Inlet, a vast sandy estuary where the Penclawdd cockle beds lay – totally different from the southern coast of Gower, blessed with miles of cliffs and golden beaches.
Today, the coroner had not commandeered the local magistrates’ courts for the meeting, but held it in his office nearby. Like most coroners outside London and some other big cities, where they tended to be medical doctors with an additional legal qualification, he was a local solicitor. These tended to pass the appointment down through their partners for generations – often the deputy coroner and assistant coroner were also part of the same firm.
Mr Donald Moses carried on his practice from all three floors of a terrace house in Mill Street. As senior partner, he had the best room, the first-floor front, and it was here that the meeting assembled at eleven o’clock. Richard Pryor had again been chauffeured by Jimmy Jenkins, who had gone off to find a cup of tea, promising to be back in an hour.
The coroner was a small man of about sixty, with thin black hair spread carefully over his rounded skull. He had a small toothbrush moustache that caused his junior staff to refer to him secretly as ‘Adolf’. Pryor was intrigued to
