‘If you had the bones, especially the femora, you could calculate his height, couldn’t you?’ asked Angela.
Richard nodded, but made a face expressing caution.
‘To within an inch or so either way, but as there’s no record of Albert Barnes’s height, apart from his wife saying he was “average”, it doesn’t help a lot. And anyway, the bones are six feet down in some cemetery.’
‘The inquest report is short and sweet as well,’ observed Angela. ‘The police offered no evidence of foul play, there were no injuries on the skeleton – not that that means much without a head.’
‘It was the wife’s definite identification of the wedding ring and the watch that clinched it with the coroner. That was fair enough, he had no reason to disbelieve her.’ Pryor threw the paper down on to the table.
‘So your old coroner pal Brian Meredith declared it was Albert Barnes and brought in an open verdict,’ concluded Angela.
‘Hardly an “old pal”! Until last month, I hadn’t seen him since before the war, when we were students together in Cardiff. I’d heard he’d gone into general practice in Monmouth and become the local coroner as well.’
Richard Pryor and Brian Meredith had qualified in 1936, but their paths had then diverged. Richard had taken up pathology and in 1940 been called up into the Royal Army Medical Corps. He had spent most of the war in Egypt and Ceylon, but when Singapore was liberated in 1945, he had been posted to the laboratory of the British Military Hospital there, ending his service with the rank of major. When ‘demobbed’ after the war, he had taken local release and stayed on as a civilian pathologist in the General Hospital, dealing with coroner’s and police cases. This post carried an additional appointment in the university medical school to teach forensic medicine.
‘So what happens now?’ asked Sian, disappointed that their first case seemed a bit of a damp squib. ‘Sounds as if this Mrs Barnes has got a cast-iron case.’
‘We’ve not got the remains, so I can’t even try for a blood group, even if we knew what group Albert was,’ said Angela.
Richard nodded disconsolately. ‘Without the damned bones, we’re stumped!’
There was a cough from the doorway behind them and turning, they saw Jimmy James standing there, his sweating body stripped to the waist, an open bottle of beer clutched in one hand.
‘Doc, just tell me where they’re buried and I’ll dig the buggers up for you tonight!’
TWO
Richard declined to take up Jenkins’ offer – in fact, his handyman’s apparent readiness to break the law so blatantly gave him something else to worry about.
‘That bloody man might turn out to be a liability,’ he growled to Angela later that day. Sian had left to catch her bus home at five o’clock and the two principals were sitting in the kitchen, eating a scratch ‘high tea’ of Fray Bentos corned beef and a salad, followed by a tin of peaches with Carnation tinned milk. The sausages were being kept for a late supper.
‘I don’t think he was serious,’ countered Angela. ‘You have to take anything Jimmy says with a large pinch of salt!’
Pryor shrugged as he finished his dessert. He then took the dishes to the big Belfast sink in the corner. ‘I admit he works hard outside, but I wish he’d keep his nose out of our business.’
Angela went across to the gas stove and lit the burner under the aluminium kettle, then used the same match to light a cigarette. ‘I must try to give these things up,’ she said, pushing the packet of Kensitas back into the pocket of her white coat. ‘I needed them with all the stress of living and working in London, but down here in this peaceful countryside, I should be able to kick the habit.’
Her tone rather suggested that ‘peaceful countryside’ was code for ‘deadly dull rural backwater’ and Richard was suddenly aware of how little he really knew about his new business partner. He had heard on the gossip network that flourishes amongst the small world of forensic specialists, that she had never been married but had had a traumatic breakdown of an engagement to a senior police officer in London. He also knew she came from a rather ‘posh’ family background in the Home Counties. Her parents ran a stud farm in Berkshire and she had been educated at a well-known boarding school, hence her well-modulated Thames Valley accent.
Quite different from his own, he thought ruefully. Though years abroad had blunted his Welsh accent, he was a product of a secondary school in a very different ‘valley’, that of the Taff near Merthyr. His parents were still there, his father having retired a few years earlier from an exhausting general practice in Aberfan.
His reverie was broken by Angela sitting down again after filling the brown teapot and bringing it to the table.
‘So what’s the next move over our first and only case?’ she asked, pouring the strong liquid into a couple of cups. Even though they were virtually camping out, her sense of propriety had made her fill a small jug with milk. The pint bottle from the village shop, the cardboard top already pecked by ardent sparrows, remained in the fridge. As Richard added his customary two spoonfuls of sugar, he ruminated about Mrs Barnes’s bones – or should it be Mrs Oldfield’s bones?
‘I’ll have to talk to this lady in Newnham, I suppose,’ he said. ‘Get her story first-hand and see if she can add anything that could help establish identity. Maybe she’ll say he had a wooden leg!’ he added facetiously.
Though Angela was not without a sense of humour, she was already learning to ignore her partner’s frequent whimsies.
‘What about this private detective fellow?’ she asked. ‘I’m always a bit wary of them, I imagine a chap in a dirty raincoat taking snaps of a co-respondent through bedroom windows.’
Pryor grinned, his lean face revealing a good set of white teeth.
‘Don’t forget the brown trilby pulled down over his eyes!’ He took a sip of the hot tea, before continuing. ‘But seriously, this man Mitchell sounds OK. Lethbridge said he was a detective super in the Gloucestershire force until a year or two ago. He was in the Division that covered the Forest of Dean, so he must know a lot about the area across the river.’
‘You’d better have a word with him as well,’ suggested Angela. ‘You never know, perhaps he can pass a bit of work our way, and vice versa,’ she added practically.
As it turned out, the pathologist met Trevor Mitchell very soon, for next morning Pryor rang the solicitor in Lydney, who after a few phone calls, made arrangements for him to see Mitchell that morning and to go on to interview Mrs Oldfield afterwards.
Leaving Angela and Sian to continue stocking the laboratory, he took the Humber up the valley for a short distance, past the hamlet of Llandogo, and across the river bridge. A side road took the heavy black car up a steep lane with sharp bends that climbed the English side of the valley, with superb views in all directions. At the top was the ancient village of St Brievals, which had been the medieval capital of the Forest of Dean and still had a castle to prove it. He stopped outside the Norman church to ask a lady for directions and was sent down a nearby lane to a thatched cottage whose picture should have been on a box of chocolates, even down to the roses around the door. A rap on the panels brought an almost immediate response, being opened by a large man wearing bib-and-brace brown overalls, looking like a carpenter or a plumber.
He held out his hand and pumped Richard’s vigorously.
‘Come in, Doctor, come in! Excuse the rig-out, but I’ve just come in from my workshop.’
As he led the way into a low living room, with blackened beams in the ceiling, Pryor saw that Mitchell was a powerful man just past fifty, with a thickset body and cropped iron-grey hair. His face reminded Richard of a bulldog, the Churchillian features looking as if they had been crushed from above downwards.
Mitchell piloted the doctor to a deep armchair, covered in flowery chintz like the rest of the three-piece suite. The room was like a film set of an English country cottage, with half-panelled walls, a large stone fireplace and numerous pictures of rural scenes. It even had a glass case containing a stuffed otter sitting on a dresser filled with blue and white china.
‘You’ll have some coffee, Doctor?’ asked the investigator, in a tone that seemed to rule out any refusal. He went to a door at the back and in a deep bass voice roared out instructions to someone in the nether regions.
Then he came back and dropped heavily on to a settee opposite.
‘I understand that old Eddie Lethbridge put you on to this,’ he began. ‘A dry old stick, but he’s sound enough, not like some of these slick lawyers in the city.’
