Heaven Knows Who by Christianna Brand Read Free Book Online Page A

dressed for the day, but like one who had hurriedly put on a coat; and indeed it was true that the old gentleman usually pottered about the house in his shirtsleeves most of the morning, when he was at home.
    She did not ask for Jess M’Pherson, and he did not mention her. He appeared perfectly calm and normal, and it never entered her head for a moment that anything might be wrong.
    She was starting off down to the basement but he stopped her. He indicated a part of the lobby and asked her if she would wash it. It was the part where she was now standing at the head of the basement stairs—where the hall narrowed down to a passage about three feet wide and six feet long, passing the stairs and leading to his bedroom at the rear of the house. The patch was considerably marked—at first sight it looked as though people had been ‘trampling’ between the top of the basement stairs and the old man’s bedroom and the back parlour, with soot on their feet. She agreed to wash the patch and would have gone down for water and cleaning materials but he went himself to a cupboard on the ground floor and got a pail and filled it with water and got a piece of cloth—a strip of clean flannel that looked as though it had been torn off a flannel vest—and stood over her while she got down on her hands and knees to it. On closer examination—so Mary later said, but this may be doubtful—it seemed to her that there had been some stain there and someone had taken a sooty cloth and rubbed over it, to hide it; the soot was dry by now but she could recognise the smell as she washed it. The door of Mr Fleming’s bedroom was open and she washed inside it as far as the ‘waxcloth’ extended. She thought that the mark which the soot had been intended to conceal was a bloody footprint; she couldn’t be sure, but it might be that of a woman. It was close to the bedroom door, leading in from the top of the basement stairs. The stain that the soot had been put over was liker blood than anything else, said Mary; but if any redness came off on the cloth, it was not visible—because of the soot. It took ten minutes of hard rubbing to get it off.
    She stood up and lifted the pail to take it down to the basement and empty out the dirty water, but the old man again stopped her. He told her to leave it where it was. Then he fished in his pocket and gave her sixpence. ‘Is that all?’ she said, surprised—referring to the work, not the sixpence: she could not see ahead a hundred years, when the rate of three-and-six an hour would be commonplace. He said yes, that was all, and showed her off the premises. But before she left he ‘catched a grip of her by the handand put his other hand on her waist and said she was a nice girl.’ Whatever his extremity, old Mr Fleming was apparently still up to his tricks.
    Mary, however, had her sixpence and must have gone her way rejoicing—her next assignment was with a Mrs Napier and she worked four hours there for a penny ha’penny.
    She did not, however, particularly mention Sandyford Place to her mother when, that afternoon, she handed over her earnings, and it was not till after she heard of the murder that she thought of telling anyone about it: and then it was ‘the lady next door.’ Mrs Brown, overhearing her, administered what Sarah Adams would have called a flyting and told her never to open her mouth about it again, for fear she might get into some hobble. ‘Mary,’ she said, ‘it was strange in you to go in when you didna’ see the girl.’ ‘Mother,’ said Mary, ‘it was all one to me when the man asked me to come in.’ She proceeded to describe the lobby fornent the bedroom door—there was something like stains on it and it was like rubbed over with black soot, and the water was quite black as if something had been spilled on it and something black rubbed over it. She had had a great