Hard Going by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles Read Free Book Online

herself behind all over the place and it wouldn’t mean a thing. Mind you, if it was me in her shoes, I’d’ve worn the gloves, cleaned the statue and put it back on the mantelpiece.’
    ‘Unless she wanted to make it look as if it wasn’t her,’ Slider said. ‘We’d have found traces on the statue eventually, and that would have put her squarely in the frame.’
    ‘Point. Except that they never think like that – lucky for us. Well, carry on. Hammersmith’s lost interest a bit what with one thing and another, and given it wasn’t anyone famous, but it only takes a slow news day and we’re back in the spotlight. The bugger of it is,’ he concluded gloomily, ‘showing someone was there isn’t going to get us anywhere.’
    Slider had already made the acquaintance of that particular bugger.
    He made Joanna go to bed as soon as she got home from the concert, and took her up a mug of Ovaltine.
    ‘Oh, Daddy!’ she simpered, fluttering her eyelids, but he could see how tired she was. They were too much, these long days and the strain of trying to be perfect in a fiercely competitive world; but he had expressed his doubts already, and could not press them without disrespecting her right to self-determination. He got on the bed beside her with his own mug, and she opened the batting – to keep him, he guessed, from saying the things he had just decided he mustn’t.
    ‘So how did it go? What’s it looking like?’
    ‘It’s looking like a long haul.’ He told her some of the details.
    ‘The housekeeper, obviously,’ she said at the end of it. ‘All you need is a motive.’
    ‘All!’
    ‘Well, you know what I mean.’
    ‘In any case, motives are usually the feeblest of things. It could be something as small as him telling her off about not cleaning something properly. How would you ever find that out? And any forensic evidence about her is automatically out of play because she had every right to be there.’ He sighed. ‘I don’t see this one coming in quickly.’
    She sipped, and then as he drew breath to speak she got in first. ‘What about your dad’s escapade today? Isn’t that intriguing?’
    ‘I’m more amazed than intrigued. Kate voluntarily went to an art gallery? Which Tate was it – Original or New Improved?’
    ‘The Modern,’ Joanna said, ‘so I expect she’d heard of it somewhere on the “cool” spectrum. I’m more intrigued that he wanted to inflict them on his girlfriend.’
    ‘Which one was it?’
    ‘Oh Bill,’ she said reproachfully, ‘it’s been Lydia Hurst for ages. Lydia from the Scrabble club?’
    ‘Oh,’ he said, recalibrating. ‘Do you think it’s serious?’
    ‘Introducing your grandchildren?’ Joanna said. ‘I think it’s a senior’s version of taking her home to meet the parents.’
    ‘He’s not brought her to see us yet,’ Slider complained.
    ‘Doesn’t want to frighten her off, maybe. This was a toe in the water. If she survived the children intact …’ She shrugged.
    ‘Well, it’ll be nice for him to get married again, I suppose,’ he said, wondering what was the appropriate reaction – wondering, indeed, what he felt about such a notion. His mother had died so long ago, and his father had lived an almost monastic life in the farm cottage where Slider had been born, until his recent move to a granny-flat attached to their new house. In all those years he had never seemed to want female companionship, and the only woman Slider had heard him speak about was his mother. Then, suddenly, transported to Chiswick, he had blossomed out into a new social life, and the zimmer-dollies had been all over him.
    ‘I don’t know if they’d get married or just live together,’ Joanna said, slightly shocking Slider, who was old-fashioned about such things – well, anyway, about one’s own father living in sin: the rest of the world could do as it pleased. ‘But either way, we have to consider how it might affect us.’
    ‘How could it affect us?’