The Santa Klaus Murder Read Online Free PDF Page A

of cards topples to the ground.”
    â€œThat’s what you’ve got to manage—to get him to ask you. You know he’d love to have you here and you’d like to be here. You’ve proved your point, that you can stand on your own feet and live your own life. Even Father admits that to himself, I’m sure. Hilda, I do want you to help me. Of course Philip and I have quite definitely made up our minds and we shall get married anyway, but I should like to know you were backing me up.”
    â€œI must think it over,” I told her. “My dear child, I want you to be happy. Can’t we persuade Father to give Philip his blessing? That would be so much simpler and, after all, he can’t object to him so much if he has him here to stay.”
    â€œI’ve suggested to Philip that he should write and publish a book that is at one and the same time an indisputable work of genius, a dignified production in the Victorian style and a best seller. That’s the only way I can see of getting Father to accept him as a son-in-law. You know quite well that no one can persuade Father to anything. Except, perhaps, Miss Portisham, and no one knows how she does it. Of course I’m not expecting you to persuade Father to ask you to come and live here. You must wangle it in some clever way, so that it just happens.”
    I have recorded all this conversation, in the words which I remember very well, because it clearly shows Jenny’s frame of mind just before Christmas Day. She wasn’t in the least influenced by what I said and she was full of plans for her own escape from Flaxmere in the spring. She had no thought of her father’s money, because she and Philip had decided that they could do quite well without it.

Chapter Three
    Monday
    by Jennifer Melbury
    On Monday morning at nine o’clock most of us gathered in the dining-room for the family meal, which Father considered the correct thing. He liked to be “the head of the family in the old ancestral home.” He was always playing a part of some kind and I believe that’s why he has been so successful in material ways. He studied his role at each stage of his life and assumed the appropriate air. But he never bothered to study how to be the father of this family; I suppose he thinks we ought all to act our parts as members of the family of his imagination.
    Eleanor and Gordon hadn’t yet arrived at Flaxmere. Aunt Mildred had come several days before, but she doesn’t feel at her best in the morning and therefore breakfasts in bed. Dittie, who goes in for being a bit languid, often does the same, but on this occasion she appeared in the dining-room with the rest of us, probably because she had only arrived the evening before and wanted to test the atmosphere and make her plans for the day accordingly.
    After breakfast Hilda and Carol, Dittie and her husband David, Patricia and her children, and I were idling about in the hall, looking at papers, reading letters and making hurried notes of the names of people who’d sent early Christmas cards and whom we’d left off our lists. George, the only one of the family who dares to come down deliberately late for breakfast, was still in the dining-room, comfortably surrounded by toast and butter and marmalade and quite undisturbed by the fact that Father sternly presided at the head of the table.
    Suddenly Patricia began to create a fuss in the hall; she’d forgotten, or thought she’d forgotten, to dispatch a present to an important rich uncle and decided that she must arrange a shopping expedition to Bristol, which is about twenty miles from us. But first we must all be asked whether it would be too dreadful if she had sent the old man a present after all and now sent him a second one. So, knowing that Patricia would certainly go shopping, whatever we said, we all gave our advice. Carol asked if she could go too. George and Patricia had come in their own car,