Bernard Knight - Where Death Delights

The woman at the desk looked askance at the letter he produced and went off to talk to someone higher up the bureaucratic tree.

‘I can’t give you these, sir,’ she said officiously, when she returned. ‘It’s quite out of order. How do I know who you are?’

‘Do you know PC Christie, the coroner’s officer? He must come in here now and then for records.’

She softened a little. ‘Of course I know John Christie. What’s he got to do with it?’

‘If you can’t give them to me, you’ll have to give them to him on the coroner’s order,’ he said patiently. ‘Then he’ll give them to me.’

Long experience of people on the other side of her counter told her that this man was – or had been – a police officer.

‘I’ll have to ring him, sir,’ she said half-heartedly.

‘Yes, a good idea. I’ll wait,’ he replied politely.

She vanished for a few moments and then came back.

‘It’ll take some time, these are a few years old.’

Trevor Mitchell nodded. ‘I’ll go and get a cup of tea in the canteen. Half an hour be alright?’

When he came back, there was a thin brown paper folder waiting for him.

‘The Records Officer says you can’t remove it from the hospital, but you can look at it here,’ she announced with a note of triumph in her voice. ‘Only the coroner can have it taken away.’

Mitchell sighed, but pulled out his notepad and leaned on the counter to copy every word. It was not difficult, as the notes were only one and half pages long. He didn’t understand some of the words, but transcribed them faithfully for Doctor Pryor to see.

Thanking the clerk with exaggerated courtesy, he left, wondering if the whole afternoon had been a waste of time. He drove his Wolseley back to Monmouth and then down the valley, deciding that instead of turning off near the bridge to go up to St Brievals, he might as well call at Garth House to show the doctor what he had found.

As he drove into the back yard, he saw that the Humber had also just arrived and Richard Pryor was hauling his black case into the house. Invited into the kitchen for a cup of tea, Trevor saw a new face, a neat woman with dark hair, who was just hanging up her pinafore.

‘This is our new recruit,’ said Richard heartily. ‘Mrs Davison is our housekeeper, cook, secretary and general factotum! Moira, meet Trevor Mitchell, the Wye Valley’s answer to Sherlock Holmes!’

Mitchell grinned as he shook hands. ‘Is the doctor always like this?’ he asked.

Moira gave him a lovely smile. ‘It looks that way, but I’ve only been here a couple of days!’ She turned to her employer. ‘I’ve left the rest of the cottage pie in the fridge for your supper, Doctor. Just heat it up in the oven – and there’s a new tin of Campbell’s oxtail in the cupboard if you fancy soup to start.’

She took a light jacket from a hanger on the back of the door and slipped it on. ‘Nice to have met you, Mr Mitchell. I’m sure we’ll see you often.’

Trevor hoped so too, as she smiled again and went out into the yard.

‘Nice woman, that,’ he said appreciatively, then waved his notebook at Pryor. ‘I’ve managed to copy Albert Barnes’s hospital record, what there is of it.’

Richard wet the tea and set cups and saucers on the kitchen table. ‘Angela’s in the lab, I’ll give her a call, she might want to hear this.’

A few minutes later the three heads were bent over the notebook, studying two pages of Trevor’s neat handwriting.

‘Not much help is it?’ commented Angela, when they had read to the end.

Richard summarized what it said. ‘He was admitted to Casualty after being struck in the railway siding by an empty truck that was rolling down an incline. Thrown to the ground, bruised chest and arm, two fractured ribs and a laceration of his scalp needing six stitches. Mild concussion, admitted overnight for observation. Discharged himself late next day, ribs strapped up, dressings on head wound, told to go to GP if any problems and to come back in ten days for the sutures to be removed.’

‘What did you expect to find from hospital records that would help in identifying him?’ asked the ever-critical Angela.

Richard shrugged, his lean face scowling at Mitchell’s handwriting in the book. ‘Well, say he’d had a fractured leg – that could have left a deformity on the bone that the pathologist might have noticed – some callus, for instance.’

‘What’s callus?’ asked the detective.

‘It’s a lump of calcified stuff that forms around a break to join the two parts of the broken bone together. It gradually absorbs over months or years, but usually leaves some permanent sign, especially on X-ray.’

‘Nothing here like that,’ said Angela. ‘Neither did the Hereford pathologist mention any old injuries.’

‘So we’re no further forward,’ growled Mitchell, obviously disappointed that his efforts had been in vain.

‘What’s this you’ve written here, in the clinical examination?’ asked Pryor, jabbing a finger at the notebook.

Trevor peered over Richard’s shoulder. ‘It says ‘ pec.rec ’, that’s all. I don’t know what it means, I just copied what was in the original notes.’

‘ Pec.rec ?’ asked Angela. ‘What’s that mean, for heaven’s sake?’

The pathologist shrugged. ‘Search me, it’s no medical term I’ve ever heard of. The doctor who examined him, whoever he was, has just written it down at the end of his external examination, before he goes on to say that the heart and lungs seem normal.’

‘Could it be of any use to us?’ asked Mitchell.

‘Until we know what it means, there’s no way of telling. It might be worth asking the chap who wrote this, what he meant by it.’

Angela looked at the date on the notes. ‘It’s seven years ago. That doctor might have drained his brain to Canada or Australia by now.’

‘Was his name on the original notes?’ asked Richard.

Trevor shook his head. ‘No, only the name of the consultant who he was admitted under that day.’

Pryor slapped his fingers on the edge of the table. ‘That’s good enough! The hospital staff records will show who worked for that consultant at that time. It would have been a house officer or a senior house officer admitting patients on surgical intake. We could track him down through the Medical Directory .’

‘A lot of effort for two little words which may mean nothing useful,’ said Angela dubiously.

Trevor drank his tea and got up to leave. ‘Next time I’m near Hereford, I’ll call in and make some enquiries. Nothing ventured, nothing gained,’ he added, philosophically. ‘When I was in the CID, we sometimes got a result from snippets just as unlikely as pec.rec !’

After their meal that evening, Richard and Angela brought a couple of chairs from the office and sat on the tiled area outside the front porch, between the two bay windows. It was a glorious evening, the setting sun lighting the opposite side of the valley, making the dense woods glow in different shades of green. He had unearthed a bottle of Gordon’s gin from one of the boxes in his room and with some tonic water that Moira had thoughtfully added to the shopping list, they spent a peaceful hour relaxing.

The woman stretched out her legs luxuriously.

‘Quite a change from my flat in New Cross, with the fog coming up from the river and the noise of the traffic outside.’

‘I though you lived in posh Blackheath,’ observed Richard, lazily.

‘The estate agents always called it that, but really it was New Cross,’ she admitted. ‘But this is much nicer!’

The sat and sipped their gin for a time, watched the shadows change beyond the Wye as the sun slipped down.