‘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.