She had always loved animals. From the old spaniel, Molly, who had been such an important part of her childhood, but now long gone, to her parents’ latest dog, a little white poodle called Noodle. And there was Flo, of course, the twelve-year-old sweetheart of a cat she had taken on after her gran died. In between, there had been a pair of green budgies, Chirp and Cheep, that they’d kept in a cage in the kitchen, and a goldfish who came home in a plastic bag from the funfair and never did get itself a name. It had only lived for a few weeks but had been given a proper shoebox funeral in the garden, just the same. And, of course, all the village pets that had come through the doors at her dad’s old vets’ surgery tacked on at the back of their house, and the farm animals in need of visits, when she had spent her school holidays helping her dad out around the place or, to be honest, mostly just getting in the way.

Prue was no scientist. She loved English and art. From the day she had been given her first camera, she had known she wanted to become a photographer and that’s exactly what she’d done, even if so far it was only working for the local paper, with the occasional wedding job at the weekends. Much to her dad’s disappointment, she had never wanted to study chemistry or biology and follow in his footsteps to become a vet but, slowly and surely, as her friends spent more and more time hanging about at the surgery with her after school and in the holidays, it became clear that her school friend Ralph Barton did. Her dad had taken Ralph under his wing, given him work experience and paid him to help out during his holidays from uni, sat with him for hours at a time, helping with revision and essays and practical tasks, then taken him on as his assistant. By the time Ralph was qualified, her dad had been more than willing to accept him into the business as a junior partner, getting him ready to take over one day when the joys of retirement started to beckon, which couldn’t be that far off now he was in his sixties.

It had caused a lot of jealousy between the brothers when their father had invested so heavily in Ralph’s future, mortgaging the family home to help Ralph raise the money to bring the practice into the modern world with a website and brand new premises. Prue could see that Joe had felt side-lined, as if his own accountancy career, and perhaps even he himself, was regarded as less important when measured against his big brother. Perhaps if their mother had still been alive it might have been different, but she had died when the boys were still at school. Their dad just didn’t seem to have the same natural intuition when it came to his sons’ feelings, finding it easier to concentrate on the practical side of things, as if chucking his money around, buying bigger and better Christmas presents and bikes and computer games, and then ploughing so much cash into the vets’, could somehow compensate for the loss of a mother’s love.