Where Death Delights Read Online Free PDF Page B

She’s dead keen on winning this one, her nephew must have a lot of family money tucked away and she wants it.’
    Pryor looked pleased at this. ‘I’m glad we can work together on this. As a doctor, it’s a bit difficult for me to go knocking on doors and asking questions.’
    Mitchell’s face screwed up even more as a quizzical expression spread across his face.
    â€˜What sort of questions, Doc?’
    â€˜Well, anything noticeable about this Albert Barnes, which would be inconsistent with what’s described in this post-mortem report, little though that is.’
    Mitchell thought for a moment. ‘Like a hunchback or club foot, you mean?’
    â€˜That sort of thing – but we wouldn’t get that from his wife, who sounds as keen as our client on proving that the remains were that of her relative.’
    â€˜But we might get something from a neighbour, perhaps.’
    The pathologist nodded. ‘At least they wouldn’t be biased witnesses. It’s a long shot, but we’ve got little else to go on.’
    â€˜And of course, we haven’t got the bones any more, they’re buried,’ added Mitchell.
    Pryor nodded. ‘Without getting a sight of those, I can’t see we can go much further.’ He finished his coffee and stood up.
    â€˜I said I’d be at Newnham by eleven o’clock. Mustn’t keep the lady waiting, especially as she sounds like an old-fashioned stickler for good behaviour. I’ll see if there’s any more medical details I can get from her. A pity we’ve got no head.’
    â€˜At the moment, we’ve got nothing at all, Doc,’ said Mitchell, accompanying him to the door. ‘I’ll make arrangements to see Mrs Barnes to get her end of the story. She won’t be thrilled to see me, if she realizes that I’m trying to throw doubt on the coroner’s findings.’
    Asking his host to thank his wife for the coffee, Richard made his way to his car, where he sat and pulled out a dog-eared book of AA road maps that had belonged to his father. Though he knew the area fairly well, from holidays with his aunt before the war, he needed to check on the route to Newnham, which was on the other side of the forest, on the main A48 to Gloucester. His finger traced out the road up to Coleford, then across to Cinderford and down an unclassified road to Newnham, which lay right on the river. Richard recalled it was one of the best places to see the famous Severn Bore, another memory from his student days.
    He set off, window down in the rising heat and drove across the forest, through the most heavily wooded part of the Royal Forest that had provided England with so many ships in centuries gone by. In midsummer, the foliage was still fresh and green, quite different from the deep, lush colours of the jungle and rubber trees with which he had become so familiar during his years in the Far East. However, today the temperature was almost as great, a freak heatwave for June – but it was a dry heat, not the suffocating dampness of the tropics.
    The road took him past the seventeenth-century Speech House in the middle of the forest, where the Verderers still held their Court every forty days, as they had done since the time of King Canute. Richard had learned these nuggets of local history during his pre-war holiday tours with Uncle Arthur in his old Morris Ten saloon.
    As he came down the last lap of the journey into Newnham, the panorama of the narrowing river estuary lay below him, spread out like a map. The town had one main street which was the A48 trunk road, running downhill, then turning towards the river bank. When his small side road met the main one, he followed Trevor Mitchell’s directions and turned up into a narrow service lane that ran in front of a row of old houses. He remembered the brick clock tower in the middle of the town and the sixteenth-century Victoria Hotel at the top of the main