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covering the whole country but ours was the first. Colonel Hoggatt started it in Chevisham Manor when he was Chief Constable in 1912, then left the manor house to his force when he died. Forensic science was in its infancy then, Inspector Blakelock says, and Colonel Hoggatt was one of the first Chief Constables to see its possibilities. We’ve got his portrait in the hall. We’re the only lab with its founder’s name. That’s why the Home Office has agreed that the new Laboratory will still be called Hoggatt’s. Other police forces send their exhibits to their regional laboratory. North-East or the Metropolitan and so on. But in East Anglia they say ‘Better send it to Hoggatt’s.’ ”
    “You’d better send yourself to Hoggatt’s if you want to get there by eight-thirty. And I don’t want you taking any short cuts through the new Lab. It isn’t safe, only half built, especially these dark mornings. Like as not you’d fall into the foundations or get a brick down on your head. They’re not safe, building sites aren’t. Look what happened to your uncle Will.”
    “All right, Mum. We’re not supposed to go through the new Lab anyway. Besides, I’m going by bike. Are these my sandwiches or Dad’s?”
    “Yours, of course. You know your dad’s home to dinner on Wednesdays. Cheese and tomato this morning, and I’ve put you in a boiled egg.”
    When Brenda had waved goodbye, Mrs. Pridmore sat down for her second cup of tea and looked across at her husband.
    “I suppose it’s all right, this job she’s found for herself.” Arthur Pridmore, when he did condescend to talk at breakfast, talked with the magisterial authority of head of his family, Mr. Bowlem’s bailiff and people’s warden at the village church. He laid down his fork.
    “It’s a good job, and she was lucky to get it. Plenty of girls from the grammar school after it, weren’t they? An established civil servant, isn’t she? And look what they’re paying her. More than the pigman gets at the farm. Pensionable too. She’s a sensible girl and she’ll be all right. There aren’t many opportunities left locally for girls with good ‘O’ levels. And you didn’t want her to take a job in London.”
    No indeed, Mrs. Pridmore hadn’t wanted Brenda to go to London, a prey to muggers, IRA terrorists and what the Press mysteriously called “the drug scene.” None of her infrequent, but uneventful and pleasant, visits to the capital on Women’s Institute theatre excursions or rare shopping trips had failed to shake her conviction that Liverpool Street was thecavernous entry to an urban jungle, where predators armed with bombs and syringes lurked in every Underground station, and seducers laid their snares for innocent provincials in every office. Brenda, thought her mother, was a very pretty girl. Well, no point in denying it, she took after her mother’s side of the family for looks even if she had her dad’s brains, and Mrs. Pridmore had no intention of exposing her to the temptations of London. Brenda was walking out with Gerald Bowlem, younger son of her father’s boss, and if that came off there’s no denying it would be a very satisfactory marriage. He wouldn’t get the main farm, of course, but there was a very nice little property over at Wisbech which would come to him. Mrs. Pridmore couldn’t see the sense of more examinations and all this talking about a career. This job at the Lab would do Brenda very well until she married. But it was a pity that there was all this emphasis on blood.
    As if reading her thoughts, her husband said: “Of course it’s exciting for her. It’s all new. But I dare say it’s no different from other jobs, pretty dull most of the time. I don’t reckon anything really frightening will happen to our Brenda at Hoggatt’s Lab.”
    This conversation about their only child’s first job was one they’d had before, a comforting reiteration of mutual reassurance. In imagination Mrs. Pridmore followed