recognize his swings of mood and today he was obviously upbeat, so she went along with it.
Sian always brought sandwiches, to which she added an apple and a bottle of Tizer, so leaving her to man the telephone, Richard ushered his colleague into the Humber and drove off down the valley towards Chepstow. None of the local pubs offered anything but drink and crisps, apart from the large hotel opposite the abbey, so he was aiming for a small cafe-cum-restaurant he knew of in the main street of the ancient town near the mouth of the Wye.
‘What’s brought this on, partner?’ asked Angela, reclining in the passenger seat, which was much more comfortable than her little Renault.
‘We’ve got to talk about organizing the house better than at present,’ said Richard. ‘So look on this as a business lunch and charge it against expenses.’
‘Expenses! We haven’t got any income yet to charge it against,’ she said scornfully, but secretly she was pleased to be pampered a little, even if it was probably only for a plaice and chips.
They parked in the town, the ruins of the huge brooding castle above them on the edge of its cliff over the swirling river. The restaurant was little more than a large shop, with a dozen tables and a counter with a huge hissing coffee machine alongside a glass case displaying an assortment of cakes. However, to Angela’s surprise, they were presented with a typed menu card which offered fresh salmon, steak and kidney pie, gammon or cold ham, all with either chips or three vegetables.
‘I still can’t get used to so much food becoming available,’ she said. ‘You were out of it for years, gorging in Malaya with your fried rice and prawn curries. It’s hardly any time since we finished with ration books here!’
She settled for salmon and new potatoes, while Richard went for the steak and kidney. The place had no licence, so they drank water until it was time for a coffee.
‘Now then, madam, we’ve got a lot to discuss,’ said Richard firmly, after they had finished apple tart and custard and were on a second cup of coffee.
‘Domestic or professional?’ she asked.
‘Both, because one affects the other,’ he replied.
‘We can’t go on pigging it in Garth House, we’d be better off camping in a tent in the garden. We need a decent meal at least once a day and someone to keep the place clean and generally look after us.’
The scientist nodded. ‘I don’t disagree with you, Richard. But how are we going to pay for it?’
‘I’ve still got a few quid left from my golden handshake and I’m sure we’ll soon be picking up some more work. If it comes to the crunch, we can take out a small mortgage on the house.’
In spite of her resolution, Angela took her Kensitas from her handbag and lit up. ‘First and last today,’ she declared. ‘But what are you thinking of doing?’
She recognized that one of his intense moods was coming on, which she applauded, except she knew it tended to fade away fairly quickly, unless she badgered him.
‘We need some sort of housekeeper, who can clean the place up and do a bit of cooking. Somebody local, who can come in each day, not a live-in servant like that old biddy has in Newnham.’
He had described his morning’s activities to her during the drive down from Garth House.
‘It would be good if she could type as well,’ added Angela. He looked at her suspiciously for a second, wondering if she was being sarcastic, but she was serious.
‘Look, we thought Sian might be able to type the reports, as well as work in the lab,’ said Angela. ‘But have you seen her trying to use that typewriter? I can do better with two fingers.’
‘I thought she had been to a secretarial college in Newport?’ he objected.
‘For two months after she left school, that’s all,’ said Angela. ‘She hated it, she told me, that’s why she got a job in a hospital lab.’
‘OK, so we need someone who can cook, clean and type! A bit of a tall order out here in the sticks, isn’t it?’
‘It was your idea, Richard. We can only try, as like you, I’m fed up with living out of tins and making my own bed. Thank God there’s a good laundry service in Chepstow.’
He gave her a brilliant smile, making her think that he wasn’t such a bad looking fellow after all, with that wavy brown hair. A pity about those awful safari suits, though.
‘Right, I’ll see what we can do. Maybe Jimmy will know someone, he probably knows every single person between here and Monmouth.’
Angela looked doubtful. ‘God knows what sort of people he knows – probably find us a gypsy who can only cook hedgehogs!’
‘Who cares, as long as she can type!’ he said facetiously.
They both burst out laughing, almost euphoric with a sudden realization of how much of a task they had taken on with their new venture.
In the car on the way back, she told him that while he was out that morning, she had had a phone call from a solicitor in Newport wanting to arrange a blood test in a disputed paternity case.
‘A doctor in the Royal Gwent Hospital recommended us,’ she said. ‘He was in your year in medical school in Cardiff.’
Richard was delighted at some new business coming in already. ‘Who the hell would that be, I wonder? How did he know I was here?’
‘Your pal the coroner, it seems. He’s spreading the word around, thank God.’
‘Have you got all the necessary stuff for your serology yet?’ he asked, as Garth House came into view.
‘Yes, it’s all under control. Though we’ll need a new fridge to keep the sera and other things in, especially in this weather. We can’t put everything in that old relic in the kitchen, alongside our food.’
Encouraged by the prospect of cases and income, Angela went off with Sian to continue their blitz on the laboratory shelves and cupboards, while Pryor went outside to look for Jimmy Jenkins. The land belonging to Garth House sloped up fairly steeply from the main road towards the dense woodland beyond. The house was built in the lower part, within fifty yards of the road below. There was a patch of kitchen garden near the house, just behind the outhouses, but the rest of the four acres was rough grass and bushes, neglected since his aunt and uncle had died.
‘Only good for a few sheep, that is,’ said Jimmy, leaning on his hoe, with which he had been weeding between a few rows of beetroot, runner beans and carrots. He wore his usual baggy corduroy trousers, but his plaid shirt was hanging on a nearby bush, exposing his barrel-shaped chest to the hot sun.
‘I’ve got plans to start a vineyard there eventually,’ declared Richard. It was one of his recent fantasies to plant vines on the south-east facing slope and make his own wine.
Jimmy looked at him from under his poke cap as if he was mad. ‘You’d be better off with a few sheep. Grow your own meat, boss, not bloody wine!’
Jimmy drank only beer, at least a couple of pints a day down at the Three Horseshoes in Tintern and his tone suggested that he thought wine was a drink fit only for ‘nancy boys’, as he called them.
Pryor was in too good a mood to argue, so he raised the matter of a domestic help, explaining that they needed someone part-time to do a bit of cleaning and cooking.
‘Do you know anybody around here who might be interested?’ he asked his handyman.
Jimmy pushed up the back of his long-suffering cap to scratch his head with a dirty forefinger.
‘Mebbe I do, must give it a bit of thought, Doc,’ he said slowly. ‘An’ you could put a card in the post office, they got a board for free adverts there.’
Having said his piece, he started vigorously attacking the weeds with his hoe, so Richard left Jimmy to his task and went indoors, thinking that he might well take the man’s advice and put a small advertisement in the local post office.
THREE
At the time that Sian Lloyd was painstakingly tapping out Richard’s dictation of the advertisement, Trevor Mitchell was parking his car in Ledbury, a small market town between Hereford and Malvern. He had telephoned Edward Lethbridge as soon as the pathologist had left his cottage and by noon, had had a call back to say that Mrs
