Bernard Knight - Where Death Delights

‘We need some sort of housekeeper, who can clean the place up and do a bit of cooking. Somebody local, who can come in each day, not a live-in servant like that old biddy has in Newnham.’

He had described his morning’s activities to her during the drive down from Garth House.

‘It would be good if she could type as well,’ added Angela. He looked at her suspiciously for a second, wondering if she was being sarcastic, but she was serious.

‘Look, we thought Sian might be able to type the reports, as well as work in the lab,’ said Angela. ‘But have you seen her trying to use that typewriter? I can do better with two fingers.’

‘I thought she had been to a secretarial college in Newport?’ he objected.

‘For two months after she left school, that’s all,’ said Angela. ‘She hated it, she told me, that’s why she got a job in a hospital lab.’

‘OK, so we need someone who can cook, clean and type! A bit of a tall order out here in the sticks, isn’t it?’

‘It was your idea, Richard. We can only try, as like you, I’m fed up with living out of tins and making my own bed. Thank God there’s a good laundry service in Chepstow.’

He gave her a brilliant smile, making her think that he wasn’t such a bad looking fellow after all, with that wavy brown hair. A pity about those awful safari suits, though.

‘Right, I’ll see what we can do. Maybe Jimmy will know someone, he probably knows every single person between here and Monmouth.’

Angela looked doubtful. ‘God knows what sort of people he knows – probably find us a gypsy who can only cook hedgehogs!’

‘Who cares, as long as she can type!’ he said facetiously.

They both burst out laughing, almost euphoric with a sudden realization of how much of a task they had taken on with their new venture.

In the car on the way back, she told him that while he was out that morning, she had had a phone call from a solicitor in Newport wanting to arrange a blood test in a disputed paternity case.

‘A doctor in the Royal Gwent Hospital recommended us,’ she said. ‘He was in your year in medical school in Cardiff.’

Richard was delighted at some new business coming in already. ‘Who the hell would that be, I wonder? How did he know I was here?’

‘Your pal the coroner, it seems. He’s spreading the word around, thank God.’

‘Have you got all the necessary stuff for your serology yet?’ he asked, as Garth House came into view.

‘Yes, it’s all under control. Though we’ll need a new fridge to keep the sera and other things in, especially in this weather. We can’t put everything in that old relic in the kitchen, alongside our food.’

Encouraged by the prospect of cases and income, Angela went off with Sian to continue their blitz on the laboratory shelves and cupboards, while Pryor went outside to look for Jimmy Jenkins. The land belonging to Garth House sloped up fairly steeply from the main road towards the dense woodland beyond. The house was built in the lower part, within fifty yards of the road below. There was a patch of kitchen garden near the house, just behind the outhouses, but the rest of the four acres was rough grass and bushes, neglected since his aunt and uncle had died.

‘Only good for a few sheep, that is,’ said Jimmy, leaning on his hoe, with which he had been weeding between a few rows of beetroot, runner beans and carrots. He wore his usual baggy corduroy trousers, but his plaid shirt was hanging on a nearby bush, exposing his barrel-shaped chest to the hot sun.

‘I’ve got plans to start a vineyard there eventually,’ declared Richard. It was one of his recent fantasies to plant vines on the south-east facing slope and make his own wine.

Jimmy looked at him from under his poke cap as if he was mad. ‘You’d be better off with a few sheep. Grow your own meat, boss, not bloody wine!’

Jimmy drank only beer, at least a couple of pints a day down at the Three Horseshoes in Tintern and his tone suggested that he thought wine was a drink fit only for ‘nancy boys’, as he called them.

Pryor was in too good a mood to argue, so he raised the matter of a domestic help, explaining that they needed someone part-time to do a bit of cleaning and cooking.

‘Do you know anybody around here who might be interested?’ he asked his handyman.

Jimmy pushed up the back of his long-suffering cap to scratch his head with a dirty forefinger.

‘Mebbe I do, must give it a bit of thought, Doc,’ he said slowly. ‘An’ you could put a card in the post office, they got a board for free adverts there.’

Having said his piece, he started vigorously attacking the weeds with his hoe, so Richard left Jimmy to his task and went indoors, thinking that he might well take the man’s advice and put a small advertisement in the local post office.

At the time that Sian Lloyd was painstakingly tapping out Richard’s dictation of the advertisement, Trevor Mitchell was parking his car in Ledbury, a small market town between Hereford and Malvern. He had telephoned Edward Lethbridge as soon as the pathologist had left his cottage and by noon, had had a call back to say that Mrs Molly Barnes was willing to talk to him that afternoon.

‘She sounded very reluctant,’ the solicitor said. ‘But I pointed out that the coroner had agreed and that as it was an open verdict, the case could be reopened if he was not satisfied.’

Mitchell thought that this smacked of mild blackmail, but he kept his feelings to himself and agreed to meet the lady at her home in Ledbury at two thirty. He parked his Wolseley 6/80 in the High Street, finding a free space near the half-timbered Market Hall and walked up The Homend, a continuation of the main street. A quick enquiry from a passer-by directed him into a side road, where he found Molly Barnes’s small semi-detached house, probably of nineteen-twenty vintage. The brass knocker on the front door was answered by a short, wiry woman with a combative expression already on her face. If he looked like a bulldog, then she resembled a rather irritable Yorkshire terrier. In her forties, she had spiky brown hair that stood out untidily from her head. Mrs Barnes wore a faded floral pinafore and clutched a dust pan and brush in her hands.

‘You’re the enquiry man, I suppose,’ she said ungraciously. ‘You’re early, but you’d better come in, I suppose.’

Putting down the pan, she showed him into a front parlour where three gaudy china ducks were flying in formation above a tiled fireplace and a ‘cherry boy’ ornament stood on a table in the bay window. She waved him to one of the armchairs of a moquette three-piece suite that was made long before the war began and sat opposite, perched on the edge of the settee, tensing herself to defend her rights.

‘Now what’s all this?’ she demanded. ‘The coroner held an inquest and his officer gave me a death certificate.’

Mitchell, with thirty years’ experience of interviewing people, decided to tread softly with Molly Barnes.

‘Another lady has claimed that the remains might be that of her nephew, who disappeared around the same time,’ he said carefully.

‘Has she got a ring and wristwatch to prove it?’ asked Mrs Barnes, pugnaciously.

‘It would help your case a lot if you had some other evidence to confirm the identity of your husband,’ replied Mitchell gently.

‘I don’t have a case!’ she retorted. ‘My case was settled by the coroner, it’s this other woman who’s got to come up with something better!’

The former detective sighed quietly, recognizing a sharp-witted character who was not going to be trodden on.

‘What I mean is, did your husband have any physical characteristics that would help to confirm that it was really him? Had he ever broken an arm or a leg, for example?’