The Oxmarket Aspal Murder Mystery Read Online Free PDF Page A

looked thoughtfully at her.  She was a big, plump woman with a healthy colour and a good-humoured mouth.  The small house as neat and clean and a faint appetising smell came from the direction of the kitchen.
                  Di Silver had gone into the financial background of Mr and Mrs Young and had found no motive there for murder, and the Detective Inspector was a very thorough man.
                  I sighed, and persevered with my task, which was the breaking down of Sarah Young’s suspicion of private detectives.  I led the conversation away from the murder and focused on the victim of it.  I asked questions about her aunt, her health and her habits, her preferences in food and drink, her politics, her late husband, her attitude to life, to sex, to sin, to religion, to children, to animals.
                  Whether any of this irrelevant matter would be of use, I had no idea.  I was looking through a haystack to find a needle.  But, incidentally, I was learning something about Sarah Louise Young.
                  Sarah did not really know very much about her aunt.  It had been a family tie, honoured as such, but without intimacy.  Now and again, once a month or so, she and her husband Michael had gone over on a Sunday to have midday dinner with Aunt Faith, and more rarely she come over to see them.  They had exchanged presents at Christmas.  They’d known that Aunt Faith had a little something put by, and that they’d get it when she died.
                  “But that’s not to say we were needing it,” Sarah Young explained with rising colour.  “We’ve got savings and we made sure that Aunt Faith got a good send off.”
                  Aunt Faith had been fond of reading and loved Strictly Come Dancing on the television. She didn’t like dogs, they messed up a place, but she used to have a cat – a ginger.  It strayed away and she hadn’t had one since, but the woman at the post office had been going to give her a kitten.  Kept her house very neat and didn’t like litter.  She made a nice little living out of her cleaning, especially from the Brooks-Nunn’s. Rolling in money they are.  Tried to get Aunt Faith to come more days in the week, but she wouldn’t disappoint her other clients because she’d gone to them before she went to the Brooks-Nunn’s, and it wouldn’t have been right.
                  I mentioned the Bellagamba’s.
                  Oh yes, Aunt Faith went to her – two days a week.  They’d come back from Italy and Mrs Bellagamba didn’t know a thing about the house.  They tried to market-garden, but they didn’t know anything about that, either.  When the children and grandchildren stayed the house was just pandemonium.  But Mrs Bellagamba was a nice lady and Aunt Faith liked her.
                  So the portrait grew.  Faith Roberts liked to read, loved ballroom dancing on the telly, cleaned houses, liked cats and didn’t like dogs.  She liked children, but not very much.  She kept herself to herself.
                  She attended church on a Sunday, but didn’t take part in any church activities.  Sometimes, but rarely, she went to the cinema in Oxmarket. She could be judgemental and one occasion had given up working for an artist and his so-called wife when she had discovered they weren’t married.  She loved the local newspaper the Oxmarket Mercury and she liked the old magazines when her clients gave them to her.  She wasn’t interested in politics but voted Conservative like her husband had always done.  Never spent much on clothes but when she did they were always of top quality.  She had an old computer but hardly ever used it, never used the internet and didn’t possess a mobile phone.
                  Faith Roberts was, in fact, very much the Faith Roberts I had imagined her to be and her niece, Sarah Young, was the