Rather stumped as to his next move, he carried on up the road until he came to the next side turning, another suburban collection of houses and bungalows.
He could hardly walk up to the doors and push all the bells in turn, then ask each occupant whether they were the fancy woman of Michael Prentice! His brief from Leonard Massey was only to confirm the existence of the mystery woman and to obtain her name and address.
Turning round, he walked slowly back to the main road and ambled towards the maisonettes, hoping for some inspiration. The patron saint of private eyes must have been in good form that day, for as he approached the block, the door of the further apartment on the front opened and a woman stepped out and began walking briskly ahead of him. She was young and very blonde indeed, wearing a light sling-back coat and high heels.
He could not see her face, but making a bet with himself that a smart blonde living in those maisonettes might well be the mysterious Daphne, he followed her at a discreet distance. There were a few other people about and he had little fear of being challenged as a stalker as she turned into the road where he had left his car. Now he could see her face in profile, and decided she was in her mid-twenties, attractive but with rather sharp features. The blonde walked past the Wolseley and headed for the centre of the small town, but stopped after a few hundred yards and turned into a newsagent’s shop.
Seeing no reason why he should not do the same, as she could not know him from Adam, he went in and saw her at the counter at the back of the shop. He stopped just inside and began looking at magazines on a rack, taking off a copy of Picture Post and looking through the pages. He heard the woman asking for twenty Gold Flake cigarettes and laughing over something with the middle-aged shopkeeper, who she called ‘Tom’. Then she walked out of the shop past Trevor, without glancing at him. He managed a good look at her and confirmed that she was attractive, but perhaps wore too much make-up.
As soon as she had left, he went to the counter to buy his magazine and as he waited for his change, he spoke casually to the proprietor.
‘That was Daphne from the maisonettes, wasn’t it? I live a few doors away, but I can never remember her surname,’ he lied.
‘Daphne Squires? Yes, she’s a good looking woman.’
The shopkeeper was obviously appreciative of young blondes and assumed that Mitchell’s interests lay in the same direction.
‘I heard that she was leaving soon, going to live in Gower,’ said Trevor, with false innocence.
The man behind the counter shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t know. Pity though, she buys fags and magazines from me – and she’s better looking that most of my other customers.’
Trevor knew when to stop probing and he left to go back to his car. Before he drove off, he was able to write another line in his notebook.
EIGHT
When Richard Pryor returned to the Wye Valley late on Wednesday morning, after having done his duty at Newport, he found Sian waiting for him with a tray of microscope slides.
‘Here we are, Doctor, a set of ‘H and E’ and one of Perl’s.’
‘H and E’ was probably the best-known acronym in pathology, standing for ‘haematoxylin and esosin’, which for a century or more had been the main method of staining tissues for microscopic examination.
She proudly set the cardboard tray alongside the small microscope that stood on a table in his room. Their big new microscope was in the laboratory for communal use, as it was so expensive that Richard and Angela had to use it between them until their finances improved. However, he had this smaller monocular in his own room, the same one he had had as a student. Sian hovered over him as he sat on his high stool.
‘Are they OK?’ she demanded, as soon as his eye was settled on the top of the instrument. He made no answer until he had studied and replaced several of the glass slides on the stage of the microscope, moving them around with the pair of control knobs. Then he looked up at the pert little technician, who was staring at him in tense anticipation, a cloud of blonde hair like a halo around her pretty face.
‘Damned good, Sian, first class! Nice and thin, fully dehydrated and beautifully stained!’
They were good, but he laid the praise on thickly as he knew it meant a lot to her, the first histology she had produced for him. Technicians were very proud of their expertise and took it personally when things went wrong.
She beamed and looked as if she had just won the football pools.
‘Thank God for that,’ she said fervently. ‘I hadn’t used a Cambridge rocker for years, we had a sledge at the Royal Gwent.’ Sian was referring to the devices used to cut slices a few thousandths of an inch thick, gadgets like mini bacon slicers, which passed the paraffin-wax blocks containing tissue against the edge of a blade like a cut-throat razor.
‘They’re great, Sian, now I can spend a happy hour looking at your handiwork!’
She took the hint and almost skipped out of his room in satisfaction. Pryor sat for a long while on his stool, eye glued to the eyepiece of the microscope, except when he changed slides and once when he got up to take a thick textbook from a shelf. Then he sat back and stared out of the window for a while, gazing unseeingly at the trees above Moira’s house further down the valley. When he finally moved, he drew a lined pad towards him and began writing a supplementary report.
By that afternoon, two conferences with different coroners had been arranged, each requiring Pryor’s presence. Phone calls between the solicitor in Lydney and Trevor Mitchell had resulted in the first appointment being made with Brian Meredith for the following morning.
‘You’d better come with me, Angela. I may need some biology expertise, as well as your moral support!’ said Richard as they were having their mid-afternoon tea.
She nodded and, with a grimace, stretched her legs out from the chair.
‘It would be nice to get out for a change, after sitting doing all that blood grouping. You get all the fun, Richard, going to all those glamorous mortuaries.’
‘Fun? Abattoirs have more glamour than those awful places I have to work in.’
Moira and Sian had taken to joining them in the staff lounge – in fact, it was Moira who now made all the tea and coffee. ‘I’ll have that extra report typed up for you to sign in an hour, then I can get it in the post tonight,’ she promised.
Sian, itching to know whether her efforts with the tissue sections had proved useful, asked Richard to explain.
‘I saw the report on Moira’s desk,’ she admitted. ‘What’s it actually mean?’
‘The bruises were of different ages,’ he replied. ‘That was obvious to the naked eye from the colour, as fresh ones are blue or purple, but the haemoglobin decays after a time and then they turn green and yellow.’
‘My grandmother could have told you that!’ said Angela, softening the sarcasm with a grin.
‘Sure, but she couldn’t put a date on them,’ he countered. ‘Neither can I for that matter, except in very approximate terms, as different people react differently, as well as there being other factors.’
‘So what use was my histology?’ persisted Sian.
‘In a fresh bruise only red blood cells have leaked out from the damaged blood vessels, but soon white blood cells start accumulating to start the clear-up and healing process and their type changes with time.’