Shallow Grave by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles Read Free Book Online Page B

his ’n’ hers library books on the bedside cabinets. Well, good luck to them.
    ‘I’m sorry to have to disturb you—’ Norma began routinely, but they jumped in eagerly.
    ‘Oh, no, not at all. Our pleasure,’ said Mr Bright, with a social smile.
    ‘Naturally we were expecting to be called upon,’ said Mrs Bright, ‘and of course we are eager to do anything we can to help in these dreadful circumstances.’
    ‘It’s our duty,’ Mr Bright added.
    ‘We’ve never held back when it was a question of duty,’ said Mrs Bright, ‘however inconvenient.’
    ‘Well, I hope I shan’t have to inconvenience you for long,’ Norma said.
    ‘Oh, please, not at all, it’s no trouble,’ Mr Bright waffled happily. ‘Won’t you sit down, Miss – er?’
    Norma sat on a slippery chintz sofa. Mr Bright looked at her legs with a slightly stunned air and sat down opposite her. Mrs Bright arranged herself carefully in an armchair between them and looked to see what Mr Bright was looking at. A spot of colour appeared in her cheeks. ‘Would you like a cup of coffee, Miss – er?’ she asked, rather sharply. ‘Desmond, shall we have coffee?’
    He snapped out of it and began elaborately rising and enquiring about the nature of preferred beverage and Norma saw herself reaching retirement in this mock-Tudor embrace and said quickly, ‘No, thank you very much, no coffee. I’d just like to ask you a few questions and then I can take myself out of your hair.’
    He sat again, trying to keep his eyes from her legs and not succeeding very well. ‘Ask away, then,’ he said heartily. ‘It’s no trouble. We’re glad to help.’
    ‘Not that we have much we can tell you,’ Mrs Bright put in, in a bid for attention. ‘We didn’t know Mrs Andrews well.’
    ‘She seemed a nice sort of gel,’ Mr Bright rumbled gallantly, and Mrs Bright gave him a sharp look.
    ‘I wouldn’t say that. I’m afraid my husband is rather susceptible to a pretty face. Mrs Andrews wasn’t really One of Us.She worked at the pub, you know, the Goat In Boots.’ She gave Norma a significant nod, as though this explained everything. ‘She was rather a forward young woman. One might almost say
pushy.
She’s quite taken over the church social committee,
and
the flower arrangements, and I have to say that some of her ideas of what’s fitting for a religious building are—’
    ‘My dear,’ Mr Bright interrupted anxiously, ‘she is dead.’
    ‘That doesn’t change the facts,’ Mrs Bright went on relentlessly. ‘She didn’t understand our ways, and she never seemed to realise where her interference wasn’t welcome.’
    ‘Oh, come, I wouldn’t say “interference”.’ Mr Bright seemed anxious for his wife not to expose herself. ‘Someone has to organise things and she had so much energy—’
    ‘Well, I have to say I didn’t like her,’ Mrs Bright said, giving him a nasty look, ‘energy or no energy. She attached herself to poor Frances Hammond, who hasn’t the sense of a day-old chick, poor creature,
and forced
her way into our circle, and then tried to impose her vulgar ideas on us. There’s a time and a place for everything, and
our
church fête is not the time and place for a bouncing castle, or whatever they like to call it.’
    Mr Bright appealed to Norma. ‘I always found her very polite. Quite a nicely spoken girl. She was always cheerful and pleasant to me.’
    ‘Yes, well she would be, wouldn’t she?’ Mrs Bright said sharply.
    Mr Bright went a little pink. ‘I don’t know what you mean, Mavis.’
    ‘Work it out for yourself,’ Mrs Bright snapped, with an appalling lapse from British Empire standards, and clamped her thin lips shut.
    Norma, fascinated by this glimpse under the carpet, reflected how odd it was that the more determinedly a couple kept up their shop front, the more eager they were to trot out old grievances before a ‘safe’ audience like a policeman, priest or doctor. She looked at Mr Bright. ‘Tell me