Trevor Mitchell nodded. ‘Yes, he told me that she wanted me to cooperate with you. She’s dead keen on winning this one, her nephew must have a lot of family money tucked away and she wants it.’
Pryor looked pleased at this. ‘I’m glad we can work together on this. As a doctor, it’s a bit difficult for me to go knocking on doors and asking questions.’
Mitchell’s face screwed up even more as a quizzical expression spread across his face.
‘What sort of questions, Doc?’
‘Well, anything noticeable about this Albert Barnes, which would be inconsistent with what’s described in this post-mortem report, little though that is.’
Mitchell thought for a moment. ‘Like a hunchback or club foot, you mean?’
‘That sort of thing – but we wouldn’t get that from his wife, who sounds as keen as our client on proving that the remains were that of her relative.’
‘But we might get something from a neighbour, perhaps.’
The pathologist nodded. ‘At least they wouldn’t be biased witnesses. It’s a long shot, but we’ve got little else to go on.’
‘And of course, we haven’t got the bones any more, they’re buried,’ added Mitchell.
Pryor nodded. ‘Without getting a sight of those, I can’t see we can go much further.’ He finished his coffee and stood up.
‘I said I’d be at Newnham by eleven o’clock. Mustn’t keep the lady waiting, especially as she sounds like an old-fashioned stickler for good behaviour. I’ll see if there’s any more medical details I can get from her. A pity we’ve got no head.’
‘At the moment, we’ve got nothing at all, Doc,’ said Mitchell, accompanying him to the door. ‘I’ll make arrangements to see Mrs Barnes to get her end of the story. She won’t be thrilled to see me, if she realizes that I’m trying to throw doubt on the coroner’s findings.’
Asking his host to thank his wife for the coffee, Richard made his way to his car, where he sat and pulled out a dog-eared book of AA road maps that had belonged to his father. Though he knew the area fairly well, from holidays with his aunt before the war, he needed to check on the route to Newnham, which was on the other side of the forest, on the main A48 to Gloucester. His finger traced out the road up to Coleford, then across to Cinderford and down an unclassified road to Newnham, which lay right on the river. Richard recalled it was one of the best places to see the famous Severn Bore, another memory from his student days.
He set off, window down in the rising heat and drove across the forest, through the most heavily wooded part of the Royal Forest that had provided England with so many ships in centuries gone by. In midsummer, the foliage was still fresh and green, quite different from the deep, lush colours of the jungle and rubber trees with which he had become so familiar during his years in the Far East. However, today the temperature was almost as great, a freak heatwave for June – but it was a dry heat, not the suffocating dampness of the tropics.
The road took him past the seventeenth-century Speech House in the middle of the forest, where the Verderers still held their Court every forty days, as they had done since the time of King Canute. Richard had learned these nuggets of local history during his pre-war holiday tours with Uncle Arthur in his old Morris Ten saloon.
As he came down the last lap of the journey into Newnham, the panorama of the narrowing river estuary lay below him, spread out like a map. The town had one main street which was the A48 trunk road, running downhill, then turning towards the river bank. When his small side road met the main one, he followed Trevor Mitchell’s directions and turned up into a narrow service lane that ran in front of a row of old houses. He remembered the brick clock tower in the middle of the town and the sixteenth-century Victoria Hotel at the top of the main street, but his attention was on the names outside the tall terraced houses on his right.
Crawling in bottom gear, he soon spotted ‘Meadowlane’ cut into a slate plaque at the side of a heavy front door. There was only one other car parked in this section of the road and he pulled up behind it and went to ring the bell.
It was answered by a short woman in a long linen apron, with a frilled mob cap on her grey curls. For a moment, Richard thought he had strayed into a stage production of a Regency play, but the woman smiled and pulled the door open wide.
‘Doctor Pryor? You are expected, please come in.’
He went into a rather gloomy hallway, unsure whether or not this was Mrs Oldfield, though she did not tally with Trevor Mitchell’s description. The house smelled of mothballs and furniture polish.
‘Mrs Oldfield is in the drawing room,’ said his guide, clarifying matters and indicating an inner door on the left of the hall. The servant, for that was what he decided she must be, tapped on the panels, opened it and stood aside for him to enter, calling out in a strong Gloucester accent, ‘Dr Pryor, ma’am!’
In the high-ceilinged room, its bay window looking down on the main street, he saw another elderly lady in a high-backed chair, one hand on a silver-headed ebony stick. She sat erect, her plain dark dress closed at the throat by a large cameo brooch. Her face was long and lined, set in a severe expression, under a swept-back mass of white hair, gathered in a bun at the back.
For a moment, he thought of Queen Victoria, though she was really nothing like the pictures he had seen of the old Empress – perhaps it was the stern expression and the gimlet-sharp eyes that regarded him.
‘Excuse me not rising to greet you, Professor,’ she said in a surprisingly melodious voice. ‘But I suffer from severe arthritis. Please be seated.’ As she waved her cane to indicate a similar chair opposite, he saw that all her finger joints were badly distorted.
As he made some polite greeting and subsided into the chair, Agnes Oldfield waved her wand at the old servant, who was still hovering in the doorway.
‘You may serve coffee now, Lucas,’ she commanded grandly and the woman vanished. Even though it was less than an hour since taking coffee with Mitchell, Pryor felt it unwise to decline, even if the draconian old lady had allowed it.
Obviously her code of conduct demanded some light conversation before they got down to business.
‘I understand you have not long returned from living in the East, Professor,’ she began. Again, he desisted from explaining that he preferred being called ‘Doctor’ and gave a quick resume of his recent life.
‘You were in the Army?’ she demanded.
‘A major in the Royal Army Medical Corps,’ he admitted.
Agnes Oldfield gave a delicate sniff. ‘My late husband was a colonel in the Hussars. We lived in India for a time, you know.’
Pryor again felt that he was playing a bit-part in some Oscar Wilde comedy, but the moment passed as Lucas came in with a tray of coffee, immaculately served in thin china amid a profusion of solid silver jugs, basins and spoons. They waited while the maid went through the ritual of moving small tables, pouring coffee and setting one at the side of the lady of the house, before giving Richard his cup. Then she proffered a plate of thin ginger biscuits and quietly left the room.
‘My solicitor has explained the problem, I take it, Professor,’ she began, fixing him with a beady eye.
‘I feel sure that this tragedy involved my nephew Anthony and that the coroner was in error with his verdict.’
Richard placed his cup back on the saucer, half-afraid of chipping the delicate china.
‘I understand perfectly, Mrs Oldfield. The problem is the lack of evidence to work with. I hoped that perhaps you could – well, fill in some of the gaps, as it were.’
He almost said ‘put some flesh on the bones’ but that would have been a slip of the tongue that he knew this severe lady would not appreciate.
‘What do you need to know?’ she asked, lifting her own cup with some difficulty.
‘Can you give me some better details of his physical appearance, for a start? His exact height, build and any old injuries or serious illnesses, for instance.’