Bernard Knight - According To The Evidence

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.

Next morning the people from the Home Office Forensic Science Laboratory in Cardiff were due at Ty Croes Farm at ten o’clock, so DI Crippen used the waiting time to interview the residents more thoroughly than the previous day had allowed.

Milking was finished, and by eight o’clock he sat with his sergeant in the parlour of the farmhouse, a musty little-used room. A bobble-edged velvet cloth covered a round table, and there was even an ancient aspidistra on the window sill. On the wall above Crippen’s head was a framed sampler dated 1864, the faded threads displaying in Welsh a gloomy extract from the Psalms.