compensation, ethics, and professional misconduct – all the problems that besiege doctors worldwide. This was the stuff that he taught to medical students, rather than the details of forensic pathology, which the vast majority of doctors would never need.
As he laboriously composed his latest progress report to send to the editors of half a dozen journals, he sighed over the numerous crossings-out and rewrites he had made and hoped that Moira could make sense of it all.
It was almost a relief when he heard the telephone ring out in the hall. The GPO had promised to come this week to install the extensions, but so far there was no sign of them and he went out to answer it. Angela was upstairs in her own room, as they avoided living in each other’s pockets, though they usually met in the evening for a drink or cup of coffee.
When he picked up the phone, he found it was Edward Lethbridge on the other end.
‘Apologies for disturbing your evening, Doctor, but I thought you might like to know that I’ve heard from the coroner about this exhumation,’ said the dry voice. ‘He’s had consent from the Home Office to go ahead.’
‘That’s damned quick!’ said Richard, enthusiastically. ‘We were all told that they usually drag their feet on this sort of thing.’
‘It seems that the powers-that-be didn’t really want to know, saying that as it was an open verdict, it was still within the coroner’s jurisdiction. But they’ve rubber-stamped it as a formality. Dr Meredith says that he’s arranged with the local council in Ledbury to open the grave early next Tuesday morning, if that suits you.’
Richard promised to liaise with the coroner’s officer about details, such as which mortuary to use, then rang off and ran up to Angela’s room to tell her the news.
She invited him in for a gin and tonic and they sat in the window to look out over the valley as the sun set.
‘What do we need to do?’ he asked. ‘You need some tissue for blood grouping, though we’ll have to search for Albert Barnes’s group.’
‘He was in the army, he should have it in his records,’ she said. ‘Trevor Mitchell should know how to go about getting it. Where will you look at the remains?’
Richard sipped his drink appreciatively. He was no drunkard, but he liked a glass of something every day.
‘Ledbury is in Herefordshire, not Meredith’s area, but he’s got a permanent arrangement with his counterpart in Hereford to use the County Hospital. Hopefully, we’ll need to have a bone or two X-rayed and then compare them with the Barnes’s films that were taken when he had his accident.’
Business talk finished, they sat and talked for a while, mainly about their families. Angela had a much younger sister who lived at home in Berkshire, but she had taken up with a man of whom her parents disapproved.
‘I’d better go up there next weekend and listen to all the angst,’ she sighed. ‘After the collapse of my romance, they’re dead scared of another fiasco!’
Richard had never probed into her failed engagement to a detective superintendent in the ‘Met’ and she had never volunteered any details. Angela seemed to sense what he was thinking and smiled at him over the rim of her glass.
‘This is an odd situation, isn’t it?’ she mused aloud. ‘Here we are, two red-blooded people staying together in the same house with no chaperone. The village people must think we’re living in sin!’
Richard’s lean face creased in a grin. ‘I always make sure my bedroom door’s locked every night!’
His partner prodded him in the leg with her pointed court shoe.
‘One of these nights I might break it down with an axe when I’m desperate!’ she promised playfully, but they both knew that it was an empty threat. Theirs was the perfect platonic friendship – or so she told herself. As for Richard, he wasn’t so sure. She was a very attractive woman, but he would never make the first move.
‘Moira has got a real crush on you,’ said Angela abruptly. ‘You know that, Richard, don’t you?’
He stared at her incredulously. ‘Moira! Go on, she’s only known me for a week or two!’ he said scornfully.
Angela nodded wisely. ‘I’ve seen her looking at you, with eyes like a big soft spaniel! You could do worse, she’s a very smart woman.’
‘I don’t want to “do” anything, thanks! I had enough problems with Miriam to last me for a bit. You’ll be saying next that Sian fancies me!’
Angela nodded sagely. ‘Of course she does! But you’re a bit old for her, so I’m not sure if she wants you for a lover or a father figure!’
Pryor laughed and stood up. ‘You’ve had too much of that gin, madam! I’m off before you get more fantasies – or start ravishing me! Don’t forget, up early next Tuesday, you’ve got an exhumation to attend. That’ll sober you up!’
He went back to his office in a thoughtful mood.
On Thursday morning, Ben Evans had arranged to speak to the men who had recovered Linda Prentice’s body from the sea and the most convenient place to meet them was at the Signal Station at Bracelet Bay. This was perched on a rocky knoll just beyond Mumbles Head, a pair of small islands which carried the lighthouse that marked the western end of the huge sweep of Swansea Bay. The coastguard station was a low building with an observation deck above it, used to monitor all vessels passing up the north side of the Bristol Channel. The two detectives parked below and climbed the path to meet the pair of coastguards in a room below the operations level. It was half-filled with equipment, but had a table and a few chairs, along with an electric kettle. The two men were burly ex-seamen, dressed in thick blue jumpers and serge trousers. One was George, who made four mugs of tea before sitting at the table with his mate, Arthur, who did most of the talking.
‘The local police called us about eight o’clock that morning,’ he began. ‘They’d been warned of a body in the sea by a chap going to do some early fishing.’
Ben Evans had already read the police report and knew that they had called the coastguard because it was impossible to get the body out of the water without proper equipment.
‘Was it difficult to recover it?’ he asked.
‘We’ve had much worse places,’ replied Arthur. ‘But without ropes and safety lines, it would have been bloody hard to get her up. She was obviously dead by the time the police responded to the chap’s call, so there was no question of resuscitation.’
‘Where exactly was she?’ asked Lewis Lewis.
‘At the foot of the last bit of cliff west of Pwlldu. There was a steep valley going down over the grass and scrub to the rocks, but then there was a ten-foot drop down to the water – a lot more at low tide.’
‘Why would a fisherman want to go down such a hairy place?’ asked Evans.
Arthur shrugged. ‘You can get some good bass in those deep gullies.’
‘Was she being knocked about much when you got there?’ asked the inspector.
‘It was near high tide and there was a fair swell running. She was close in to the rocks, being washed back and forth, rubbing against them sometimes,’ explained George.
‘The gully went in a long way, so she wouldn’t have gone out to sea until the tide ebbed and pulled her back out,’ said his mate.
Lewis wrote away in his notebook, while Ben drank some tea and thought of his next question.
‘How long d’you think she’d been in the water?’
Arthur rubbed his bristly beard. ‘Not all that long, but no way of saying exactly. She was still fresh, no signs of decay. The skin on her hands and feet was wrinkled badly, but that can happen in a couple of hours.’
‘If she had gone swimming the previous day, could you guess where she went in, given where you found the body?’ queried the detective superintendent.
Arthur grimaced. ‘These chaps who claim to tell you that exactly are talking a lot of bullshit!’ he declared.
‘There’s so many factors like tide, wind and coastal streams. With the usual westerly wind and the tidal drift along there, she would have gone eastwards, but I can’t say how far.’
As the police had later found Linda’s robe and towel at the bottom of Broad Slade, Ben knew the point was academic.
‘No doubt in your mind that she drowned?’ he asked.
‘None at all – when we hauled her out on to grass, the movement brought up some froth from her nose and mouth. That goes with her not being in all that long, as when bodies reach a bad state, it’s too late for that.’
‘Do you get many drownings like this along that bit of coast?’ asked Lewis.
The coastguard shook his head. ‘Very few, thank God, only one or two a year. We get more damn fools who fall down the cliffs or get caught by the tide.’
‘She was said to be a strong swimmer – and she went in along there very often. So why d’you think she might
