Angela had made it quite clear from the outset that their relationship was purely professional – she had no intention of becoming housekeeper, cook or surrogate wife. The obvious answer was for her to find somewhere to live nearby, but this seemed ridiculous with such a large house available, especially as their finances were already stretched. After spending the first few nights in a bed and breakfast in Tintern Parva, the nearest village, Angela rebelled at the ongoing cost and inconvenience.
‘I’m moving in to the middle bedroom,’ she announced, arriving with her cases in the back of her white Renault Dauphine. ‘The village gossips can call me the scarlet woman from London if they like, but it’s crazy to leave a big house like this half empty. As soon as we can afford it, we’ll divide it properly into two flats.’
Garth House now belonged to both of them, as they had set up a limited company for their venture, he putting in the house and Angela the proceeds of the sale of her flat. As the courteous Richard had lugged her cases upstairs, he had wondered how this was going to work out. Were there locks on the bedroom doors, for instance?
‘But I’m not cooking or cleaning, remember,’ she called up after him. ‘We’ll have to camp out for a bit, until we sort out some more permanent arrangement.’
So far, their lifestyle had been spartan, with Shredded Wheat and Typhoo Tips for breakfast, a sandwich lunch and usually something from a tin as supper. Sometimes they splashed out on an evening meal in a cafe at Chepstow or Monmouth, the towns at each end of the famous winding valley with its steep, wooded sides. Aunt Gladys had died at eighty-six in a nursing home, leaving the house furnished. Though much of it was old and worn, they had kept the better pieces to kit out some of the bedrooms. The downstairs rooms, apart from the kitchen and one turned into a communal lounge, were given over to the needs of their practice. As well as the office, there was a large laboratory and a workroom each for Angela and himself, together with a toilet at the end of the corridor that led back from the central hall. A preparation room and wash-up for apparatus occupied the former scullery and what had been a huge pantry was now to be a storeroom.
As they finished their drinks, there was a throaty roar from outside as a motorcycle climbed the steep drive from the main road below and swung around the back of the house to the yard behind. Here there was a coach- house with space for two cars underneath a large loft that Angela had her eye on for an extension to the laboratory. With a final noisy revving, the engine of the Royal Enfield died and moments later the rider and his passenger marched into the office.
‘Jimmy saw me at the bus stop and gave me a lift,’ announced their sole professional employee. Sian Lloyd was a lively, ebullient blonde of twenty-four, small and shapely, with a snub nose and blue eyes. Not a girl to be pushed around, she gazed out at the world defiantly, speaking her mind on anything that concerned her – and some things that did not. Sian came from a working-class family, her father a welder in a local engineering works, a shop steward and fervent socialist, some of which had rubbed off on his daughter. She was fully qualified, having passed all the examinations giving her Fellowship of the Institute of Medical Laboratory Technology, and she had already started on an external degree in biochemistry.
‘Here’s the licence – and the stamps.’ She placed an envelope on the table in front of Angela. ‘Jimmy’s left the groceries in the kitchen.’
Behind her, their odd-job man touched a finger to the greasy cap in which he seemed to have been born. Richard wondered if he even wore it to bed.
‘Got all the stuff on the list, Miss Angela – and I saw some nice-looking sausages in Emery’s shop, so I brought you half a pound.’
Jenkins was a broad, powerful man with a short neck and long arms. The fanciful Richard wondered if he had a touch of gorilla in him, after seeing his hairy arms and chest when he was clearing some of the neglected area behind the house. Jimmy, who appeared to be about fifty, had a wide, weather-beaten face with a broken nose and a permanent grin, which exposed irregular teeth yellowed by years of smoking Woodbines. On the rare occasions when he lifted his cap to scratch his head, he revealed stubbly grey hair that stuck up like a scrubbing brush.
‘Goin’ to rain tonight, no doubt about it,’ declared Jimmy. ‘So I’ll get out and trim that hedge down by the front gate while it’s still dry.’
Unless Richard gave him some definite task, he seemed to decide for himself what jobs he would do, but in spite of earlier misgivings, his employer had to admit that Jimmy seemed a good worker.
Angela took Sian into the laboratory to carry on sorting out the new equipment, while Richard walked down the corridor from the hall to the room at the back of the house which he had earmarked for his own. His medical books and journals were piled on the floor and he began stacking them on the bookcases that lined one wall. It had been a library-cum-smoking room in the distant days when Uncle Arthur had been alive.
Angela’s room was the former drawing room in the front of the house. Like the lab, it had a magnificent view across the valley, with the River Wye meandering at the bottom and steep tree-covered slopes opposite. The large bay window matched the one across in the laboratory, and only Pryor’s sense of chivalry prevented him being a little envious of Angela’s domain.
It was Wednesday, but there was nothing else for him to do until the following Monday, when he was to start carrying out post-mortems for the coroner at the small public mortuaries in the area – assuming there were any customers that day. Though he wished no one any ill will, he trusted that the mortality statistics would ensure that there be some sudden deaths, suicides and accidents, as this would be almost their only financial income until their reputation spread and business came in from further afield. Thanks to a professional contact in Bristol University, he had been offered twenty lectures a year to medical students. The salary was derisory, but it gave him a nominal academic appointment and hopefully widened his medico-legal contacts which could lead to work from police, lawyers and doctors in the area.
As he hefted up heavy textbooks on to the shelves, he thought that the last time he had opened any of them was six thousand miles away, in the island city at the bottom of the Malay peninsula. He had enjoyed his years in Singapore, but with the Empire rapidly shrinking, it was time to move on, especially when the university had been so generous in wanting to get rid of him.
As he ruminated about his life in the tropics – and his failed marriage – he heard the distant ringing of the telephone on a table in the hall. Pryor had already asked the GPO to put extensions in the office and the two doctors’ rooms, but it would be weeks before they got around to it. He started towards it, but his new employee had beaten him to it.
‘There’s a call for you, Prof!’ said Sian, speaking as excitedly as if the call was from Mars. ‘It’s some solicitor, maybe he’s got some work for us.’
Sian Lloyd had already identified strongly with the venture and was agog that maybe someone wanted their expertise. Pryor hurried into the hall and picked up the heavy black phone. A carefully measured voice answered his ‘hello’.
‘This is Edward Lethbridge, of Lethbridge, Moody and Savage. We are solicitors in Lydney and I wondered if you could help us?’
Richard felt his own frisson of excitement at this possibility of their first case. ‘I’m sure we can, Mr Lethbridge. We have hardly opened for business yet, but I’m sure that we can do something for you. How did you hear of us so soon?’
‘The coroner, Doctor Meredith, gave us your name and telephone number. I’ve known him for years, as we have occasional dealings in the coroner’s court. This is a little difficult to explain over the telephone, so I wonder whether you could call at my office.’
Only too anxious to follow up this invitation, Richard arranged to meet Edward Lethbridge in Lydney that afternoon. Sian hurried in to the laboratory to tell Angela and start putting more bottles in place in case they were needed for this new development. The biologist was more restrained in her reaction.
‘He probably wants us to do a paternity blood test in some family dispute,’ she said evenly, ‘Still, it’s all grist to the mill, and we certainly can do with the money.’
It was not a paternity test, but was hardly a serial-killer case either, as the pathologist discovered later that day. He drove the ten miles to Lydney in his five-year-old Humber Hawk, the Severn estuary visible down on the right of the A48, which took most of the traffic from England into South Wales. It was a busy road, far too narrow, tortuous and built-up for the volume of traffic it had to bear, thought Pryor. With the rapid increase in manufacturing and trade generally since the war had ended, the infrastructure of the country was proving woefully inadequate. Big lorries lumbered past him almost in convoy and those in front held him up, many of the old trucks of pre-war vintage belching fumes from their worn engines. A decade after VE and VJ days, things were improving rapidly, but there
