Bernard Knight - Where Death Delights

He led the way into the building, which consisted of two dismal rooms. The one just inside the doors held the body store, an eight-foot high metal cabinet which, from the three labels stuck on its door, was a triple-tier refrigerator of doubtful antiquity. The rest of the space contained a battered desk to hold the mortuary register and several trolleys for moving coffins and bodies.

‘The “pee emm” room is through here, sir,’ said Christie, in a booming voice that suggested that he had been at least a warrant officer during the war. He pushed open another pair of doors into the other half of the building. Richard was half expecting to see a large slab of slate as the autopsy table, as he had once seen in Bridgend, but was relieved to find a porcelain version on a central pillar. There was very little else in there, just a large white sink with one cold-water tap, a sloping draining board and a gas water heater above it. A small table stood against one wall, with a glass cupboard above it containing bottles of formalin and disinfectants.

‘Doctor Saunders always did his organ-cutting on this,’ explained John Christie, indicating a contraption standing on the autopsy table. It looked like the tray that invalids take their meals on in bed, a large board with four legs to stand across the lower half of the corpse.

Pryor looked around the rest of the chamber which hopefully was to be his regular place of work. The usual paraphernalia of a morgue was there, mops and buckets standing in a corner, a butcher’s scales hanging over the draining board and several pairs of grubby Wellington boots under the table. A few red rubber aprons with chains around the neck and waist, hung from hooks on the wall.

‘There’s no mortuary attendant, then?’ he asked tentatively.

The officer shook his head. ‘Not enough work to warrant the expense, says the council. We’ve got one down in Chepstow, though. Here one of the chaps in the depot sees bodies in and out for the undertakers.’

‘So I have to do all the donkey work myself?’ hazarded Richard. Maybe this wasn’t going to be such a windfall after all, he thought.

The policeman’s rugged face cracked into a grin.

‘Don’t worry, Doctor, I’ll give you a hand. I’ll sew up and clean down – and take off the skull when you need it.’

He was as good as his word, too. While the pathologist put on boots and a rubber apron, then took his instruments from his black bag, the coroner’s officer had trundled a body in from the fridge, sliding it off the trolley on to the table and placing a wooden block under the head. He wore no apron and his green trilby stayed firmly on his head throughout the whole proceedings.

Before Pryor began his examination, Christie produced some papers from his breast pocket and laid them on the table.

‘This first gent is a sudden death, sir. Collapsed in the pub, probably just heard that the price of beer had gone up,’ he added heartily. ‘Seventy-one years old, history of chest pains, but hasn’t seen a doctor for a month, so had to be reported to us.’

‘What’s the other one?’ asked Pryor.

‘Probably an overdose, there’ll be an inquest on her. Lady of sixty-five, lives alone. History of depression, not seen for three days. Found dead in bed, empty bottle of Seconal on the floor, but we don’t know how many were left in it. I’m chasing the prescription date today.’

‘Have to have an analysis on that one,’ said Richard. An extra fee and some work for Sian in the laboratory, he thought.

Both autopsies went off smoothly and he took his samples for analysis into bottles he carried in his capacious case, which had three large drawers stuffed with equipment. He had had it made to his own design in Singapore and the sight and feel of it made him aware again of how much life had changed in a few short months.

Christie was busy with a sacking needle and twine, restoring both bodies to a remarkable degree of normality, given the primitive facilities. Richard was secretly amazed at how the officer did everything so calmly and efficiently in his tweed suit and hat, without getting a single drop of blood on himself. He seemed to be able to work from a distance, bending over and reaching far out with his long arms. His only concession to hygiene was the wearing of a thick pair of household rubber gloves.

Pryor washed his hands under the trickle from the gas heater, using soap kept in a Player’s glass ashtray. There was a clean towel on the table, God knows from where, he thought. As he dried his hands, the busy officer asked about his report.

‘How d’you want to do it, Doctor? I used to jot down a few notes for Doctor Saunders and he’d add a conclusion and sign it. The coroner seemed satisfied with that, just in longhand.’

The new broom shook his head. ‘No, I’ll just make a few notes myself, then I’ll dictate a report back at the office and have it typed up, then post it to you.’

He hoped Sian was up to the task, if they started getting more than a few cases at a time. As he leaned over the table to write some notes on a pad taken from his case, he heard John Christie dragging the second corpse on to a trolley.

‘I’ll put them away when you’ve gone, Doc,’ he said.

‘Business to be done now.’ He approached the table, pulling a wallet from his jacket and then laying four one-pound notes alongside Richard’s notebook.

‘The going rate is two guineas a case, sir. I don’t know what happens in Singapore, but here there’s been a long tradition that the coroner’s officer gets the shillings off the guineas.’

Pryor recalled that in the few coroner’s autopsies he had done before going to the Forces, the same regime had operated, though then he hadn’t got the pounds, they went to the senior pathologist!

‘The coroner said he’d like you to call in on him, if you’ve the time, sir,’ said the officer, as he saw him to the outer door.

Richard knew where his old college friend had his surgery, as he had called on him soon after he arrived at Garth House, unashamedly touting for any work that was going. Brian Meredith was almost exactly the same age, but had escaped being called up during the war, due to poor sight, which required him to wear spectacles with lenses like the bottom of milk bottles. He was a surgeon’s son from Cardiff and had been in general practice since soon after qualifying, most of it in Monmouth. Well connected, with one brother a barrister and the other a solicitor, he had been appointed a couple of years ago as the coroner for East Monmouthshire.

Richard left the council yard and drove around the back of the small town, remembering that it was famous for being the birthplace of King Henry V and home of Charles Rolls of Rolls Royce, the first Briton to die in an aircraft crash.

‘I wonder if he had a post-mortem?’ he murmured, as he looked for the cream-painted building that housed Meredith’s family practice. Spotting it in the road behind the ancient Monmouth School, he pulled into a paved space in front and went into the waiting room, causing a doorbell to jangle as if it was a shop.

Morning surgery was over and the row of hard chairs around the walls was bereft of patients. An inner door opened and Brian’s moon face peered out, his heavy glasses giving him the appearance of a benign owl. When he saw who it was, he advanced with hand outstretched. He was as unlike the lean, tanned man from Singapore as could be imagined. Short, portly and starting to go bald, he looked ten years older than Richard, but there was an air of benign prosperity about him that told of years of a settled lifestyle.

‘Richard, nice to see you again. How did the first day go?’ They chatted their way back into his consulting room where the GP sat his old friend down in the patient’s chair. After the inevitable reminiscences about their student days, they got down to business.