The Coffin Lane Murders Read Online Free PDF

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    She looked up at the men appealingly. 'I really don't know what I'll do without Molly. She was absolutely devoted to me.'
    'Has she any family?' Faro asked.
    Miss Errington shook her head. 'None. She was a workhouse child. I took her on trust and she repaid it well. She was eighteen when I took her in. She had been a servant with a very respectable family who were moving to Spain. Although her working life began with scrubbing floors in a local hospital, I was prepared to overlook this since she took enormous pride in having risen in the world from such lowly beginnings.'
    She sighed. 'A very reliable girl, she had excellent references, of course,' she added, a fact which Faro already knew.
    'A young woman, surely she had some private life, friends in the area perhaps?' asked Faro.
    Miss Errington looked suspicious and a trifle apprehensive at the word 'friends'. 'Your meaning, Inspector?' she said stiffly.
    'I mean, madam, perhaps a young man.'
    Miss Errington, who had never experienced feelings of being in love and therefore hadn't the least idea what he was talking about, was outraged at such a wicked idea.
    'Of course she didn't have a - young man.' She spat out the words, managing to make them sound an obscenity. 'I assure you she was entirely devoted to me.'
    Faro smiled. 'Quite so, quite so.' Apparently Miss Errington moved in a wilderness where the natural inclinations of man and womankind did not exist. A wilderness devoid of the emotion that kept the world turning and carried those who fell beneath its spell beyond the call of duty to their employers.
    'Is there anything else, Inspector?'
    'I should like to see her room.'
    Miss Errington was not at all pleased at this request and for a moment he thought she was going to refuse. Such behaviour in someone less invalidish would have made him immediately suspicious.
    Adie was summoned and waited at the bedroom door, eyeing him apprehensively as he opened the rickety cupboard and looked through the two drawers in the shabby chipped chest to reveal darned underwear and stockings. A nightgown lay neatly folded beside what was probably poor Molly's only other dress.
    'Done something wrong, has she?' demanded Adie as he closed the door.
    'Not that I know about,' said Faro. 'Was she a friend of yours?' he asked hopefully of the shivering kitchen maid. As she watched him she rubbed together hands blue with cold. Her nose was red and the house icy except for the fire in Miss Errington's sitting room.
    The thin dress under the starched white apron and cap looked hopelessly inadequate to keep Adie warm although he doubted that such a thought had ever crossed Miss Errington's mind, cosily wrapped in cashmere shawls against the chilly corridors.
    'That one!' Faro realised that Adie was speaking not of present injustices by her employer, but launching a tirade against Molly.
    'A friend, that one! Not likely! Proper snob she was, thought herself somebody, being the mistress's companion. Tried to imitate her proper manners. It was "do this, Adie, do that", never a kind word. Above her station, she copied the mistress, even the way she talked,' she added darkly.
    'Did she have friends outside the house?' Faro asked and Adie's lips twitched into a sneer.
    'Not her. Never went out nowhere except with the mistress. Close as two peas in a pod, they were, probably had hopes of being left something in her will when she goes.'
    Faro went to the door.
    'Is that it then? Seen enough, have you?'
    'I would like to see your kitchen, if I may.'
    Adie looked at him. 'What on earth for?'
    He pretended not to hear the question and with a shrug she led the way down the back stairs into a kitchen which nursed an inadequate fire and was only marginally less cold and forbidding than the rest of the house.
    She was surprised at his request to inspect the cutlery drawer.
    'The best silver's kept in the dining room. Locked away. Is some of it missing too? Is that what's up? Done a bunk with the silver,