Death in Summer Read Online Free PDF Page B

part of each morning in the café sits where he always sits, with a view of the street.
    ‘You going after another job then, Pettie?’
    She’s finished with child-minding, Pettie says. She’s finished with kids making a bedlam – flour and raisins all over the floor the minute your back’s turned, Shredded Wheat floating in the sink, the bedclothes set on fire one time. The morning she typed the reference, Brendan Dowler ate the best part of a packet of Atora. The first day at the Fennertys’, Dean put the cat in the fridge. When she walked into the toilet the time Dowler hadn’t locked the door he said be my guest.
    The house in Essex was a different kind of set-up altogether, you could tell that even before you got there; you could tell from the advertisement, you could tell from the man’s voice when she rang up. Living in, the job was, and the minder’s room had a carpet and an armchair, dried flowers in a vase, a television. Because of how the man sounded on the phone, giving her directions, saying they were looking forward to seeing her, she was so sure she’d get the job she didn’t turn up at the Dowlers’ the nextmorning. Passed on in the Soft Rock Café, this information causes Albert some dismay.
    ‘Don’t do to go behind on the rent, Pettie.’
    A couple of months ago it was Albert who got Pettie the room in Mrs Biddle’s house, across the landing from his own. Mrs Biddle wasn’t keen – asserting, in fact, that Pettie frightened her – but in the end she agreed, and Albert feels responsible for the arrangement. Sometimes Pettie is headstrong, not realizing what the consequences of her actions may be. If she doesn’t pay the rent she’ll have to move on, no way she won’t. A tearaway, Mrs Biddle calls her.
    ‘You think about going back to explain to the Dowlers, Pettie? A Saturday today, they wouldn’t be at work.’
    The time he persuaded her to go back to the Fennertys she said she’d been in a hospital with suspected appendicitis. He was against her saying that, but she argued that she couldn’t just tell them she was fed up. Not that any of it mattered: they didn’t even listen when she said about the hospital, glad to have anyone for the kids, no matter who.
    ‘Mrs Biddle can’t be short on the rent, Pettie. I’m only thinking about that.’
    ‘No way she’ll be short.’
    ‘I’m only mentioning it, Pettie.’
    Stockily made, two years older than his friend, Albert is a dapper presence in the Soft Rock Café, the three buttons of his brown jacket buttoned, as are the buttons of its matching waistcoat. These clothes have been acquired in a charity shop; his tie and the shirt into which it is tightly knotted were the property of Mrs Biddle’s late husband. He wears a watch he sometimes draws attention to, a Zenith,given to him by a couple whose windows he used to clean.
    ‘You hear that name before?’ Pettie is saying. ‘Thaddeus?’
    Albert shakes his head, on which darkish hair is tidily combed and parted. After a moment he says he thinks he has heard the name, but can’t remember where. It could have been Miss Rapp in the old days; it could have been a person he was talking to on the street. Fearful of falsehood, as Albert is, he wouldn’t like to say.
    ‘The wife was in a photograph.’
    And Pettie describes this because it kept catching her eye: a photograph in a silvery frame on a round table with paperweights on it. There were coloured flowers in the glass of the paperweights, and you could tell the photograph was of Thaddeus Davenant’s dead wife because it was given pride of place. A road accident was all that was said, which was why a minder for the kid was necessary.
    ‘There’s too much speed on them motorways, Pettie.’
    Pettie says speed wasn’t mentioned. They didn’t give a reason, any more than they did for not taking her on, except the grandmother saying they’d changed their minds. The same three girls were waiting for the bus back, and got on to