‘That’s my son Victor, checking on the ties, ready for the winter gales,’ said his father.
As they came up to him, Richard saw a tall young man in his early twenties, who straightened up when they approached. He had an angular face with a marked cleft chin and prominent cheekbones.
‘Victor, this is Doctor Pryor, who I told you about. He’s going to join the ranks of the Welsh wine makers.’
The younger man shook hands and gave Richard a pleasant smile.
‘I’m glad to hear it! Then the ranks will consist of two of us!’ he said heartily. He had none of the accent of his parents, though Richard realized that he must have been born in France before the war.
They chatted for a few moments, Victor explaining what he was doing. The vines had recently been pruned after the leaf fall, but needed tidying up and securing while dormant.
He walked back with them towards the outbuildings where the wine was made and Richard’s head began to spin as he assimilated information of the double-Guyot training system, varieties of grape and the basic principles of making the wine once the grapes had been grown.
‘Did you grow up in a winemaking area of France?’ he asked Louis, when he had a chance to get a word in.
‘I did indeed. My family came from the Loire region where the conditions are not all that unlike Britain. My father was a winemaker, but as I left to join the army when I was eighteen, I had to relearn the trade when we came here.’
From various bits of information, Richard gathered that the family still had land in France and that though the vineyard here was successful, it was far from being their only means of support. In fact, from the furnishings and many fine paintings and ornaments in the house, he felt that they were more than comfortably off. He wondered why they had chosen to remain in Britain after the war, when they could have made wine more easily in their native country. It was none of his business and he was not a nosy person by nature, though the thought occurred to him that perhaps there were political issues involved, as General de Gaulle was a controversial figure.
The next hour was spent blissfully in the outbuildings, where Louis had his equipment and the storage for his wines. Though some of the vats, presses and other arcane machinery looked old, the place was almost clinically clean.
‘I brought most of this over from France later,’ said Louis, with a sweep of his hand around the sheds. Though becoming bewildered with an overload of information from both father and son, Richard listened to the explanations of all the processes with fascination, determined that in a year or two, he would be doing the same thing on a much smaller scale.
The high point was a wine tasting in a small room which was almost a laboratory. Emily Dumas came out to join them with a plate of plain biscuits, so that they could enjoy several different wines from the previous year’s vintage.
‘Of course, we only make white,’ said Victor. ‘As I said, I don’t think this climate is the right one for reds.’
It was almost dusk when, reluctantly, Richard left them, happy that his afternoon had been so pleasant and informative. As he drove home through the dark lanes and then the busier main roads, he felt that his odd, almost obsessional interest in vines had been greatly strengthened, in spite of the rather pitying way in which his friends and colleagues seemed to humour him over the idea.
‘A man has to have a hobby,’ he muttered to himself, as he stared down the tunnel of his headlights. ‘Especially when he has such a damned morbid job as mine!’
He rather envied the Dumases’ way of life at that idyllic estate, though he still had the impression that there was some sort of serpent in that Garden of Eden that prevented them from being totally contented.
Just as the orders to investigate the pickled head had cascaded down through the Birmingham police hierarchy, the fact that it had been found climbed back up the same route. When it reached the ACC early that afternoon, he called in his chief superintendent, Simon Black, and asked him what they were going to do about it.
‘Is it a murder or not?’ he demanded. ‘So far, we have no evidence at all to show that this head belongs to this body in Wales.’
The CID chief agreed. ‘But the Welsh corpse has to be a murder, according to the local force. Their pathologist down there says the chap was strangled… and anyway, who’s going to bury a headless corpse unless it was unlawfully killed?’
‘What does this fellow who kept the head in his shed have to say about it? Has he coughed as to its identity?’
The chief super shrugged. ‘The DI started on him this morning, but in view of the strange nature of the whole affair, he decided to refer it up here to see how we wanted to play it.’
‘What do you think, Simon? Do you want to handle it yourself or send a DS or a DCI down there?’
Simon Black shook his head. ‘The local DI, Trevor Hartnell, is a sound man, plenty of experience. And he knows his own patch best. It would be a pity to take it off him now, at least until we know where we are with it.’
‘Getting that damned head examined is the obvious priority, to see if it does belong to that corpse in sheep-shagger country.’
His chief detective agreed. ‘Seems most sensible to ask the same pathologist to come up and have a look at it. He’s in the best position to know if they match.’
The orders went out, one down to Hartnell telling him to get on with grilling Olly Franklin and the other to the police in Cardiganshire, informing them of the latest developments and asking them to arrange for Doctor Pryor to come up to Birmingham at his earliest convenience.
In Aberystwyth, David John Jones called Meirion into his office as soon as he had put the phone down.
‘They’ve found the head! Good thing Gwyn Parry’s brother-in-law has such good contacts. It had been in some pub as was suspected, but turned up in the licensee’s shed, of all places.’
‘What happens now?’ asked his detective inspector.
‘Birmingham suggest, quite sensibly, that Doctor Pryor goes up there to examine it, so can you ring him and fix a time. You’d better be there yourself, I think, to keep up to date on our behalf. The head is being taken to the central mortuary behind the coroner’s court in Newton Street, so they said.’
This sparked a question in Meirion’s mind. ‘Which coroner will have to deal with the death, I wonder?’
The DCC turned up his hands in doubt. ‘Beats me! We’ve got the biggest bit — that’s assuming they belong together. I still can’t understand how they came to be a hundred miles apart!’
Meirion Thomas made for the door, going back to his office to start phoning around. Then he stopped for a last question.
‘What about the Yard? Do we have to tell them?’
David Jones growled something under his breath, then sighed. ‘Have to, I suppose. Maybe they won’t bother to come back here, if a big force like Birmingham is involved.’
When his DI had gone out, he swung round in his chair and glowered through his window at the inoffensive Irish Sea outside.
‘Why the hell should the damned English use our bog as a cemetery?’ he muttered.
In the police station in Winson Green, DI Hartnell and his sergeant were hard at it, trying to prise information out of Olly Franklin. A night in the cells had done little to soften his stubborn truculence, but Trevor Hartnell had been flattered by the trust his seniors had shown in his abilities and was determined to get something out of the ex-publican, even if it meant reaching down his throat.
They sat in a dismal interview room, with damp-stained green walls looking down on a bare table and chairs.
Tom Rickman sat alongside his ‘guv’nor’, notebook and pencil on the table before him, as Hartnell began all over again.
‘Look, Olly, whatever happens, you’re in the shit over this. But if you come clean, it’ll be in your favour, right?’
‘You don’t want an accessory-to-murder charge slapped on you, do you?’ contributed the sergeant. ‘So far, you’re up for concealing a death and obstructing the coroner, but they’re not exactly hanging offences. Why don’t you keep it that way?’