‘No known associates? Any hard men he owes money to?’
Paget turned up his hands appealingly. ‘Damn all, sir. We’ll keep on looking, but I think Arthur’s right. It has to be someone at Ty Croes.’
Morris threw his pencil down on the desk. ‘So what do we do now? Are we going to call in the Yard? If so, we’ve got to get a move on.’
For many years, small police forces had been able to call on Scotland Yard for assistance, who would send a detective superintendent down to offer their expert help. This had to be done within a week, otherwise financial charges would be imposed. Most provincial police forces, especially the larger ones, made it a point of honour not to call in the Yard, feeling it was a slur on their own abilities. DI Crippen was certainly in this category.
‘Oh, not the bloody Yard, sir! We don’t want them throwing their weight about down here. There’s nothing they can do that we can’t.’
His chief nodded gravely, his double chin bobbing. ‘I’m not keen myself, but it’s up to the Chief Constable, as he’ll have the press and the Watch Committee on his back before long. Thankfully, few people seem to have got wind of this yet, but it can’t stay under wraps forever.’
They kicked the problem around for a further half-hour without coming to much of a conclusion. Arthur Crippen’s last contribution seemed the only way forward for the moment.
‘It’s got to be someone at that damned farm. I’ll go back there and worry the life out of them until something breaks, sir!’
SEVEN
By the time Richard Pryor returned to Tintern from Bristol, both Moira and Siân had left for the day. He drove his Humber up into the yard at the back of Garth House and parked it in the coach house, alongside Angela’s little white Renault 4CV.
He took his old briefcase from the back of the car and began walking towards the back door, but he was accosted by a figure coming down from the garden behind. It was Jimmy Jenkins, their gardener and odd-job man, who sometimes added being their driver to his accomplishments. Jimmy had been inherited with the house, as he had been employed by Aunt Gladys for years and when Richard took over he seemed to have continued in his job by default.
A well-known character in the area, Jimmy was about fifty, with a weather-beaten face decorated by a broken nose and a set of crooked, tobacco-stained teeth. He always seemed to have half a Woodbine stuck to his lower lip, and Richard could never remember seeing him smoking a whole cigarette. His bristly grey hair was surmounted by a greasy cap perched over one eye – Jimmy habitually wore thick flannel shirts, over which were the braces that held up his corduroy trousers.
‘I’ve run the cultivator over your patch again, doctor,’ he announced in an accent from the Forest of Dean, which lay just across the river. ‘Needs doing once more before you puts in them fancy plants. Best do it soon, before the cold weather comes.’
The ‘patch’ that he rather sarcastically referred to was a quarter of an acre of the four acres of land that rose up the hill behind Garth House – and the ‘fancy plants’ were vines that Richard had ordered from a distant nursery. He had ambitions to start a small vineyard on the south-facing slope, as the climate of the sheltered Wye Valley was mild. Jimmy was contemptuous of the idea, trying to persuade his boss to grow strawberries instead, but Richard was adamant, even though he knew virtually nothing about horticulture.
They spoke about his pet project for a few minutes before Richard could escape. ‘I’ve got to go to Cardiff in the morning, so could you give the car a wash tonight?’
He declined Jimmy’s offer to drive him there, and as the man went off to fix up the hosepipe he went into the house.
Angela was still at her bench, finishing off a batch of paternity tests. Richard put his head around the laboratory door to let her know that he was back.
‘Did you find anything useful in Bristol?’ she asked, looking up with a pipette hovering over a rack of small tubes.
He hefted his document case to show her, a battered crocodile-skin bag that he had bought years ago in Ceylon.
‘I think so, but I’d like your opinion on it this evening. I’m going down to the library in Cardiff tomorrow to see if I can dig out anything else.’
She nodded as she pulled another rack towards her.
‘Fine. We’ll talk about it after supper.’
He went off to his room down the passage and spent half an hour reading the mail and checking some reports that Moira had typed that day on post-mortems he had done at Chepstow and Monmouth. Then he pulled down a couple of textbooks from his shelves and began pursuing some of the matters that he had discovered in the medical school library in Bristol.
Eventually, his partner banged on his door and called out ‘Supper!’ to call him into the kitchen. Here Moira had laid out two places on the big table and left a casserole for them in the warming oven of the Aga. Originally, she had been employed to do basic housekeeping, some cooking and a little typing, but as the business had increased, Moira had become overburdened. Now a buxom woman from the village came in for two hours each day to clean and make beds, while Moira made lunch and left them something each evening for supper. It was great improvement on the early days, when Richard and Angela virtually camped out in the old house, eating out of tins.
Only the two partners took meals, as figure-conscious Siân always brought sandwiches, an apple and a bottle of Tizer, while Moira herself went home at midday to feed her dog. As Pryor sat down in anticipation of one of Moira’s casseroles, for she was an excellent cook, Angela opened a tin of Heinz oxtail soup and warmed it for their first course. When she first came to Garth House, she was adamant that she was not going to be involved in any domesticity, but her resolve had slipped a little and now she was prepared to do a few things, but she drew the line at proper cooking and cleaning.
They finished up with a fruit salad and local cream, which Moira had left for them in the old Kelvin refrigerator, then Richard made coffee, his contribution to the domestic scene. He took this into the staffroom next door, and the pair settled down on each side of the low table.
‘So what have you got from your ferreting around in Bristol?’ she asked.
He delved into his briefcase and brought out some loose papers and a foolscap legal pad, several pages of which were covered with his handwriting.
‘I wish they had one of those new copying machines in their library,’ he complained. ‘I had to write everything out longhand.’
He slid the papers across the table and settled back with his coffee to wait for her to digest the contents. When Angela had looked through the first couple of pages, she looked up at him.
‘Can you prove this beyond reasonable doubt?’ she asked soberly, using the standard for evidence that applied in criminal cases. In civil matters, only the ‘balance of probabilities’ was needed, but they both knew that this would not be sufficient in a murder trial.
Richard shrugged. ‘All I can do is offer the conclusions of this chap who did the research. The other stuff you have there is watertight, as it’s been accepted fact for years.’
He watched her intently as she went back to her reading. Angela was a very intelligent woman whose opinion he valued highly. With an honours degree and a doctorate in a biological science, and years of experience in its forensic applications, she would be able to appreciate the significance of the material at least as well as he could with his medical training.
Her coffee neglected, her head was bent over the papers, a swathe of dark brown hair falling over her face. Richard experienced a wave of respect tinged with affection for her. Though there had been no repetition or even reference to the momentary episode on the stairs the other evening, he felt that their relationship had somehow warmed and that they felt more comfortable with each other. When he first met her and, indeed, even when she came to take up residence in Garth House, he found her manner rather cool, showing him a purely professional face. Now she felt more like a sister or an attractive cousin, and he briefly wondered if it would ever go further. His daydreaming was interrupted when she dropped the papers back on to the table and took up her now lukewarm coffee.