According To The Evidence

THREE

It was now a little late to have lunch, but the two scientists found a small cafe in the twisty little streets of Brecon that could offer them bacon, egg and chips with their bread, butter and tea.

They had tried a pub on the way from Cwmcamlais, but after threading their way past sheepdogs and local farmers drinking Buckley’s Bitter, all that was on offer at the bar were crisps, desiccated pork pies or Scotch eggs.

‘So what’s all this mystery, Richard?’ demanded Angela as they sat over a second cup of Brooke Bond in the bay window of the little shop. He had refused to be drawn during the short journey from Cwmcamlais, promising to explain it after he had had more time to think.

‘Those legs,’ he said, stirring sugar into his tea. ‘Why is there all that lividity in them, especially on the front of the shins? The fellow had been on his back for hours.’

Though she was a biologist, not a medical doctor, Angela immediately realized what he was implying. ‘But that seems impossible! He was found lying under a tractor with his neck squashed.’

‘The whole thing is bloody odd! No wonder Hawley Harvey Crippen wanted me to have a look at it.’

She ignored his facetious renaming of the DI and demanded to know what he was going to do about it.

‘Depends on what else we find when I can go over every inch of that body.’ He looked at his wristwatch. ‘They should be at the hospital by now, so let’s get on with it.’

It was a small hospital and a small mortuary, little more than a brick shed near the boiler house. There was no mortuary attendant, but Pryor was used to fending for himself. With the help of Billy Brown, the coroner’s officer, he was able to deal with the examination after two undertakers had carried the corpse in from their van and laid it on the solitary slate slab in the small, dingy room.

Arthur Crippen and one of the detective constables crowded in behind, while the photographer took more pictures of the clothed body. Richard and Billy began removing the heavy boots, socks and then the crumpled dungarees and flannel shirt. As soon as the body was bare, Pryor again took great interest in studying the legs, then moved to the hands. Pulling off the underpants, he took the long thermometer which Angela handed him from their bag and slid it into the corpse’s back passage. Standing back, he waited for the mercury to settle and used the moments to speak to the detective inspector.

‘There’s something not right here, Mr Crippen. I’m not sure yet, but I suspect you’ve either got a concealed suicide here – or possibly even a murder.’

The DI remained impassive, his features retaining his usual gloomy frown. ‘It didn’t ring true to me either, doc. But what makes you think that?’

Richard turned to put on a long red rubber apron that the coroner’s officer took from a hook on the wall. After he had looped the chain over his neck and tied the tapes at the back, he put on the rubber gloves that Angela produced from their bag, then explained his suspicions.

‘A lot for me to do yet, but it’s those legs and hands that worry me. Look, from the knees right down into the feet, the skin is reddish-purple, even on the front of the shins. And both hands are the same colour.’

This time Crippen’s face allowed itself to crease into an expression of incomprehension. ‘And that tells you what?’ he demanded.

‘That this poor chap didn’t die where he was found on the floor. At least, he hasn’t been lying there ever since he died. He must have been upright for some hours. And about the only way corpses can stay vertical is when they are hanging!’

The four police officers stared at him incredulously.

It was Crippen who reacted first. ‘You’re saying that someone put him under the tractor after he was dead?’

Richard nodded. ‘The blood has drained down after death into the lowermost parts, the legs, feet and hands. Sure, it can move again afterwards, but often it becomes fixed within a few hours.’

He moved to the body again and pulled out the thermometer. Glancing at it, he called out ‘eighty-one degrees’, which Angela wrote down on a clipboard. Then he helped the coroner’s officer to roll the body over on to its face.

‘See, very little lividity on the back, where it usually settles. Most of it went down into the legs.’

Arthur Crippen, by no means an unintelligent man, struggled to adjust his mind to this new set of circumstances.

‘Doc, are you telling me that this fellow was hanged first, then stuck under that tractor?’

Even Angela looked at her partner a little dubiously. She didn’t want him making an ass of himself on his very first Home Office call-out. However, Pryor’s quietly confident manner seemed to reassure her as he explained further.

‘The logical reason is that someone wanted to conceal the true cause of death by faking an apparent accident. Whether or not it’s a hanging remains to be seen, which is what I’m going to do next.’

Taking a block of wood that stood on the foot of the autopsy table, he slipped it under the corpse’s chest as the coroner’s officer lifted the upper part of the body. This allowed the head to drop down on its mangled neck, so that the pathologist could get a good look at the skin between the hairline and the upper shoulders. It was wrinkled and bloodstained, with a few tears from the crushing weight of the great tyre, but Richard studied it with minute care.

‘I don’t want to wash it yet in case there’s trace evidence,’ he said, more to himself than the others. This prodded Angela into voicing her concern.

‘If this turns out to be criminal, what about forensic evidence?’ she asked crisply. ‘I’ve got no official standing here, so I can’t become involved, even though I’ve been doing the job for years!’

Richard looked quizzically at the detective inspector. ‘That’s a point, Mr Crippen. What are we going to do?’

The DI looked at his watch. ‘It’s mid-afternoon already. I don’t feel like hauling a chap up from the laboratory in Cardiff; it would put us back until after dark.’

He looked across at the photographer and the other detective constable. ‘We can get all the pictures we need and Amos here can act as Exhibits Officer. As Dr Bray is your colleague, already helping you with the post-mortem, I don’t see why she can’t collect any trace evidence you find and hand it over to Amos. That’ll keep the chain of continuity intact.’

It was always vital, if there was any chance of a case ending up in court, for any specimens to be accounted for every inch of the way, to be able to counter any defence accusation that samples had become mixed up.

Angela gave a little shrug, though she was secretly pleased to be more directly involved, even if it was only as a go-between.

‘Fine, but I’m only acting as a collector of any traces. I don’t want to get my knuckles rapped by the director of the Cardiff lab for sticking my nose in!’

Richard was busy peering at the back of the corpse’s neck. There were wide smears of dried blood all over it, obscuring the view.

‘Considering the damage to the neck, which is virtually squashed, there wasn’t all that much blood on the floor,’ he observed, turning his face up towards the DI. ‘Tends to confirm that he was dead before that wheel landed on him.’

He continued to study the neck, twisting the head a little each way to get a view of the sides. Then he straightened up and beckoned to the photographer. ‘Best get some pictures as close up as you can before I start cleaning it up,’ he suggested.

He stood back as the DC took his photos, a slow process as he had to change the one-shot flashbulbs between each exposure. When he had finished, Pryor asked Angela to come around his side of the table and have a close look at the neck.

‘Is there something there to pick off or is it my imagination?’ he asked her, pointing at the side and back of the neck with a gloved finger.

The biologist stared for a moment, then put on her own rubber gloves. She took a small lens and a pair of forceps from their case and bent back for another look.

‘There are a few fibres stuck in the dried blood,’ she murmured, delicately picking something off, though they were invisible to the watching policemen. She carefully placed whatever she had recovered in a small screw-top vial from the case and handed it to Amos, the detective constable whom Crippen had nominated as the Exhibits Officer.

‘What about taping the neck?’ asked her partner.

Angela nodded. ‘Better do it, though we’ll get a lot of dried blood as well.’

Another dip into the apparently bottomless murder bag produced a roll of Sellotape and some glass microscope slides. Cutting lengths off the tape, she pressed the sticky side against the skin of the neck, dabbing the whole area to pick up any tiny threads and fibres that might be there. Then she placed the tapes firmly on to the slides and again handed them to the DC, who placed them in brown exhibit envelopes which he had brought from his van and began to fill in the labels.

‘Better keep all the clothing, especially the shirt,’ she advised. ‘The lab may want to look for more fibres on them.’

What had started as an accident or possibly a suicide had escalated into a suspected homicide, so all the usual forensic precautions had to be taken.

Richard Pryor went back to his labours. ‘I’ll have to wipe it down now, if there’s nothing wanted,’ he announced.

Billy Brown brought over a sponge and an enamel pan of water from the sink so that the pathologist could clean away the blood from the neck. As soon as he had done so, he gave a grunt of satisfaction.

‘I was right, thank God! I was afraid that I might have been making a fool of myself!’

The detectives crowded closer as Richard’s finger pointed at a brownish line on each side of the neck, rising at the back towards the hairline between the ears but vanishing in the centre.

‘Typical hanging mark! Strung up with a rope or some sort of line, with the knot at the back.’

As the photographer got busy again, he explained to Arthur Crippen. ‘The rope cuts into the front of the neck, then the mark comes around the sides and rises because of the down-drag of the body. As the head falls forward the suspension point is moved away from the skin, unless it’s a slip knot, causing a gap in the mark right at the back.’

‘So he died by hanging?’ growled the DI.

‘That’s jumping ahead a bit, but it’s certainly the favourite at the moment,’ replied Richard, moving back to the mortuary slab. Again with the help of the coroner’s officer, he turned the body on to its back again. After more photographs, Angela came with her sticky tape and did her best to cover the wreckage of torn skin that had mangled the whole of the front of the neck and chin.

Then Pryor sponged it down as well as he could, holding the ripped segments of skin one at a time. Then he tried to reassemble them to cover the jagged wound made by the tyre treads. The half-inch brown-red mark was now seen to run across the throat below the jaw, but there were other marks as well, apart from the tyre crushing.

‘Ho ho, the plot thickens!’ He looked across at Arthur Crippen again. ‘Just as well I didn’t plump for a hanging just now. I think this chap had been strangled first!’

As the DI and his sergeant pushed nearer, Richard pointed out a series of blue bruises the size of a fingertip each side of the rope mark and some more up under angles of the jaw on each side. In addition, there were several crescent-shaped scratches among the larger abrasions from the tractor tyre.

‘No doubt that he’s been squeezed around the neck while he’s still alive. But that rope mark and the grazes from the wheel are post-mortem.’ He turned back the flaps of skin and showed that the only blood in the tissue under them was where the tears went across the blue bruises.

His next examination was of the eyes, which were well above the destruction of the neck and lower jaw. In the outer lids he found some fine blood spots in the skin and on opening the eyes with his fingers there were several more small haemorrhages in the whites.

‘They could be either from hanging or strangulation,’ he admitted. ‘But if the hanging was done after death, then they’re down to throttling.’

Arthur Crippen digested these rapid changes in the nature of the case. ‘Why the hell would anyone want to go through all this rigmarole, doc?’

Pryor shrugged. It wasn’t his job to be a detective, but he allowed himself an opinion. ‘Whoever did this started off by strangling the fellow, then thought he’d cover it up by hanging the body. Later he saw that the neck bruises gave the show away, so he devised a way he thought would destroy the evidence on the neck by crushing it.’

‘You say “he”, doctor,’ interposed Sergeant Nichols. ‘So we needn’t be looking for a woman?’

Richard grinned. ‘A good forensic motto is never say never, never say always, but I doubt if you need to cherchez la femme this time. In fact, manual strangulation is uncommon in men; it’s usually inflicted on women and children. But there are plenty of exceptions, of which this seems one.’

Crippen looked at his watch. ‘Four o’clock now. Any idea when you’ll finish up here, doctor? I’d like you and Dr Bray to come back to the scene afterwards, to have a look at a possible hanging site.’ He moved towards the door, sighing deeply.

‘Meanwhile, I’d better go and phone the good news to my chief inspector. It’ll make his day, I don’t think!’

It was almost three hours later before they got back to the barn.

After finishing the post-mortem and closing the body, they were taken into the hospital dining room and given tea and sandwiches. Billy Brown, being coroner’s officer, knew all the staff and had no problem in arranging some refreshment, the ghoulish activities of the past few hours having had no effect on their appetites.

When they returned to Ty Croes Farm, they found the same police team, but reinforced with two more uniformed constables, as the scene was to be guarded all night. It was now early evening and, although there was still full daylight, another van had brought a floodlight powered by a gas cylinder and some large torches, in case they were needed.

Arthur Crippen was waiting for them at the gate, where a PC stood to repel any spectators, not that this was likely in such a remote spot.

‘I’ve spent the time since I left you in questioning all the folks at the farm,’ he said mournfully. ‘But no one admits to hearing a damned thing last night. The farmhouse where Aubrey Evans and his family lives, as well as his cousin’s cottage nearby, are a good quarter of a mile away and no one had any reason to come down here until this morning.’

They walked over to the barn, where the big door was still open. Richard and Angela stood on the threshold and looked at the cavernous space, half filled with vehicles. The blue Fordson was still propped up on the jack, a few spanners scattered under the back end.

‘We didn’t put those blocks back under the axle,’ explained the detective sergeant. ‘They might have to be fingerprinted, though probably a dozen people will have handled them, like everything else in this jumble sale!’

‘I spoke to the liaison officer in the Cardiff lab,’ added Crippen. ‘He’s coming up in the morning with a scientist. We’ll keep the place battened down until then, but I just wanted you to point out any spot where the hanging could have taken place.’

The pair from the Wye Valley stood and looked around them. The barn had a high-pitched roof of galvanized sheets laid on wooden rafters supported by a number of thick metal cross-beams held up by rusty steel pillars. At one place on their right, a chain was slung over a beam, the two free ends holding a large pulley-block. From this dangled a continuous loop of thin chain, the lower end of which was at shoulder height. Hanging below the drum was a sturdy metal hook, and a length of heavier chain dangled down to floor level.

‘That chain hoist looks a likely candidate,’ said Richard, pointing at the device.

Crippen nodded his agreement. ‘I thought that, too. How’s it work?’

The DC with the passion for tractors enlightened him. ‘You keep pulling on that loop of chain, which lowers the hook down. To lift it up, you just reverse the direction of pull. It’s geared so you can lift a hell of a weight, though it’s slow.’

‘What’s it for?’ asked Angela.

‘Lifting anything heavy – here it would be for hoisting an engine out of its chassis, things like that.’

The DI contemplated the device hanging up in the air. ‘It’s the obvious place, but that was a rope mark around the neck, not a chain.’

‘The surface of the hook should be taped for fibres,’ said Angela. ‘If there are any, they might match those I took from the victim’s neck.’

‘Better leave that for the lab chap tomorrow,’ growled Crippen. ‘We’ll get all the fingerprints first, just in case. Not that that rusty chain will be much use for prints.’

‘Where’s this rope, I wonder,’ asked Richard, peering around the barn, which apart from the tractors, a couple of Land Rovers and an old car, had all sorts of junk lying around. There were parts of engines, oil drums, dismantled farm machinery and numerous shapeless pieces of rusty metal. Among all this there were several lengths of rope of various lengths and sizes.

‘Those fibres were coarse and looked like hemp or sisal,’ said Angela. ‘And the mark on the skin suggests it was about half an inch wide.’

‘Some of that coil over there would fit the bill,’ said John Nichols, pointing at a hank thrown over a drum of Duckhams lubricating oil standing alongside a grey Ferguson tractor.

‘All the rope will have to be packed up and taken back to Cardiff tomorrow,’ said the biologist. ‘Those fibres from the neck will have to be matched against them.’

Richard Pryor was staring up at the chain hoist hanging innocently above their heads. ‘Apart from the other evidence, it certainly rules out a suicide,’ he commented.

‘How d’you mean, doc?’ asked Crippen.

‘Well, he would hardly sling a rope over the hook, put the noose around his neck and then start hauling himself up by pulling hand over hand on the chain. He’d pass out before he got his feet off the ground!’

The detective inspector agreed. ‘No doubt someone did it for him, after strangling him. Then he must have spotted those fingermarks on the neck and realized that they gave the game away. So he decided to have him down again and squash him under the Fordson.’

Richard rubbed his chin, now bristly after a long day. ‘He must have been left hanging for some time, otherwise that lividity wouldn’t have had a chance to settle in his legs.’

‘How long, doctor?’ queried the sergeant. ‘The killer must have either hung about here all that time or come back later.’

‘Can’t put an exact time on it; it’s very variable,’ said Pryor. ‘But I suspect it must have been at least a couple of hours to get that intense.’

Crippen mulled this over. ‘So unless he waited here for a hell of a long time, he must have come back to the barn. Sounds like a local job, not just some passing thug.’

His sergeant snorted. ‘One of those buggers up at the farm, sir! Got to be. Who else would want to croak a boozy mechanic?’

Richard Pryor decided that he didn’t want to get involved in any police business, so he prepared to leave them to it.

‘Dr Bray and I will get back home, if we can’t do any more for you. It’s been a long day.’

The DI was sincere in his gratitude when he walked them to the Humber.

‘You’ve done a damned good job for us – and you, ma’am!’ he added. ‘I’ll keep you informed of what’s going on here. Perhaps you could have a word tomorrow on the phone with the forensic people in Cardiff, to tell them what specimens you took and that sort of thing.’

Angela promised to liaise with her old colleagues, as she knew all the case officers in Cardiff. ‘We’ve collected blood and urine samples for alcohol, especially as he’s got this history of drinking. Maybe that’s at the bottom of all this?’

As Crippen opened the car door for Angela, he gave a grim promise.

‘You may be right. Tomorrow, I’ll be squeezing all I can from those folk up at the farm.’

It was dark before they got back to Tintern Parva, the village nearest to Garth House at the lower end of the Wye Valley.

As Richard was putting the car away in the coach house at the back, Angela was surprised to see a light in the kitchen window. She had expected Moira Davison, the young widow who looked after them, to have left something cold for their supper in the old fridge, maybe sliced ham and salad. But when she opened the back door and went into the kitchen, she found Moira there, pulling something out of the Aga stove.

‘I thought you could do with a hot meal after such a long day,’ she announced, her gloved hands placing a large cottage pie on top of the big cooker.

‘Moira, you’re a wonder!’ Richard sniffed the aroma appreciatively as he came into the room.

‘You’ve not been waiting here for us all evening, have you?’ asked Angela, pulling off her coat and dropping thankfully into one of the chairs at the table, which was already set with two places.

‘No, but I’ve been back and forth, keeping an eye on the oven,’ said the trim, attractive woman. Slim and petite, she had an oval face framed by jet-black hair cut in a bob, a straight fringe across her forehead. Moira lived a few hundred yards away down the main road to the village. When the partners had started up the forensic consultancy six months earlier, they were virtually camping out in the dusty old house, living out of packets and tins. Also, their laboratory technician, Siân Lloyd, couldn’t keep up with the typing of reports as well as doing her technical work, so it was a godsend when they found an efficient lady almost on their doorstep who could not only do some cooking and cleaning but keep on top of the office work.

Moira put her pie on a cork mat on the big table, another legacy from Richard’s aunt. Together with local carrots and peas, the two scientists tucked in hungrily, washing the food down with cider from a large flagon.

‘Aren’t you joining us, Moira?’ asked Angela, eyeing the apple tart that she was taking from the warming oven.

‘No, I had something at home earlier. But I’ll make some coffee and have one with you, so that you can tell me what you’ve been up to today.

‘By the way,’ she added. ‘There were a couple of messages today, nothing urgent. I’ve left a list on your desk, doctor. The only one that sounded interesting was a call from a firm of solicitors in Stow-on-the-Wold, who wanted to talk to you about giving them a medical opinion in a criminal case.’

‘Did they say what it was about?’ asked Angela.

‘No, but they left their number, and I promised that we would get back to them tomorrow. Perhaps it’s another murder!’

Like their technician Siân, Moira was very enthusiastic and partisan when it came to the work of the Garth House consultancy. They took a pride in being part of it and wanted to be involved as much as possible. The cases were often highly confidential, often being sub judice until cases came to court, but both employees had shown in the past months that they could be trusted to keep their mouths shut. Moira had been a secretary to a local solicitor and Siân had worked in a hospital laboratory, both jobs requiring strict attention to confidentiality.

Between the pie and the apple tart and then over coffee, the partners gave Moira the details of the unusual case in Breconshire that had occupied them for most of the day.

‘How extraordinary! A good start for your first Home Office call-out,’ she exclaimed. ‘Who on earth could have done such a thing?’

‘Our friend Dr Crippen seems set on blaming one of those up at the farm,’ said Richard, making Moira giggle over the poor detective’s name. ‘I suppose he’s right, as there are very few others to suspect in that lonely place.’

By the time they had helped their housekeeper to clear up the kitchen, it was getting late. Richard saw her to the bottom of the steep drive and watched her go down the road with her torch, keeping well into the hedge as there was no verge or pavement.

When he got back inside, Angela declared that she was going up to her room to listen to the wireless and read for a bit, before going to bed.

Accommodation had been something of a dilemma when they had first come to Garth House. Though there were plenty of rooms, there was only one bathroom. At first, Angela had stayed in a bed and breakfast in Tintern, but soon rebelled at the cost when there was a large house available. It belonged equally to both of them – or more accurately to the legal partnership that they had set up. When she left London, Angela had sold her flat and put the money into the firm, Richard contributing Garth House itself, a substantial Victorian dwelling with four acres of land. His aunt had died in a retirement home twelve months ago, her husband having passed away years before. She left her estate to her only nephew Richard, who used to stay with her when a boy and even when a medical student in Cardiff. This legacy coincided with the offer of a ‘golden handshake’ from his university post in Singapore. As he had been divorced not long before, there seemed nothing to keep him in the Far East, so he took the plunge and came home to Wales to set up in private practice with Angela.

The problem with the house was that even in these enlightened 1950s, it was a little daring for two unmarried people to live together in the same house. However, after a few nights in the B &B, Angela had declared that she had had enough and moved in with Richard.

It was a purely platonic relationship – she had a sitting room and a bedroom upstairs and he took another bedroom on the other side of the house. Downstairs was devoted to the business, each having a study, the other rooms being an office, a laboratory and staffroom, as well as the kitchen. The original problem was the single, old-fashioned bathroom, as his aunt had done nothing to improve the house for thirty years. However, in the intervening months a local jobbing builder had divided the cavernous bathroom in half, with two separate doors. This his-and-hers arrangement now worked very well, with a new modern bath in place of the cast-iron monstrosity in Angela’s half. Richard was content with a shower cabinet, so their problem was solved and they were happy to ignore any scandalized gossip in the village.

After seeing Moira off, Richard took the samples of blood and urine he had collected in Brecon and put them in the new refrigerator in the laboratory, for Siân to deal with the next day. Then he went back into his own office on the ground floor, opposite the staffroom. Here he had a desk, a workbench and a microscope, as well as shelves with all his medical textbooks and journals.

Next door was Moira’s office, the main features being a filing cabinet and a typewriter. A new communicating door went into the laboratory, a large front room with a wide bay window looking out on to the valley below. The house had two such windows, one each side of the central front door. The one on the other side was Angela’s study, with the same superb view of the woods and cliffs opposite.

Sitting at his desk, he drew a yellow legal pad towards him and began to write a draft report of his visit to Ty Croes Farm and the subsequent post-mortem in Brecon. In the morning, Moira would type it up for him, with a couple of carbon copies, so that he could send one to the Brecon coroner and the other to DI Crippen.

As he sat writing under his table lamp, Moira was sitting alone in her own house down the road. Her comfortable armchair was pulled up near the hearth, where a small fire was burning, as October evenings were becoming cool. Her Yorkshire terrier was asleep at her feet and a small glass of sherry stood on a table alongside her. An open copy of a Georgette Heyer novel lay on her lap, but she was not reading it, just staring at the flames flickering between the coals in the fire.

The thirty-year-old was thinking once again of the profound changes in her life that had taken place over the past couple of years. Happily married, three years earlier she had suddenly become a widow when her husband, an industrial chemist, had been killed in a factory accident in Lydney. Generous compensation and a modest pension had allowed her to live on comfortably in their house, but she found herself somehow aimless and lacking direction in her life.

Moira had not contemplated marrying again, though she was certainly attractive enough, as no one she knew remotely interested her. Then six months ago, a postcard advertisement in the village post office had spurred her to apply for a job as a part-time housekeeper with the new people who had just moved in to Garth House, virtually next door. It was the best move she could have made, as it jolted her out of her rut and she soon found the position fascinating. She had rapidly become an indispensable part of the ‘forensic family’.

Staring into the flames of her fire, she wondered yet again about the relationship of Richard Pryor and Angela Bray. Though they slept in the big house every night, she had never seen any sign of intimacy or affection between them, just a pleasant friendship. She knew the story of their meeting at a forensic conference eighteen months ago and their eventual decision to set up in partnership. Her main source of information had been Siân Lloyd, who seemed to know every bit of gossip. She and Siân had often discussed the nature of the relationship between their two employers, but they came to no conclusion. Siân, young romantic that she was, was inclined to think that they were secret lovers, but Moira felt that though the situation could one day go that way, at present Richard and Angela appeared to be in a purely professional relationship.

She sighed and took a sip of her sherry. A rather prim woman, it would be brash to suggest that she ‘fancied’ Richard Pryor, but certainly he was often in her thoughts. She had enjoyed marriage and missed all aspects of her former wedded state. Maybe it was time that she began to look around, she thought – taking this stimulating job had started to nudge her out of her previous apathy.

Her book forgotten, she stared into the fire and visualized Richard’s lean face and wiry body. He was quite tall, with abundant brown hair and appealing hazel eyes. Siân, who was an ardent film fan, claimed he was very like Stewart Granger or Michael Rennie, an image that was reinforced by the way he dressed. Richard was fond of light suits with a belted jacket and button-down pockets, strengthening the Granger image of a big-game hunter. As he had lived in the Far East for the past fourteen years, it was natural that he had these Singapore-made suits, but the women in the house had recently ganged up on him and sent him off to get clothes better suited to the British climate and appearing in local courts.

Though she always thought of him as ‘Richard’, Moira never failed to address him as ‘doctor’, as did Siân. Apart from being their employer, they had a genuine respect for him that discouraged overfamiliarity, even though he was the son of a Merthyr general practitioner, a valleys boy still with a slight Welsh accent even after all his years abroad.

He was certainly an attractive man, she thought once more. In his early forties, he was more than a decade older than her, but these days that was no bar to a romance – or so she fantasized.

This led her to think of the age of another woman – Angela Bray, who was only slightly younger than Richard. Here was competition indeed – a tall, handsome woman with a similar academic background to the doctor, coming from an affluent family in the Home Counties. Siân Lloyd, that fount of all gossip, had soon discovered that Angela’s parents ran racing stables and a stud farm in Berkshire and that she had gone to a select boarding school in Cheltenham. A London University degree in biology, followed by a PhD, had led her to fifteen years in the Metropolitan Police Laboratory, where she had risen to a responsible position but then stuck halfway up the promotion ladder.

Moira sighed when contemplating the challenge Angela posed in her daydreams of a romance with her boss. The scientist was elegant, poised and extremely well dressed – and, most of all, she was living in the same house as Richard Pryor!

Almost angrily, Moria pulled herself together, mentally chiding herself for being such an adolescent fool. Drinking down the rest of her sherry, she opened her Georgette Heyer and determinedly began to read.