Brenda nodded. ‘I’m doing mornings this week; Audrey will go in again about three o’clock.’ As she turned for the door, Sheila Lupin called after her. ‘Is he there now?’

‘Arrived back from a call just as I was leaving,’ she answered as she left the shop. The nurse walked to her car and sat in it for a moment, a frown on her face. It was such a pity that Sheila was so antagonistic to her brother-in-law Samuel. It was common knowledge that she had been dead against her sister Mary marrying the local veterinary surgeon fifteen years ago. Brenda, being in the same age group as the sisters, knew that they had not been all that attached to each other, each going away to different boarding schools at an early age. Sheila was always the plain one and Mary the prettier of the pair, which she felt was the root cause of Sheila’s antipathy to Samuel Parker. Never having married, the pharmacist seemed to have devoted her life to disliking the ‘vet’, and now that Mary was terminally ill she never missed an opportunity to disparage the long-suffering husband. With a sigh, the nurse started her car and drove off to visit her next patient.

A few minutes after the Morris left, Sheila Lupin hurried out of the shop. She had changed her white coat for a mackintosh, as a few spots of drizzle were falling. Walking rapidly, she crossed the road in front of the parish church and continued down the pavement for a few hundred yards until she turned into the drive of a substantial Victorian house set well back from the road. A wide expanse of gravel lay before it, on which was parked a maroon Lanchester car. The house had a central porch with bays each side and a red gabled roof surmounting a row of upstairs windows. Built on to the further side was a large extension, with a muddy Land Rover standing outside. This was Samuel Parker’s animal surgery and waiting room. It had its own entrance, but Sheila went straight to the front door, which she opened with a key.