A Time of Secrets Read Online Free PDF

first met. ‘But it’s never caused me any real concern. He swam the Hellespont, of course. And I was married three times.’
    Her mind tended to dart from topic to topic and her conversation was peppered with such cheerful non sequiturs, pronounced in a soft Scottish accent. She was, as she said herself, ‘a well-covered woman’ and tried to hide her weight by dressing in baggy black garments that reached her ankles. Inside her flat she wore soft leather slippers and a bonnet that might have been fashionable fifty years before. When she ventured outside for her daily ‘constitutional’ or over to the old Presbyterian church on Punt Road, her feet were invariably encased in buttoned boots and she wore a shapeless hat that was decorated with dangling jet beads.
    I was very fond of Mrs Campbell. Dolly disliked her, and called her ‘Mrs Busybody’. It was true that she interrogated us mercilessly about our comings and goings, but I knew it wasn’t prurient curiosity; it was that her world was so small and her interest in it was so immense. On occasion, she exhibited flashes of intuition about people that amounted almost to second sight.
    ‘A sad anniversary, is it,’ she said to me two weeks ago when I arrived home from Goodwood, longing for a cup of tea and a rest after eight hours of work without even a break for lunch.
    It had been six years exactly since my wedding, and I’d been forcing the memory out of my mind all day.
    Dolly told me, when I came to live in her flat, ‘If you’re holding on to a secret don’t even think it when you see Mrs Busybody in the hallway.’
    If Mrs Campbell saw me coming home after work she’d sometimes invite me in for a cup of tea and a ‘natter’, and we’d spend an hour chatting. I’d usually accept the invitation with good grace. She was lonely and, besides, I was fascinated by how she saw the world: to Mrs Campbell it was such a wondrous, brightly coloured thing, where people seemed to be better or worse than they really were. Her great delight in life was reading all the newspapers from cover to cover, and dwelling at length on the crime pages. To my amusement, Mrs Campbell appeared to be completely unshockable. She had absolute faith in the ultimate goodness of humanity, but she was well aware that there was ‘great wickedness’ out there and she seemed to revel in reading about it.
    ‘Oh, hello, my dears,’ she said now. ‘An axe attack. Whatever is the world coming to?’ A delicate shudder accompanied the words.
    ‘What?’ I asked, as Dolly hissed in my ear, ‘Don’t encourage her.’
    ‘A girl was attacked. Last night. When she was sleeping in her own bed.’ Her eyes were bright black buttons set in a face as white and wrinkled as crumpled linen. ‘They’ve not found the bloodstained axe.’
    My mind was trying to fit it altogether. I couldn’t help but imagine how horrible it must have been for the victim. Roused out of sleep to see a dark figure standing over her, axe raised – the terror and then the pain and, finally, oblivion. I shuddered, pushed the thoughts out of my mind and tried to concentrate on Mrs Campbell, who had put her head on the side and was looking thoughtful.
    ‘I don’t know about lady tram conductors,’ she said.
    ‘Tram conductors?’
    ‘The poor girl was a tram conductor,’ she said. ‘Manpowered, no doubt.’
    ‘No doubt,’ said Dolly, who had hold of my arm and was on the step above me, tugging.
    ‘Fractured her skull.’ Mrs Campbell seemed not in the least perturbed by the information she was imparting. ‘Do you think it was the uniform? Some men are very, ah, stirred up by a woman in uniform.’
    I was confused. ‘You said she was in bed. Surely she wouldn’t have been in uniform?’
    Dolly giggled and Mrs Campbell gave us a look from under her sparse eyebrows.
    ‘Of course not. But don’t you agree that such interesting things happen in St Kilda?’ she said.
    ‘Mmmm,’ was Dolly’s response,