Bring Forth Your Dead Read Online Free PDF

pleased to be able to balance what she had said about Craven’s daughter a moment earlier. But he had little doubt that her recollection was accurate.
    Lambert said, ‘Think carefully about this, Mrs Lewis, and if you can’t be certain don’t be afraid to say so. Was there any longer period—say, two or three weeks—when David Craven was not able to visit his father in those last months?’
    It was an opportunity to give the son an alibi of sorts, and he thought she was intelligent enough to realise it. She thought carefully before she replied, as he had directed, but there was an air of satisfaction as her brow cleared and she said, ‘No, I’m sure that there was nothing that kept him away for that length of time. In fact, I’m sure that in those last months a week would be the longest interval between any two of David’s visits.’
    Again the effect of murder was to invert the normal moral canons, so that what should have been a proper filial concern now laid a suspicion of the worst of evils upon the bereaved. Lambert saw Margaret Lewis’s blue eyes watching as if hypnotised Hook’s deliberate recording of these facts. To break the spell he said, ‘And who else came regularly into the house in the months before Mr Craven died?’
    She paused to think again. He thought what a good witness she would make in court: calm, intelligent, giving a proper attention to counsel’s questions, not straying into irrelevancies in her replies. And it never came amiss in a good-looking woman to arrive smartly but not gaudily dressed. Eventually she said, ‘Edmund did not have a hectic social life in the last years. Various friends came in to see him from time to time, but not as frequently as you are suggesting is significant.’
    She stopped for a moment at the end of what sounded like a formal introduction to something of importance; probably that was what made both policemen aware that the real matter was yet to come. ‘There was one visitor you will wish to add to your list, though I am quite sure he had nothing to do with the death. Walter Miller visited Edmund each week to play chess with him. They had known each other for almost fifty years, I think.’
    ‘Mr Miller was a contemporary of Mr Craven’s?’
    ‘Indeed, yes. Sometimes I thought that was the chief thing they had in common. But you must understand that they had been friends for many years before I came on the scene.’
    Her manner had become suddenly stiff and formal again, as it had been at the start of the interview. Her words about the mysterious Mr Miller had the ring of a prepared statement. He decided not to press her: this was the beginning of an investigation and it might be better to probe specific areas after he had seen Miller himself. Hook took details of the elderly man’s full name and address, which she was able to give them from memory.
    She gave them details of the medical visitors who come to the chronically sick: doctor, chiropodist and district nurse. It was the last of these who had set running the hare which had led them to the exhumation, when she had eventually reported to the pathology people at the hospital the suspicions of a poisoning that had nagged at her insomniac mind for months. Lambert had interviewed the district nurse before the exhumation. He had cleared her as a suspect: though she had had ample opportunity, it was obviously highly unlikely that she would wish to draw attention to a crime successfully completed had she been involved herself. She was an intelligent woman; it was a conversation with the pathology staff about another poisoning which had set her mind racing about the death of Edmund Craven. There was no sign that Margaret Lewis was aware of this as she watched Hook dutifully lengthening his list of those with access to the deceased.
    Lambert said, ‘Was there anyone else, Mrs Lewis, who came regularly into the house in the period which concerns us?’
    ‘No. Not that I can remember. It’s over a year