The going was easy on such a fine but chilly morning and the climb up over the Malvern Hills gave a superb view over the Midland Plain, which stretched away to the horizon.
‘First hills that way are the Urals, Jimmy!’ said Richard in a euphoric mood, but the geographic allusion was lost on his handyman. They stopped at a roadside cafe near Droitwich for a cup of tea, where Jimmy demolished a doorstep ham sandwich while Richard bought a copy of the Daily Telegraph. He scanned the news while his driver champed his way through his snack. Clement Attlee’s resignation from his chairmanship of the Labour Party, a black boycott of buses in Alabama, a patent taken out for something called a ‘hovercraft’ and sixteen new member countries admitted to the United Nations. None of it thrilling stuff, Richard decided and as soon as Jimmy had finished, they were back on the road again.
The last few miles into Birmingham itself were more difficult than the previous hundred, but using a street plan in the back of his atlas and then asking a police constable, they arrived in Newton Street with a few minutes to spare. The coroner’s court and mortuary were in this narrow side-street, near the centre of the city, not far from the main railway station and very close to the large children’s hospital. Courts, police stations and other civic buildings crowded the area, but to Jimmy’s satisfaction there were also several pubs within sight.
They cruised slowly down the short street until they saw the red-brick coroner’s court. It had a gate to a narrow lane at the side, from which a hearse appeared, marking it as the entrance to the mortuary.
There was no room to park in the lane, but Jimmy found a space further down the street. He declared his intention of finding the nearest boozer and promised to be back at the car in two hours’ time, happy to wait for his boss for as long as necessary.
Richard hauled his black bag out of the Humber’s boot and made his way back to the entrance of the court. Here a coroner’s officer showed him into a waiting room where DI Thomas from Cardiganshire was standing with several other plain-clothes officers from Birmingham.
Meirion Thomas introduced him to the Winson Green detectives, Trevor Hartnell and Tom Rickman. They brought him up to date with the finding of the head and the meagre information they had prised from the former publican of the Barley Mow.
‘We’re seeing another villain later this afternoon,’ explained Hartnell. ‘He’s banged up in prison, but we hope he can tell us a bit more, possibly even give us an identity.’
After a little more chat, the coroner’s officer, a middle-aged constable whose developing arthritis made him unfit to pound a beat, asked Richard if he would have a word with the coroner. He took him through into an inner sanctum, where he met Doctor Theobald Priestly, a dapper man in his fifties, who had qualified as a barrister at Lincoln’s Inn some years after becoming a medical practitioner. Richard knew that in some of the larger cities, such as London and Birmingham, doubly qualified men were preferred as coroners.
Doctor Priestly had greying ginger hair with a matching Van Dyke beard and Richard felt that with a lace collar and a rapier on his belt, he could have walked straight out of a Restoration portrait. He came around his desk and shook hands, motioning his visitor to a chair.
‘Damned odd affair this, doctor!’ he remarked, in what Richard’s mother would call a cut-glass accent. ‘Two coroners each with part of a body in two different countries!’
‘Well, we’re not yet sure that they are parts of the same body, but I’ll do my best to find out,’ replied Richard. ‘If it seems likely, which way will the parts go?’
The coroner gave his beard a brief massage.
‘I’ll have to discuss this with my counterpart at your end, but if what our CID fellows suggest may be true, then the cause of his death sounds as if it’s more a matter for this city than Aberystwyth. No hope of deciding where he died, I suppose?’
Richard shook his head. ‘I don’t see how that could be established, given the length of time that’s elapsed. With no known scene of death to examine, it seems impossible, unless some solid new evidence comes to light. But that’s a matter for the police, rather than me.’
A few minutes of chat established that they had several mutual acquaintances in the Royal Army Medical Corps, as Doctor Priestly had spent most of the war in a Field Ambulance, ending up commanding one in the Italian campaign. When Richard left his office, he felt pleased with this new contact, as the coroner had promised to keep him in mind whenever he need someone to stand in for one of his regular pathologists.
Outside, the coroner’s officer led him and the detectives down a passage and out into the body store of the mortuary, a busy place with a large throughput of bodies from the central part of the huge city. The outer area was where the hearses and plain vans loaded and unloaded coffins into a hall lined on one side by a bank of refrigerators. Beyond this was the mortuary assistants’ office, which housed the registers and the inevitable electric kettle and tray of chipped mugs and cups.
An amiable senior technician welcomed them and promised tea and biscuits as soon as they had finished.
‘A bit out of the usual run of “pee-ems”, doctor!’ he observed. ‘A body in a bucket, almost! I thought we could do the necessary on one of the tables, if that suits you.’
They trooped into the main post-mortem room, a large, bare chamber with a partial glass roof and half a dozen porcelain autopsy tables in a row down the centre. Waiting there was a police photographer with a large camera and flashgun.
Three of the slabs had corpses on them, one being in the process of being sewn up and made presentable by another mortuary attendant. On one of the empty tables stood a metal container with a police exhibits label tied to its handle with string. The photographer began by taking a few shots of it, the flashes from the bulbs illuminating the whole room.
‘What do you need, doctor?’ asked the senior technician solicitously. ‘Will just an apron and gloves do, or do you want a gown as well?
Richard settled for a green rubber apron and some rubber gloves and approached the table with the canister. Close behind came the two CID men, Trevor Hartnell already lighting up a cigarette. ‘Can’t stand the stink in these places,’ he said apologetically. ‘Blood and Lysol, I reckon!’
His detective sergeant seemed immune to smells and stood impassively on the opposite side of the white table, still wearing his belted mackintosh and wide-brimmed trilby.
‘Right, sir, I’d better identify this properly to you.’ Hartnell, who wore a heavy grey overcoat, tapped the label on the handle. ‘This is the container we recovered yesterday from a shed at 183 Markby Road, Handsworth. It’s been dusted for prints, not that I think that will help after it’s been knocking about for all these years.’
Richard took a stainless-steel T-bar from the assortment of mortuary tools left on the table. This was like a short, wide screwdriver with a crossbar, used for levering off skullcaps after they had been sawn through. He used it now to pop off the lid, which he laid to one side, allowing a pungent aroma to arise from the interior of the drum.
‘That’s mainly methylated spirit, by its smell,’ he remarked. Peering inside, he saw strands of hair floating under the surface, but resisted the temptation to use them to lift out the head, in case they detached from the scalp. Sliding both gloved hands down the sides, he carefully hoisted it out and laid it on the table.
The head was covered in shrivelled skin of a pale greyish colour, with a wizened caricature of a face. It seemed to have collapsed in on itself, the cheeks hollow and the eyelids lying back in sunken sockets. There was no sign of decomposition and the hair, which was still black, lay in wisps across the scalp. The lips had contracted back in a bizarre grin, showing irregular teeth in grey gums.