‘We must tell Priscilla about this, unless it’s already all over the local papers down in Cardiganshire,’ said Angela. ‘She was in on it from the very beginning. In fact, she owes her new university post to this beheaded gangster, as otherwise she would never have met Doctor Boross!’
‘Well, it certainly beats going down the Labour Exchange as a means of looking for a job!’ giggled Sian.
It was one of those cold, fine days that occur in winter, with a thin blue sky looking down on frosted fields, as Angela and Richard drove to Cardiff on their way to the vineyard in St Mary Church. They had decided to make a day of it, as it was the first time that Angela had been to the city, declared the capital of Wales only a few months before. After an early lunch in the Angel Hotel, the place where Louis Dumas had met his alleged son, Richard walked her around the centre of the city, which he knew well from six years there as a medical student. She dutifully admired the huge castle and the superb buildings of the civic centre, although secretly she would have preferred spending the time in the three large department stores.
Then a forty-minute drive through the Vale of Glamorgan brought them to ‘Chateau Dumas’, as her partner insisted on calling it, where a rather apprehensive Louis and Emily received them courteously. They ushered them into the sitting room, where a tall young man rose to greet them. Black-haired and serious of face, the two doctors saw nothing of either of his presumed parents in his features — but Richard recalled that the younger son Victor also bore no particular resemblance to them. The father introduced him as Pierre Fouret and the soft-spoken Canadian replied in an accent which was more French than North American.
‘I understand that we all have to undergo this ordeal of the needle!’ he said, in a tone intended to lighten the rather tense atmosphere. Angela, who was rather taken by this good-looking man, went along with his ploy.
‘Just a small prick in the arm, Monsieur Fouret. I guarantee that you’ll survive!’
The bloodletting was performed swiftly and discreetly in Louis’s study across the hall, Angela’s experienced hands taking the three samples into her labelled tubes with the minimum of drama or disturbance. When she had repacked her bag and washed her hands, they went back to the sitting room for the inevitable tea and biscuits. They made rather strained small talk for a while, keeping off the subject of the Dumas family problems. Pierre told them of his life as a tractor salesman and the travelling it entailed.
‘I’m off back to Quebec next week and will probably be in the States and Mexico for a few months,’ he explained. ‘I doubt I’ll be sent back to Europe until the autumn.’
Richard wondered if this was a coded message that he would not be hanging around the family, seeking to ingratiate himself with them. The time soon came for them to leave and as they rose to go, Richard learned that Louis intended driving Pierre back to Cardiff to catch the train for London.
Richard and Angela made their way to the Humber, parked on the gravel area outside, as the Dumas clan said their goodbyes. Angela got into the front seat and as Richard was putting her case in the boot, he saw another car turning into the driveway from the road outside. It was a new yellow Triumph TR2, a two-seater sports car with the hood down, in spite of the winter weather. It drew up nearby and Victor Dumas got out, muffled in a heavy car coat and a scarf. He looked rather surprised to see Richard, but greeted him affably.
‘Hello, doctor! I didn’t expect to see you back here in this cold weather. I’m afraid the vines are all fast asleep for the next few months.’
Feeling rather uncomfortable, Richard saw no alternative but to say why he was there.
‘Just called in to take some blood samples. We were just leaving, actually.’
Victor’s face changed in an instant as he realized the implications. His smile vanished and his face reddened in anger.
‘Is that bloody crook here?’ he snarled. ‘I’ll not have him pestering my parents, they’ve suffered enough!’
As if on cue, the trio from the house appeared at the front door and stopped dead as soon as they saw Victor outside. As he marched angrily towards them, his father stepped forward and attempted to act as peacemaker.
‘Victor, come and meet Pierre Fouret. He’s just come to have a blood sample taken…’
He got no further, as Victor began ranting at the older man, who stood impassively under a barrage of invective and abuse, the thrust of which was that he was a scheming charlatan, out to make trouble and wheedle his way into his parents’ affections.
Emily began to weep, Louis tried ineffectually to restrain his younger son and Richard wished the ground would open up under him, so that he could avoid witnessing this highly embarrassing family feud. He was glad that Angela was already in the car, hunkering down and pretending that she was unaware of what was going on.
The row escalated rapidly, as Victor closed with Pierre and tried to drag him away from his mother and father. Although the visitor had kept silent until now, he resisted Victor’s physical force and told him to behave himself.
This further inflamed the aggressor, who began shouting at him to go and continued to pull at his arm. Pierre shook him off, his self-control obviously weakening under the provocation. The climax came when Victor swung a punch at the other man, catching him on the shoulder. Pierre pushed him away, in a last attempt to distance himself, but this made things worse, as Victor followed up with a heavy blow in the stomach, which made Pierre grunt with pain. This was too much for his self-restraint and he landed a fist squarely on Victor’s nose, which immediately began to bleed profusely. He staggered back and almost fell into Richard’s arms, as the pathologist had decided that he had better try to dampen down the rumpus.
His first reaction was to pull out his handkerchief and offer it to Victor, who automatically clapped it to his nose, then thrust it back as he pulled out his own.
‘I’m going and I’ll not be back while that impostor is here,’ he screamed emotionally, though it was somewhat muffled as he staunched the dribble from his bruised nose. Without another word, he almost ran to his car and sped away in a shower of gravel.
Angela was about to get out of the Humber, her better nature overcoming her reluctance to becoming embroiled in a family fracas. She thought she had better see if there was any female comfort she could offer the distressed Emily Dumas, but Richard, after a quick word with her husband, came back to the car and slipped into the driving seat.
‘Louis says it would be best if we left them to cope with their embarrassment alone,’ he explained and with some half-hearted waves from the group at the door, they left the unhappy house with a rather guilty sense of relief.
It took Angela almost the whole of the next day to put the samples through a wide battery of grouping tests and Sian and Moira had left by the time she went into Richard’s room with a sheaf of papers in her hand. He looked up from his microscope, where he was going through some slides prepared by Sian that day.
‘Have you worked your magic to a satisfactory conclusion, Doctor Bray?’ he asked, being in one of his frequent whimsical moods.
Angela sat on a stool alongside him and waved the forms at him. ‘I don’t suppose you want all the details, as I know you have never grasped the beautiful logic of genetics.’
He grinned back at her. ‘It’s a blind spot in my otherwise powerful intellect! Could never fathom all these blood groups with fancy names — Rhesus, MNS, Lutheran and all the rest of them. Just give me the answer, lady!’
She dropped the papers on the desk in front of him.
‘Right, if that’s what you want. Firstly, Pierre Fouret or Maurice, or whatever you want to call him, is certainly not eliminated as being the biological offspring of Emily and Louis Dumas. In fact, in terms of probability, there’s about an eighty-five per cent likelihood that he is their son, given the congruity of various subgroups.’