Where Death Delights (34 page)

‘Not safe to do that,' she advised. ‘It often contains diatoms that grow inside the pipes.'

The digests were centrifuged to throw what was left of the solids down to the bottom of the tubes, then she repeated this twice more to dilute the acid to harmless proportions.

‘Now let's have a look at those,' she said, taking the tubes over to the microscope.

Putting a drop of the final sludge on to a glass slide and dropping a coverslip on to it, she peered through the eyepieces for a few moments, twiddling the stage controls to move the slides around under the high-power lenses.

Then she leaned back to let Sian's glossy head take her place. ‘Plenty in the lung! Have a squint at those. Good old Bristol Channel diatoms!'

When Sian had satisfied herself, Angela went through the extracts from brain, liver, bone marrow and kidney.

She was glued to the microscope much longer this time, but eventually got up and declared herself satisfied.

‘Thought we were going to draw a blank, but the marrow has hit the jackpot,' she said. ‘You need to find a reasonable number of diatoms, not just one or two – then hope the chap hadn't been eating cockles or oysters the night before!'

Her technician seemed very taken by the technique and wanted to practice for herself.

‘I'll have a go at the next body from the water myself,' she promised. Angela, impressed by her keenness, had a suggestion.

‘We kept some tissues from the Gower case. Why don't you use those, as Richard was convinced she was drowned, so it should be a good positive.'

Full of enthusiasm and without any other pressing work for the moment, Sian looked out the labelled pots and started on the digestions. Angela kept a motherly eye on her from a distance, but let her get on with the procedures herself. By the afternoon, the acid digestion was completed and Sian happily made up the slides from the various tissues.

She spent a long time staring at them down the microscope, while Angela was busy with a paternity test on another bench.

‘Any joy, Sian?' called the biologist eventually.

‘Plenty in the lungs, but of course, you said that's of no use in proving drowning,' she replied, sounding rather disappointed.

‘Are there none in the other organs, then?'

‘Yes, I've only found half a dozen in the kidney and another five in the marrow. Is that enough?'

Angela rose and came across the room.

‘Let's have a look. Lung first, eh?'

Sian gave up her seat and stood alongside, while Angela peered down the instrument, then slid the other organ slides into place under the lenses. This seemed to go on for a long time and the technician became restless.

‘Did I do it properly?' she asked anxiously.

Angela made no direct reply but asked her to hand down a book from a nearby shelf.

‘The thin green one, on the end,' she said in a worried tone. She riffled through the pages and Sian saw dozens of photographs and drawings of diatoms, some boat-shaped, some circular, others like needles.

‘Give me that lung slide we made this morning, please. The one from the oil tanker death.'

Still with no explanation, Angela changed the specimens on the microscope stage, then changed them back again.

When she looked up at her technician, her face was serious.

‘Sian, can you give Richard a call, please? I think we've got a problem!'

‘But that's bloody impossible!' he exclaimed. ‘Linda's body was hauled out of the sea by the coastguards, so we know she was in there!'

Angela shook her head stubbornly.

‘I'm not denying that she had been in the sea, there are plenty of marine diatoms in her lungs. But she didn't
die
in sea water. It was fresh!'

Richard stared down the microscope, though he was none the wiser until Angela pointed out various illustrations in the atlas of diatoms that was still open on the bench.

‘The ones in the kidney and marrow are all freshwater species, no marine ones at all. There are stacks of them in the lungs as well, but of course they're mixed with marine diatoms, as she had been submerged later in the sea.'

Pryor jumped from the stool and paced back and forth.

‘There's no possibility of some mistake?' he demanded. ‘Could the samples have been mixed up?'

Angela was unruffled. She pointed to the bench top.

‘There are the pots in front of you! You were the one who brought them back and it's your writing on the labels, as well as the signature of the DI who was there.'

Sian, who had been standing wide-eyed listening to this, decided to join in.

‘I was the one who did the digestion, Doctor. I'll do it all over again, just to make sure.'

Moira came in with some forms to sign and immediately sensed that something was going on.

‘What's happening?' she asked. ‘Am I interrupting something?'

‘These two ladies have thrown a great big spanner in the works!' said Richard. ‘I suppose we should have looked for these blasted diatoms straight after I did the PM, but it just didn't seen necessary, it was so obvious that she had drowned.'

‘And now you've discovered that she didn't?' gasped Moira, afraid that her perfect doctor had dropped a huge clanger.

‘No, not at all,' said Richard. ‘But she drowned in the wrong sort of water!'

Angela explained that diatoms in sea water were different from those in fresh water. ‘Though there's an overlap, there is such a preponderance of some species that there's no doubt which water it was. In fact, it's said to be possible to tell whether someone drowned in the brackish waters of an estuary, if both sorts are found together.'

They all thought about this for a moment.

‘So where did the poor woman drown?' asked the practical Moira.

‘In almost any water but the sea,' sighed Angela. ‘They're everywhere – rivers, streams, ponds, lakes, even puddles if they've been there long enough.'

‘So you could even find them in the bird bath in your garden?' said Sian.

‘Yes, but you have a job to drown in a bird bath,' objected Moira.

Richard was not so sure. ‘There have been plenty of cases of people drowning in only a few inches of water, like a big puddle or a bucket. Of course they'd either have to be drunk or drugged, unless someone was holding them so that their nose and mouth were covered.'

There was another pregnant silence at this.

‘Holding her face under?' said Angela sepulchrally.

‘But under what?'

Richard stopped pacing. ‘That's for the police to discover. But could you identify a particular source of water by the type of diatoms, Angela?'

She shook her head. ‘Not firmly enough to give in evidence. This diatom business is only now being considered as useful, even though it's been suggested on and off for ages. Many people are still too critical of it to use it routinely.'

‘So you couldn't definitely identify any river or lake as being the place? Not that there seems to be any of those around Pennard, it's on top of the cliffs.'

‘She could have been driven from anywhere,' pointed out Sian. ‘You said this Prentice chap has got a big Jaguar, he could have brought her from Lake Windermere, for all we know!'

‘When are you going to tell the CID, Richard?' asked Angela. ‘I think we ought to repeat the tests, just to be on the safe side.'

‘I'll work all night, if you want me to,' volunteered Sian, eagerly.

Angela tempered her enthusiasm a little. ‘Let's get the digestions started now, then they can simmer all night, so that we can look at them first thing in the morning.'

Richard nodded his agreement. ‘Then I'll ring Ben Evans and make his day! Angela, if he finds some suitable water in the district, we may have to go down there and sample it for diatoms.'

Detective Superintendent Evans slammed his phone down and gave a roar of delight.

‘Lewis, come in here!' he yelled out of the door. As his inspector hurried in from the CID room outside, he gave him the news like a trumpet call.

‘I reckon we may have got that swine Prentice! Doc Pryor and his team have done some fancy tests and reckon Linda didn't die in the bloody sea at all!'

He explained what he'd been told on the telephone and though neither of them fully understood the technicalities, they knew they had to find some fresh water that would fit the bill.

‘Are we going down there now?' asked Lewis. ‘What are we looking for?'

‘I've arranged with the doctor to come down today, with the lady scientist who discovered this. She was a forensic expert from the Met Lab, so she must know what she's talking about.'

‘Where's Prentice now? Still working in that place of his in Jersey Marine, I suppose.'

‘To hell with him for the moment, we've got to find some water around there. Apparently, this lady may want to take some samples.'

By noon, Richard and Angela were on the road in the Humber, with a cardboard box containing a dozen glass sample jars on the back seat.

They reached Gowerton about three o'clock, after a quick snack on the way – a sandwich, currant bun and cup of tea at Saunders Refreshment hut on Stalling Down, near Cowbridge. At the police station, they met Ben Evans and Lewis Lewis to give them a detailed account of their recent discovery, emphasizing that as far as they were concerned, there could be no other explanation other than Linda Prentice had drowned in fresh water, not the sea.

‘Let's go and find some for you, then,' growled Evans. He and the inspector climbed into a patrol car with a uniformed driver and the Humber followed behind. They went out westwards into the country, through Penclawdd to Llanrhidian, then back to join the secondary road that went up over Cefn Bryn, the hilly spine of the Gower peninsula.

‘Where the hell are they going?' asked Richard, but soon it was made clear, as the black Wolseley in front pulled over to the side of the road, in the middle of a large stretch of moorland. They stopped behind it and saw that at the side of the road was a large, sinister-looking pool, surrounded by rushes. They got out and joined the two detectives, who wore their habitual belted raincoats and trilbies, as it had been a day of typical Welsh drizzle. The four of them stood at the edge of the almost circular pool, which was about a hundred yards wide.

‘We brought you here first, as it's about the largest pond in these parts,' said Evans. ‘It's called the Broad Pool at Cilibion.'

He pointed at the ridge in the distance. ‘Up there on Cefn Bryn is Arthur's Stone and there's a legend that this pond is where King Arthur chucked in his sword Excalibur. Lot of nonsense, that – but there's plenty of water to get drowned in, even though it's shallow.'

Angela dutifully filled one of her jars at the edge and agreed that it was murky enough to be full of diatoms. Then they moved on and went over the hill to Reynoldston and back to Pennard through Parkmill, where they stopped again to sample the small river that ran down from Ilston to Three Cliffs Bay.

‘The seaward end of this stream is not all that far from Pennard,' said Lewis. ‘But it would be a devil of a climb up and down, as well as being busy with trippers, except at dead of night.'

‘We may as well get to the house and work out from there,' suggested Evans. They went on their way again and arrived at
Bella Capri
, getting some curious looks from a few walkers, as the two large black cars, one with a ‘Police' sign, drew up outside the house.

‘No sign of his Jaguar, guv,' murmured Lewis, as they looked over the gate at the silent bungalow.

‘Where do we start?' asked Richard, turning to survey the rather arid cliff top, with its rocky ground and scraggy gorse. ‘There doesn't seem to be any streams or ponds up here.'

‘The nearest river is the one that comes down the Bishopston Valley and empties into the sea at Pwlldu,' said Lewis. ‘More of a stream, really, it goes underground for part of the way.'

The superintendent pushed open the gate. ‘Let's have a look around now we're here. I suppose he doesn't have a swimming pool around the back?'

As they walked up the drive, Angela pointed to the circular rockery in front of the bungalow. ‘What's that? A fish pond?'

They quickened their pace and went to the rather neglected heap of large stones, with its central cement-lined hollow. Angela put her fingers into the murky water and pulled out some weed with green slime trailing from it. ‘I'll bet this is rotten with diatoms,' she announced.

‘Bit small to drown in, isn't it?' asked Lewis, dubiously.

‘Let's try it and see!' said Ben Evans, suddenly grabbing the smaller man and pushing his head forwards over the outer ring of stones until his face was almost touching the water. Fortunately, he had left his hat in the police car or it would probably have fallen in.

‘Hey, lay off, boss!' he complained, as the grinning superintendent pulled him back up. ‘But you're right, it could be done.'

Angela had an objection. ‘Surely she would struggle and then there would be signs of restraint! Wouldn't she show fresh bruises on her shoulders and arms if she was gripped to hold her under water for a few minutes?'

Richard pursed his lips in doubt.

‘If she was thrashing about, yes – but what if she was unconscious, after a bang on the head?' he asked. ‘There were certainly signs of a recent head injury, which could be put down to being bashed against rocks while still alive in the sea – but which we now suspect didn't happen!'