‘How did you get on with old Lethbridge and this bone business?’ asked the coroner, over their rather tough steaks.
‘The lady in Newnham is dead set on upsetting your verdict,’ answered Richard. ‘She’s got a private investigator looking into it, as well.’
‘Trevor Mitchell? He’s a good man, I met him a few times when he was still in the CID across the border. Any chance that I’m going to have to eat my words?’
Pryor shrugged. ‘Not so far, but I’m waiting to hear from Mitchell as to what he found when he interviewed Mrs Barnes.’
‘She was a tough little bird, spoke her mind at the inquest!’ said Meredith. ‘It seems she wants to get married again and urgently needs a declaration that her husband is dead.’
The conversation veered towards more personal matters until they finished their meal, when Pryor manfully paid up at the till and walked back to the surgery with Meredith.
‘I’ll have to call you up to an inquest sometime on that lady with the overdose,’ said the coroner as they entered his forecourt.
‘We’ll run an analysis to make sure it was that Seconal,’ said Richard, as he unlocked his car. ‘You should have the result in a day or two, along with the post-mortem reports on both cases.’
Meredith’s pale eyebrows rose on his chubby face.
‘That’s a welcome change!’ he admitted. ‘The forensic lab in Cardiff usually takes at least a couple of weeks!’
They shook hands and Pryor climbed into his car and shut the door. He was about to start the engine, when the coroner came to the window, which Richard wound down.
‘It completely slipped my mind, I almost forgot to ask you,’ said Meredith. ‘My barrister brother, who’s in chambers in Swansea, rang me last night to see if I could recommend someone to give a sound pathological opinion. I don’t know what it’s all about, but I said that there was no need to go looking up in London, as you were on the doorstep, so to speak.’
Suddenly feeling that his outlay on a good lunch seemed to be proving worthwhile, Pryor happily nodded his assent. ‘So what shall I do about it, Brian?’
The other doctor pulled a prescription pad from his side pocket and scribbled a telephone number on the back.
As he handed the sheet through the window, he told Richard to speak directly to his brother Peter to find out more.
‘Best of luck with the new venture,’ he said as he waved goodbye. ‘There should be some more work for you at the Chepstow mortuary later this week.’
Feeling buoyant with these harbingers of future work, Richard let in the clutch and drove off, back down the valley that he already thought of as home.
FOUR
It had been agreed that Sian need not come in on Saturdays unless there was something urgent going on, so when Richard returned with his samples on Friday afternoon, she busily began setting up her equipment for barbiturate analysis, with the promise to ‘get cracking’ first thing on Monday morning. Her enthusiasm was infectious, as she was almost ecstatic at having ‘her first case’, as she put it. Even the usually impassive Angela was smiling benignly at Richard’s news of more work and both the women were itching to know what the barrister in Swansea would have to say.
However, they had to wait over the weekend for it, as Pryor’s attempt to phone the chambers in Swansea where the coroner’s brother was based, produced only a message from a clerk that Peter Meredith had left for the weekend, but that he would get him to return the call on Monday.
The weather had cooled down but was still pleasant and with little else to occupy him over the fallow two days, Richard looked forward to ‘striding his own broad acres’, as he liked to think of his bit of land, as well as sorting out his office and his room upstairs. He was not by nature a very tidy person, unlike Angela who was almost obsessive about ‘a place for everything and everything in its place’, as his grandmother used to say. However, he made an effort, buoyed up by the hope that an increasing workload would make this the last chance he had of getting really organized. His workroom was on a back corner of the house, behind the room used for an office, and he had plans to have a doorway knocked through to save having to walk around the corridor and into the hall to get into the office.
After another scratch meal with Angela in the kitchen – this time more salad and a tin of John West salmon, followed by cheese and biscuits – he percolated some Kardomah coffee and took it into the ‘staff lounge’, as they grandly called it. This was the room between Angela’s office and the kitchen, entered by a door at the foot of the stairs.
Angela was relaxing in one of the large armchairs, part of the three-piece suite they had retained from his aunt’s furniture. The room was much as the old lady had left it, with a good, but faded carpet on the floor, a large sideboard against one wall and a stone Minster fireplace on the other.
‘Should be cosy enough in the winter,’ she said, as she poured coffee into two mugs on the small table in the centre. ‘As long as we can afford the coal! Heating this house will cost a fortune.’
‘I should think we could get wood easily enough around here, the whole valley is a forest,’ replied Richard, full of optimism today. ‘I’ll have to ask Jimmy, he’ll probably offer to cut down someone’s trees for us!’
They listened to the six o’clock news on the massive Marconi radiogram that had been part of the furnishings, but the details of the national rail strike and the disaster at the Le Mans motor race in which a crashed Mercedes had killed over eighty people, were too depressing and they switched it off.
‘No trains, but I think I’ll drive up to Berkshire in the morning to visit my parents,’ announced Angela. ‘I need to bring down some more of my things I’ve left with them since I left the flat.’
‘At least you can get a decent meal when you’re home,’ suggested Richard. ‘I wonder if we’ll get any replies from that advertisement?’
‘Hardly likely in a place as small as Tintern Parva,’ replied Angela. ‘I think you’ll have to put it in the local Monmouthshire paper to get any hope of a response.’
It turned out that she was wrong about this, for later that evening as she was sitting upstairs her room, enjoying the view of the sunlit valley through the bay window, she heard the distant ringing of their solitary telephone in the hall below.
It stopped after a few rings and a few moments later, there was a tentative tap on her door.
‘Are you decent?’ came Richard’s voice. Even in the short time they had inhabited the house, they had both become meticulous about respecting each other’s space and he normally kept well clear of Angela’s territory. The bathroom was a problem and he was determined to hive off part of the spare bedroom behind his, to have a second one constructed.
She went to the door and invited him in, motioning him to another chair opposite hers in the bay window. Because of the wonderful view, she used this front room as her lounge, again with remnants of the original furniture pressed into use. Her bedroom was the one behind and another project they had in mind was a connecting door, to save her having to go out on to the landing each time she wished to move from one room to the other.
‘I heard the phone, was that more business for us?’
He shook his head and gave her one of his impish grins.
‘Guess what? That was a reply to our card in the post office. It’s only been there a few hours!’
She leaned forward, as surprised as he had been.