The Death of a Much Travelled Woman Read Online Free PDF Page A

just her brother, who retired from his job in Exeter to Sticklecombe-in-the-Moor. He was much older than Tommy and thought she was rather wild and boyish. It seemed perfectly plausible to him that his sister would spend all her time exploring foreign places.”
    I was still trying to take it in. “And your publishers? Didn’t they ever check?”
    “You must remember, my dear, that in those days there was no television and rather less general knowledge of what places looked like. Tommy found she loved acting the part of intrepid explorer, and our publishers loved it, too. Periodically she’d dress up in khaki and tall leather boots with a riding jacket and a tweed cap and swagger into the staid old office of Chatham and Son with a new manuscript. She refused to have her photograph in the books and, on my suggestion, said she always travelled incognito, in disguise. That was to prevent people in the countries we wrote about from realizing that she had never been there.”
    “But after the books were successful, didn’t you have any desire to actually travel to foreign places?”
    “Tommy did,” said Constance. “But my thought was that neither of us would be able to take the kind of chances I took in the travel books, and that if by any chance we were exposed, it would mean the end of a rather lucrative career.”
    “I thought for a while that you and Tommy Price were the same person,” I said slowly. “And that Tommy had created you as a kind of alter ego, someone to stay at home while she explored the world.”
    “You could just as easily say that I created Tommy Price as my alter ego,” Constance said. “Someone to explore the world for me while I stayed home.”
    My eyes went to the shelves of books in their faded bindings. How many happy days I’d passed reading about Tommy Price’s adventures. And now it turned out they were bogus.
    “It must have been hard for you when the books began to be reprinted,” I said. “And suddenly the world discovered Tommy Price again.”
    “Things had not gone so well with us in the last twenty years,” Constance said, with lips pinched. “Sometimes it seemed as if Tommy had come to believe my stories about her. There were periods when she spent most of her time walking over the moors; and other times when she gave out that she was on a trip but stayed home and inside, expecting me to wait on her hand and foot. When the books began to be reprinted, at first I was happy, for it would be more income. But then I realized what it was going to be like living with her.”
    “Now you have the income, but no Tommy Price to worry you,” I said. “I know she left everything to you in her will.”
    “Yes, she did.”
    “I’m curious about one thing,” I said. “Why Tommy invited me here to visit.”
    “I didn’t know she had until you turned up. It was rather unexpected, to say the least.” Constance’s wrinkled old face looked quite ghostly now, and evil, as if she were a Dartmoor pixie come back in human shape. No time to turn my jacket inside out now, either. “Perhaps Tommy had begun to be afraid of me and wanted a witness,” Constance said, so cold-bloodedly that I couldn’t help shivering. I remembered the toughness of her books. She hadn’t hesitated to shoot imaginary tigers or draw her gun against rampaging kangaroos. Why would she stop at murder?
    “And that ticket to Burma?”
    “I bought it for myself, as a kind of reward, I suppose. I had always wanted to see the pagodas of Burma. But when I arrived at Heathrow on December second, I realized that such a trip was impossible for me. The years when I could have enjoyed it were long over. I passed two not very agreeable weeks at a bed and breakfast in Bournemouth and returned home earlier this evening. I’ll spend the rest of my life here”—Constance’s mouth twisted, ironically or cruelly, I couldn’t tell—“answering fan mail for Tommy.”
    “And when did you push Tommy into the bog and hold