‘Tell me about this oil business?’ he asked.
The superintendent turned up his hands. ‘It was a nice piece of detection, but now that Prentice has admitted driving to the place where his wife’s body was recovered, it doesn’t matter so much, except to raise the question of why he lied about it and why he felt so vulnerable that he went and tried to scrub it off.’
Craddock was making notes on a yellow legal pad in front of him.
‘Yes, that’s a very telling point, of course. Tied in with the fact that he moved the body from one bit of sea to another, it’s so far the only hint we’ve got that he might have killed her. But it’s still not proof and I’m damned if I can see why he did it!’
Richard Pryor sat quietly in his new suit, listening to the exchanges. This was police business and had nothing to do with him, but it was intriguing stuff, all the same.
Eventually, Craddock got around to the medical aspects. He turned to Patrick O’Malley first.
‘Doctor, it seems there is absolutely no doubt that Linda Prentice drowned?’
The Irishman, who seemed to be trying to remain as inconspicuous as possible, hastily agreed.
‘As far as I’m concerned, yes, she died of drowning. But I make no claims at being a forensic chap, that’s Doctor Pryor’s province.’
‘You made no particular reference to the bruises on her body?’ asked the lawyer, mildly.
O’Malley looked uncomfortable. ‘Well, I knew she had been recovered from a rocky part of the coast and most of the injuries were scratches from that. I assumed the bruises were from the same cause.’
‘But I understand that you can’t bruise a dead body?’
‘She would have been alive for a time in the water, until she drowned. She could bruise against the rocks then,’ said the pathologist, rather evasively.
‘You didn’t carry out the tests under microscope that Dr Pryor did?’ asked Craddock, smiling indulgently. ‘You see, Doctor, I’m trying to anticipate the questions the defence will no doubt put to you, if the Director of Public Prosecutions decides to run this for murder.’
O’Malley admitted that he had not thought it necessary, given that he had been told the death was accidental, but he readily agreed with what he knew of Pryor’s interpretation. Craddock gave up tormenting O’Malley and turned to Richard.
‘A rather unusual situation, Doctor Pryor! Here you are, a private expert retained by the family, yet now you may have been transformed into a prosecution witness.’
Richard matched his smile in return.
‘That’s how it goes, Mr Craddock. Facts are facts, whoever commissions me.’
The prosecuting solicitor then went through Richard’s statement in minute detail, questioning every piece of evidence until he was sure he knew its significance. The bruises were the focus of his interest and especially the dating and location of these injuries.
‘So in summary, they are a mixture of ages, Doctor, suggesting that they were inflicted over a period?’
‘Certainly not in one episode,’ replied Richard cautiously. ‘I can’t give you exact timings, but some were probably of the order of a week or two, others were more than a day or so – and a few were so fresh that they could have been inflicted during the previous day or as Dr O’Malley said, even in the water immediately before death.’
He added the last as a compassionate sop to reduce the other pathologist’s discomfiture.
‘And you are also quite happy that the cause of death was drowning?’ was the final question, to which Pryor had no difficulty in giving a positive answer.
After some more general discussion, the lawyer laid down his pen and squared up the yellow pad on the desk in front of him.
‘I’m not sure where this leaves us, gentlemen,’ he said, his smile having vanished now. ‘I’m not all that optimistic about being able to push the charges beyond obstructing the coroner and wasting police time. We might be able to jack it up to “perverting the course of justice” but as for murder, I can’t see much hope of that.’
He fiddled with his pen again. ‘It will be up to the DPP and no doubt he’ll consider all the papers and perhaps brief Counsel to give an opinion. Even if the magistrates would wear it and commit him for trial, I can’t see a judge letting that charge go to the jury as it stands, on the evidence we have so far.’
‘What if the letter proves to have been written by Prentice?’ growled Ben Evans, reluctant to let his instincts be confounded. ‘What earthly reason would he have for writing a false suicide note, other than to cover up a homicide?’
Craddock bobbed his head in agreement.
‘It would indeed be a telling point, but is it enough to send a man to the gallows? And Inspector Lewis told us that determining who typed a given document is not a straightforward exercise, it has a lot of subjective opinion about it. Much would depend on the strength of the document examiner’s evidence, as opposed to a defence expert, who I am sure would be called to challenge him.’
Richard Pryor sat listening to the lawyer demolishing his own case, but recognized that this was the sensible thing to do. It was no good going to court with flimsy evidence that a competent defence counsel could shoot down in flames. Maldwyn Craddock made one final resume of the situation.
‘We have a man who is having an affair with another woman. His wife finds out and they have a stormy period. He wants a divorce and she refuses so he becomes violent on at least one occasion, gripping her arms and probably her throat. This is corroborated by the letter she writes to her friend.’
He paused to drink from a glass of water on his desk.
‘Then she is found dead in the sea, which is assumed to be an accident. After his car is proved to have been standing further along the cliff, the husband admits that he has suppressed a suicide note, which may or may not be genuine.’
He stopped and looked along the faces in front of him, his eyebrows raised in an invitation to comment.
The detective superintendent was the first to respond.
‘That’s about the measure of it, Mr Craddock. A lot will depend on the strength of the document examiner’s opinion on who wrote that note.’
Donald Moses, the coroner who had been largely silent until now, agreed with Ben Evans. ‘In my opinion, everything hangs on that note. If the death was an accident, why on earth try to make it look like a suicide? The only conclusion is that he’s trying to cover up the fact that somehow he killed her.’
The prosecuting solicitor drummed his fingers restlessly on the edge of his desk.
‘Agreed, but how did he kill her? Doctor Pryor, have you ever heard of someone being carried alive and then thrown into the sea to drown? Especially as it seems she was an experienced swimmer.’
Richard shook his head. ‘It seems very improbable. The only way would be if she was drugged or drunk. We did an alcohol on her urine and it was negative. We still have a blood sample in our fridge, perhaps it had better go to the forensic laboratory in Cardiff for drugs screening.’
‘What if she was knocked out first?’ suggested Lewis Lewis. ‘There was an injury to the back of her head, wasn’t there?’
Richard nodded. ‘There was a recent bruise under the back of the scalp, yes! Impossible to say whether or not it would have rendered her unconscious or not.’
‘Remind me, was that a fresh injury, Doctor?’ asked Craddock.
‘Fresh, in the sense of being within a day before death,’ replied Richard. ‘We originally assumed that it was from being banged against the rocks, which in an accidental scenario, could account for a good swimmer being drowned.’
The solicitor nodded his fleshy head. ‘That’s certainly what any defence counsel would allege – and I presume you couldn’t deny it?’
He did not wait for an answer but again surveyed the others in the room.
‘So it looks as if we’ll have to run with what we’ve got, unless something new turns up before the preliminary hearing. Prentice has confessed to the suppression of the letter, so he can’t dodge that, but we may have to be content with whatever sentence that brings.’
EIGHTEEN
