get another officer up here.’
Reynolds nodded, glad of an excuse to postpone working for another hour or so. The two policemen went back to their car, where the inspector radioed to get a local constable to stand guard until the CID appeared. Then with a wave to the workers, he made a cautious three-point turn on the concrete and vanished in the direction of Monmouth.
ONE
‘If I’d realized that setting up house was as hellish as this, I’d have stayed in bloody Singapore!’
He staggered through the office door with a large cardboard box and dumped the heavy typewriter on a new desk, whose five-ply top creaked ominously.
‘Stop complaining, Richard! We’ve broken the back of it now.’
He stifled the obvious retort about breaking his own back and dropped into the swivel chair behind the desk, wiping the sweat from his face with a large khaki handkerchief. It was very warm and the confines of the Wye Valley seemed to hold in the summer heat, even though he should be used to it, having lived in the tropics for the past thirteen years. Looking across at Angela Bray, he almost resented how cool and fresh she looked in a yellow summer dress. His business partner sat at a table, checking lists of laboratory equipment, ticking off delivery notes against her own inventory of what they needed. The rest of the room and the one next door, which was to be their main laboratory, were piled with crates and cardboard boxes, most carrying labels bearing the name of suppliers in Cardiff and Bristol.
‘All we need now are some clients, or it’ll soon be overdraft time!’ he muttered, thinking of their rapidly dwindling bank balance.
Angela slapped down her pencil and glared at Richard Pryor. ‘Come on, Richard, the coroner has promised you regular post-mortems in Chepstow and Monmouth. And you’ve got those medical school lectures in Bristol, so that’s a good start. We agreed that it would take us at least a year to break even.’
Her level-headed pragmatism was a counterpoint to his swinging moods, for she was always calm and self- possessed whatever the crisis. Pryor sometimes thought of her as the ‘ice maiden’, except that the thick mane of brown hair that framed her handsome face was hardly that of some Nordic beauty.
‘That’s the last of the stuff from the car,’ he announced, his good humour returning. ‘So I’ll start shifting some of this stuff into the lab.’
He climbed to his feet and took off the jacket of his crumpled linen suit, which like all his clothes, was a legacy of more than a decade in the Far East. Before next winter, he reflected wryly, he would have to get something warmer.
Angela looked up briefly from her papers.
‘Sian will be back soon, she can tell you where some of the things go. Then she can start putting the reagent bottles and apparatus in the right places.’
He humped a dozen boxes into the next room, which had been his late aunt’s dining room but which now was lined with white Formica-topped kitchen units, a large wooden table standing in the bay window. With the last carton in his arms, he stopped in front of Angela.
‘Where d’you want this microscope?’
She tapped her lists together and stood up, almost as tall as Pryor.
‘I’ll come and see, shall I? You’ll be using it as well, once we get some histology going.’ They spent the next hour in their new laboratory, unpacking boxes and starting to fill cupboards with bottles of chemicals and strangely shaped bits of glass. Even though it was not yet mid-morning, the old mansion was already stifling in the hot June day and Angela Bray mentally added a couple of electric fans to her next list of purchases.
‘Where’s that damned girl?’ asked Richard eventually. ‘I hope she’s going to be reliable.’
Sian Lloyd, their new laboratory technician-cum-secretary had offered to stop off at the post office to get a supply of stamps and a wireless licence.
Angela sighed. ‘She has to get a bus from Chepstow, then walk up from the village. Give her a break, Richard, she doesn’t have a car like us.’
‘Talking of a break, we could do with our elevenses.’
He looked hopefully at his partner, who steadfastly ignored his hint that she should assume some domestic duties. ‘There’s no milk’ she said. ‘But if you want black Nescafe, feel free to make it.’
‘I thought Jimmy was bringing us some groceries and things.’
‘He is, but after shaking a couple of bottles of milk around on that motorbike of his, it will probably be butter by the time he gets here.’
Pryor had inherited Jimmy Jenkins along with the house that Aunt Gladys had left him in her will. He had been her gardener, odd-job man and part-time driver and when Richard had appeared as the new owner, he had materialized again and taken up his old duties virtually by default. Richard had to admit that though at first he had suspected the man was something of an idle scrounger, the house and four acres needed the attention that a pathologist and a forensic scientist were in no position to provide.
Thirst drove him to the old-fashioned kitchen that lay at the back of the big Victorian house, and in the rattling old Kelvinator fridge he found a flagon of local cider. Taking a couple of glasses back to the office, which had once been his late uncle’s study, he put them on the table and sat down opposite Angela, who had gone back to check something on her equipment lists.
Abstractly, she murmured some thanks, still immersed in her papers. When she got to the bottom of the last page, she looked up at her partner and caught him staring out of the French window at the distant trees on the English side of the valley. Covertly, she studied his profile and decided again that he was not a bad-looking chap, in a stringy sort of way. Forty-four years old, he had that lean, sinewy appearance, often seen in men who had spent many years in the East. Though not a frequent cinema-goer, she was reminded of actors like Stewart Granger or Michael Rennie with their ‘big white hunter’ look, a similarity which Richard Pryor unconsciously reinforced with his belted safari suits with button-down pockets. He suddenly came out of his reverie and his deep-set brown eyes fixed her with a worried gaze.
‘Do you think we’ve done the right thing? Both giving up good jobs to take a leap in the dark like this?’
‘We’ve been through this before, Richard,’ she said patiently. ‘We agreed that we’d give it two years. If it doesn’t pan out then, both of us are well enough established to go back to what we did before.’
Angela took a sip of her cider and shuddered slightly at the acrid flavour.
‘People with our qualifications and experience are not going to starve, you know, even if we have to join the brain drain to the States or Australia.’
Dr Angela Bray had been a forensic scientist at the Metropolitan Police Laboratory in London and Richard Glanville Pryor was formerly the Professor of Forensic Medicine in the University of Singapore.
She had become increasingly frustrated by public service bureaucracy and the lack of any foreseeable advancement in the system, whilst Pryor had been offered a generous ‘golden handshake’ after nine years in the university, who wished to appoint a local Chinese in his place. He could have stayed on, but the size of the financial inducement, coupled with a weariness with the tropics and a yearning for his native Wales, tipped the scales.
He and Angela had met the previous year at an International Forensic Science Congress in Edinburgh. After discovering a mutual desire to make a radical change in their professional lives, they decided to combine their talents by setting up a private partnership to offer forensic expertise to anyone who needed it. Angela’s decision was reinforced by the prospect of living in the beautiful Wye Valley on the Welsh border, as she had fond memories of holidays in the valley. There was little to keep her in London, so now it was crunch time, to see if their ambitious venture would succeed.
Richard had been living in the house for over a month and Angela had moved down a fortnight earlier, after burning her boats by selling her flat in Blackheath. One thing they had not fully foreseen was that their professional partnership was going to be less of a problem than their personal lives. Though Garth House was a large place with five bedrooms, it was not proving easy to share the accommodation, especially as it possessed only one bathroom.
