Gift Wrapped by Peter Turnbull Read Free Book Online Page A

two of his officers would be calling on me directly.’ Mrs Wenlock’s voice, as well as being soft and pleasing, Webster noted, could, he thought, also be accurately described as mellifluous.
    â€˜Yes.’ Webster replaced his ID in his jacket pocket. ‘Mr Hennessey is our boss, and we are part of his team. We are the two officers he spoke of.’
    â€˜I see.’ Mrs Wenlock stepped nimbly aside. ‘Well, do please come in.’
    The door opened on to a wide hallway with a dark brown-coloured carpet and highly polished wooden panelling, and smelled strongly of a mixture of carpet cleaner and wood polish. A black telephone stood on a low wooden table beyond the door, and a wide carpeted stairway rose up to the upper floor of the house. China plates gripped in metal braces and attached to the wall panelling provided tasteful decoration.
    â€˜If you could please go into the rear sitting room,’ Mrs Wenlock closed the front door, ‘second door on the right, or the parlour as my late father would have referred to it, God rest his soul.’
    Webster, followed closely by Carmen Pharoah, walked quietly down the hall, pushed upon the second door on the right, as directed, and entered a large living room, gently decorated with a light blue fitted carpet and cream-coloured coverings over the armchairs and settee. Full bookshelves lined the wall opposite the door; the window looked out upon what Webster thought was a disappointingly modest rear garden though it was as well tended as the front garden. A small television set stood in the corner of the room, beneath which was a silver-coloured hi-fi system and a CD player.
    â€˜I put the dogs outside, which is why I was a little delayed in answering the door,’ Mrs Wenlock explained as she entered the room. ‘If you can’t see them it’s because they will have found some shade for themselves. Two black Labradors ... like all brown and black dogs they do not do well in the heat. I knew you’d be the police so I knew I’d be safe, but I’m exceedingly grateful for their presence, during the night especially.’
    â€˜You live alone?’ Carmen Pharoah ‘read’ the room: all age and social class appropriate, she thought, and felt, thusly, reassured.
    â€˜Yes, yes I do.’ Mrs Wenlock sank gracefully into an armchair and, with a clearly practised gesture of her right arm and open palm, invited Webster and Pharoah also to take a seat. Reginald Webster sat in the remaining armchair, whilst Carmen Pharoah contented herself with the centre of the settee. ‘I have two sons,’ Mrs Wenlock continued. ‘Both went to university and both didn’t come back, as is often the way of it, and so for the greater part of each year, these days, I am alone in the house, but I am visited at Christmas and my birthday and also on one or two other occasions. The boys were much closer to James, my husband, than they were to me, so because of that the “old woman” is visited out of a sense of duty only – just token visits, with limited access to my grandchildren. Very limited access. I am held to blame for my husband’s disappearance, you see.’
    â€˜You are blamed?’ Carmen Pharoah sat forward. ‘Why ... in what sense are you to blame, or held to blame?’
    â€˜Why ... why indeed ... well, I suppose it’s because our marriage had its ups and downs,’ Mrs Wenlock glanced up at the ceiling, ‘and I dare say that if I am to be at all honest it had more downs than ups ... rows ... such awful rows and such awful arguments ... you can imagine it, I am sure ... and the boys, my two dear sons, said I drove James away and they said that he just walked away into the wilderness and stumbled into a river somewhere, and his body was never found ... or it remains still to be found. If I hadn’t been such a shrew of a woman then he just wouldn’t have left this house looking