Death of an Expert Witness (4 page)

He was her husband and she loved him. But he mustn't resign. What other job could he get? What else was he suited for? Unemployment was as bad in East Anglia as it was elsewhere. There was the mortgage to pay and the electricity bill for the central heating --they couldn't economize there because of Debbie needing warmth--and the hire-purchase on the bedroom suite to find. Even the nursery furniture wasn't paid for yet. She had wanted everything nice and new for Debbie, but it had taken all their remaining savings. She said:

"Couldn't you apply to Establishment Department for a transfer?"

The despair in his voice tore at her heart. "No one will want me if Lorrimer says I'm no good. He's probably the best forensic biologist in the service. If he thinks I'm useless, then I'm useless."

It was this, too, which she was beginning to find irritating, the obsequious respect of the victim for his oppressor. Sometimes, appalled by her disloyalty, she could begin to understand Dr.

Lorrimer's contempt. She said:

"Why not have a word with the director?"

"I might have done if Dr. Mac was still there. But Howarth wouldn't care. He's new. He doesn't want any trouble with the senior staff, particularly now when we're getting ready to move into the new Lab."

And then she thought of Mr. Middlemass. He was the Principal Scientific Officer Document Examiner, and she had worked for him as a young S.O. before her marriage. It was at Hoggatt's Laboratory that she had met Cliff. Perhaps he could do something, could speak to Howarth for them, could use his influence with Estabs. She wasn't sure how she expected him to help, but the need to confide in someone was overwhelming. They couldn't go on like this. Cliff would have a break down. And how would she manage with the baby and Cliff ill and the future uncertain? But surely Mr. Middlemass could do something. She believed in him because she needed to believe. She looked across at Cliff.

"Don't worry, darling, it's going to be all right. We're going to think of something. You go in today and we'll talk about it in the evening."

"How can we? Your mother's coming to supper."

"After supper then. She'll be catching the quarter to eight bus. We'll talk then."

"I can't go on like this, Sue."

"You won't have to. I'll think of something. It's going to be all right. I promise you, darling. It's going to be all right."

"Mum, did you know that every human being is unique?"

"Of course I did. It stands to reason, doesn't it? There's only one of every person. You're you. I'm me. Pass your Dad the marmalade and keep your sleeves out of that butter."

Brenda Pridmore, recently appointed Clerical Officer/receptionist at Hoggatt's Laboratory, pushed the marmalade across the breakfast table and began methodically slicing thin strips from the white of her fried egg, postponing, as she had from early childhood, that cataclysmic moment when she would plunge the fork into the glistening yellow dome.

But indulgence in this small personal ritual was almost automatic. Her mind was preoccupied with the excitements and discoveries of her wonderful first job.

"I mean biologically unique. Inspector Blakelock, he's the Assistant Police Liaison Officer, told me that every human being has a unique fingerprint and no two types of blood are exactly the same. If the scientists had enough systems they could distinguish them all, the blood types I mean. He thinks that day may come in time. The forensic serologist will be able to say with certainty where the blood came from, even with a dried stain. It's dried blood that's difficult. If that blood is fresh we can do far more with it."

"Funny job you've got yourself." Mrs. Pridmore refilled the teapot from the kettle on the Aga hob and eased herself back into her chair.

The farmhouse kitchen, its flowered cretonne curtains still undrawn was warm and cosily domestic, smelling of toast, fried bacon and hot strong tea.

"I don't know that I like the idea of you checking in bits of body and bloodstained clothes. I hope you wash your hands properly before you come home."

"Oh Mum, it's not like that! The exhibits all arrive in plastic bags with identifying tags. We have to be ever so particular that all of them are labelled and properly entered in the book. It's a question of continuity of evidence, what Inspector Blakelock calls the integrity of the sample. And we don't get bits of body."

Remembering suddenly the sealed bottles of stomach contents, the carefully dissected pieces of liver and intestines, looking, when you came to think of it, no more frightening than exhibits in the science laboratory at school, she said quickly:

"Well, not in the way you mean. Dr. Kerrison does all the cutting up. He's a forensic pathologist attached to the Laboratory. Of course, some of the organs come to us for analysis."

Inspector Blakelock, she remembered, had told her that the Laboratory refrigerator had once held a whole head. But that wasn't the kind of thing to tell Mum. She rather wished that the Inspector hadn't told her. The refrigerator, squat and gleaming like a surgical sarcophagus, had held a sinister fascination for her ever since. But Mrs. Pridmore had seized gratefully on a familiar name.

"I know who Dr. Kerrison is, I should hope. Lives at the Old Rectory at Chevisham alongside the church, doesn't he? His wife ran off with one of the doctors at the hospital, left him and the two kids, that odd-looking daughter and the small boy, poor little fellow. You remember all the talk there was at the time, Arthur?"

Her husband didn't reply, nor did she expect him to. It was an understood convention that Arthur Pridmore left breakfast conversation to his women. Brenda went happily on:

"Forensic science isn't just helping the police to discover who's guilty. We help clear the innocent too. People sometimes forget that.

We had a case last month--of course, I can't mention names-when a sixteen-year-old choir girl accused her vicar of rape. Well, he was innocent."

"So I should hope! Rape indeed!"

"But it looked very black against him. Only he was lucky. He was a secreter."

"A what, for goodness' sake?"

"He secreted his blood group in all his body fluids. Not everyone does. So the biologist was able to examine his saliva and compare his blood group with the stains on the victim's ..."

"Not at breakfast, Brenda, if you don't mind." Brenda, her eyes suddenly alighting on a round milk stain on the tablecloth, herself thought that breakfast wasn't perhaps the most suitable time for a display of her recently acquired information about the investigation of rape. She went on to a safer subject.

"Dr. Lorrimer--he's the Principal Scientific Officer in charge of the Biology Department-says that I ought to work for an "A' level subject and try for a job as an Assistant Scientific Officer. He thinks that I could do better than just a clerical job. And once I got my A.S.O. I'd be on a scientific grade and could work myself up. Some of the most famous forensic scientists have started that way, he said. He's offered to give me a reading list, and he says he doesn't see why I shouldn't use some of the Laboratory equipment for my practical work."

"I didn't know that you worked in the Biology Department."

"I don't. I'm mainly on Reception with Inspector Blakelock, and sometimes I help out in the general office. But we got talking when I had to spend an afternoon in his Laboratory checking reports for courts with his staff, and he was ever so nice. A lot of people don't like him. They say he's too strict; but I think he's just shy. He might have been Director if the Home Office hadn't passed him over and appointed Dr.

Howarth."

"He seems to be taking quite an interest in you, this Mr. Lorrimer."

"Dr. Lorrimer, Mum."

"Dr. Lorrimer, then. Though why he wants to call himself a doctor beats me. You don't have any patients at the Lab."

"He's a Ph.D." Mum. Doctor of Philosophy."

"Oh, is he? I thought he was supposed to be a scientist. Anyway, you'd better watch your step."

"Oh, Mum, don't be daft. He's old. He must be forty or more. Mum, did you know that our Lab is the oldest forensic science lab in the country? There are regional labs covering the whole country but ours was the first. Colonel Hoggatt started it in Chevisham Manor when he was Chief Constable in 1912, then left the manor house to his force when he died. Forensic science was in its infancy then, Inspector Blakelock says, and Colonel Hoggatt was one of the first Chief Constables to see its possibilities. We've got his portrait in the hall. We're the only lab with its founder's name. That's why the Home Office has agreed that the new Laboratory will still be called Hoggatt's. Other police forces send their exhibits to their regional laboratory. North-East or the Metropolitan and so on. But in East Anglia they say "Better send it to Hoggatt's.""

"You'd better send yourself to Hoggatt's if you want to get there by eight-thirty. And I don't want you taking any short cuts through the new Lab. It isn't safe, only half-built, especially these dark mornings. Like as not you'd fall into the foundations or get a brick down on your head. They're not safe, building sites aren't. Look what happened to your Uncle Will."

"All right, Mum. We're not supposed to go through the new Lab anyway.

Besides, I'm going by bike. Are these my sandwiches or Dad's?"

"Yours, of course. You know your dad's home to dinner on Wednesdays.

Cheese and tomato this morning, and I've put you in a boiled egg."

When Brenda had waved goodbye, Mrs. Pridmore sat down for her second cup of tea and looked across at her husband.

"I suppose it's all right, this job she's found for herself." Arthur Pridmore, when he did condescend to talk at breakfast, talked with the magisterial authority of head of his family, Mr. Bowlem's bailiff and people's warden at the village church. He laid down his fork.

"It's a good job, and she was lucky to get it. Plenty of girls from the grammar school after it, weren't they? An established civil servant, isn't she? And look what they're paying her. More than the pig man gets at the farm. Pensionable too. She's a sensible girl and she'll be all right. There aren't many opportunities left locally for girls with good "O' levels. And you didn't want her to take a job in London."

No indeed, Mrs. Pridmore hadn't wanted Brenda to go to London, a prey to muggers, IRA. terrorists and what the Press mysteriously called "the drug scene." None of her infrequent, but uneventful and pleasant, visits to the capital on Women's Institute theatre excursions or rare shopping trips had failed to shake her conviction that Liverpool Street was the cavernous entry to an urban jungle, where predators armed with bombs and syringes lurked in every Underground station, and seducers laid their snares for innocent provincials in every office. Brenda, thought her mother, was a very pretty girl. Well, no point in denying it, she took after her mother's side of the family for looks even if she had her dad's brains, and Mrs. Pridmore had no intention of exposing her to the temptations of London. Brenda was walking out with Gerald Bowlem, younger son of her father's boss, and if that came off there's no denying it would be a very satisfactory marriage. He wouldn't get the main farm, of course, but there was a very nice little property over at Wisbech which would come to him. Mrs. Pridmore couldn't see the sense of more examinations and all this talking about a career. This job at the Lab would do Brenda very well until she married. But it was a pity that there was all this emphasis on blood.

As if reading her thoughts, her husband said: "Of course it's exciting for her. It's all new. But I daresay it's no different from other jobs, pretty dull most of the time. I don't reckon anything really frightening will happen to our Brenda at Hoggatt's Lab."

This conversation about their only child's first job was one they'd had before, a comforting reiteration of mutual reassurance. In imagination Mrs. Pridmore followed her daughter as she pedalled vigorously on her way; bumping down the rough farm track between Mr. Bowlem's flat fields to Tenpenny Road, past old Mrs. Button's cottage where, as a child, she had been given rice-cake and home-made lemonade, by Tenpenny Dyke where she still picked cowslips in summer, then a right turn into Chevisham Road and the straight two miles skirting Captain Massey's land and into Chevisham village. Every yard of it was familiar, reassuring, un menacing And even Hoggatt's Laboratory, blood or no blood, had been part of the village for over seventy years, while Chevisham Manor had stood for nearly three times as long. Arthur was right. Nothing frightening could happen to their Brenda at Hoggatt's.

Mrs. Pridmore, comforted, drew back the curtains and settled down to enjoy her third cup of tea.

At ten minutes to nine the post van stopped outside Sprogg's Cottage on the outskirts of Chevisham to deliver a single letter. It was addressed to Miss Stella Mawson, Lavender Cottage, Chevisham, but the postman was a local man and the difference in name caused him no confusion. There had been Sproggs living in the cottage for four generations, and the small triangle of green in front of the gate had been Sprogg's Green for almost as long. The present owner, having improved the cottage by the addition of a small brick garage and a modern bathroom and kitchen, had decided to celebrate the metamorphosis by planting a lavender hedge and renaming the property. But the villagers regarded the new name as no more than a foreigner's eccentric fancy which they were under no obligation either to use or recognize.