A New Lease of Death Read Online Free PDF Page A

pushed his plate away, signaled rather imperiously to the waiter and ordered two portions of apple pie. Burden knew that his chief’s notion of gracious living was somewhat limited.
    ‘Roger Primero had been visiting his grandmother that Sunday,’ Wexford said. ‘He was working in a solicitor’s office in Sewingbury at the time and he used to make quite a habit of having Sunday tea at Victor’s Piece. Maybe he had his eye on a share of the loot when Mrs Primero went – God knows he hadn’t a bean in those days – but he seemed genuinely fond of her. It’s certainly a fact that after we’d seen the body and sent for him from Sewingbury as next of kin, we had to restrain him forcibly from going over to the coach house and laying violent hands on Painter. I daresay his grandmother and Alice made a lot of him, you know, buttered him up and waited on him. I told you Mrs Primero had her affections. There’d been a family quarrel but apparently it didn’t extend to the grand-children. Once or twice Roger had taken his little sisters down to Victor’s Piece and they’d all got on very well together.’
    ‘Old people usually do get on well with kids,’ said Burden.
    ‘They had to be the right kind of children, Mike. Angela and Isabel, yes, and she had a very soft spot for young Liz Crilling.’
    Burden put down his spoon and stared at the Chief Inspector.
    ‘I thought you said you’d read all this up at the time?’ Wexford said suspiciously. ‘Don’t say it was a long time ago. My customers are always saying that to me and it makes me see red. If you read the account of that trial you must remember that Elizabeth Crilling, aged precisely five at the time, found Mrs Primero’s body.’
    ‘I assure you I can’t remember, sir.’ That must have been the day he’d missed, the day he hadn’t bothered with the papers because he’d been nervous about an interview. ‘She didn’t appear at the trial, surely?’
    ‘Not at that age – there are limits. Besides, although she was actually the first to go into the drawing room and come upon the body, her mother was with her.’
    ‘Digressing a little,’ Burden said, ‘I don’t quite get this stuff about the right kind of children. Mrs Crilling lives over there in Glebe Road.’ He turned to the window and waved his hand in the direction of the least attractive part of Kingsmarkham where long streets of small terraced brown houses had sprung up between the wars. ‘She and the girl live in half a house, they haven’t a penny to bless themselves with …’
    ‘They’ve come down a lot,’ said Wexford. ‘In September 1950 Crilling himself was still alive – he died of T.B. soon after – and they lived opposite Victor’s Piece.’
    ‘In one of those white semi-detached places?’
    ‘That’s right. A Mrs White and her son lived next door. Mrs Crilling was about thirty at the time, little bit over thirty.’
    ‘You’re joking,’ said Burden derisively. ‘That makes her only in her late forties now.’
    ‘Look, Mike, people can say what they like about hard work and childbearing and all that. I tell you there’s nothing like mental illness to make a woman look old before her time. And you know as well as I do Mrs Crilling’s been in and out of mental hospitals for years.’ He paused as their coffee came and pursed his lips censoriously at the anaemic brown liquid.
    ‘You did say black, sir?’ the waiter asked.
    Wexford gave a sort of grunt. The church clock struck the last quarter. As the reverberation died away, he said to Burden:
    ‘Shall I keep the parson waiting ten minutes?’
    Burden said neutrally, ‘That’s up to you, sir. You were going to tell me how Mrs Primero and the Crilling woman became friends. I suppose they were friends?’
    ‘Not a doubt of it. Mrs Crilling was ladylike enough in those days and she had a way with her, sycophantic, sucking up,
you
know. Besides, Crilling had been an accountant or something, just enough of a