Death of an Expert Witness by P. D. James Read Free Book Online

that most of the money would come to me after his death, anyway—I mean, that’s what he told me when the will was read—and it would be too late then. I’d be an old lady. I might die first. It was now that was important. But I didn’t tell him why I wanted it. I swear that.”
    “Swear? Don’t be dramatic. You’re not in a court of law. And then what did he say?”
    If only Star would stop that agitated pacing, would only turn and look at her instead of questioning her in that cold, inquisitorial voice. And the new bit was even harder to tell. She couldn’t explain to herself why it should be, but it was something which she had tried to put out of her mind, for the present anyway. One day she would tell Star, the moment when it was right to tell. She had never imagined being forced into confidence with such brutal suddenness.
    “He said that I shouldn’t rely on getting anything in his will. He said that he might acquire new obligations.
Obligations
was the word he used. And if he did, the will would no longer stand.”
    And now Star swung round and faced her.
    “New obligations. Marriage! No, that’s too ridiculous. Marriage, that desiccated, pedantic, self-satisfied prude. I doubt whether he ever deliberately touches a human body except his own. Solitary, masochistic, surreptitious vice, that’s all heunderstands. No, not vice, the word’s too strong. But marriage! Wouldn’t you have thought …”
    She broke off. Angela said: “He didn’t mention marriage.”
    “Why should he? But what else would automatically set aside an existing will unless he made a new one? Marriage cancels a will. Didn’t you know that?”
    “You mean that as soon as he married I should be disinherited?”
    “Yes.”
    “But that isn’t fair!”
    “Since when has life been noted for its fairness? It wasn’t fair that your grandmother left her fortune to him instead of sharing it with you just because he’s a man and she had an old-fashioned prejudice that women shouldn’t own money. It isn’t fair that you’re only a secretary at Hoggatt’s because no one bothered to educate you for anything else. It isn’t fair, come to that, that you should have to support me.”
    “I don’t support you. In every way except the unimportant one, you support me.”
    “It’s humiliating to be worth more dead than alive. If my heart gave out tonight, then you’d be all right. You could use the life-assurance money to buy the place and stay on. The bank would advance the money once they knew you were my legatee.”
    “Without you I shouldn’t want to stay on.”
    “Well, if you do have to leave here, at least it will give you an excuse to live on your own, if that’s what you want.”
    Angela cried out in vehement protest: “I shall never live with anyone else but you. I don’t want to live anywhere but here, in this cottage. You know that. It’s our home.”
    It was their home. It was the only real home she’d ever known. She didn’t need to look around her to fix with startlingclarity each familiar loved possession. She could lie in bed at night and in imagination move confidently around the cottage touching them in a happy exploration of shared memories and reassurance. The two Victorian lustre plant pots on their matching pedestals, found in The Lanes at Brighton one summer weekend. The eighteenth-century oil of Wicken Fen by an artist whose indecipherable signature, peered at through a microscope, had provided so many shared moments of happy conjecture. The French sword in its decorated scabbard, found in a country sale room and now hanging above their fireplace. It wasn’t just that their possessions, wood and porcelain, paint and linen, symbolized their joint life. The cottage, their belongings, were their joint life, adorned and gave reality to it just as the bushes and flowers they had planted in the garden staked out their territory of trust.
    She had a sudden and terrifying memory of a recurrent nightmare. They