The Case of the Missing Bronte by Robert Barnard Read Free Book Online

principle.’
    â€˜I know what’s Right,’ she said. ‘I know what’s Right and I say so.’ She sniffed and kept looking ahead, but I thought she was thawing towards me a bit.
    â€˜Mother saw a good deal of Cousin Edith,’ said Amos Macklehose, still uneasy with the conversation and rubbing his hands as if he were a garage mechanic. He looked at me ingratiatingly the while, his head cocked like one of our less appealing feathered friends. ‘Saw her most days in dear Cousin Rose’s last illness. United they tended her, you might say.’
    â€˜She did her duty, I’ll say that for her,’ pronounced Judith Macklehose. She added, as if as an afterthought, though it was not that: ‘Though I’ve no doubt she had her reasons.’
    â€˜Mother!’ said Amos Macklehose.
    â€˜Really?’ I probed. ‘You thought she had her reasons?’
    â€˜I’m not saying there was anything Wrong, mind you,’said the charming Judith. ‘But Cousin Rose leaving all her personal things away from her nearest Kin is something I’ll never understand. I just think it was Funny.’
    Judith Macklehose was clearly one of those people for whom funny is never funny-peculiar, let alone funny ha-ha, but always funny-suspicious.
    â€˜I’d gathered they were very old friends,’ I ventured.
    â€˜Oh, friends,’ said Judith Macklehose, disposing of friendship with a mighty sniff. ‘Still, if Edith Wing collected her pile, she worked for it, I’ll say that. I’d be the last to begrudge it to her. Particularly,’ she intoned, with great emphasis, ‘particularly in view of what has befallen her.’
    She didn’t actually use the word retribution, but the word was definitely hanging in the air.
    â€˜You’ve no idea who might have done such a thing — attacked her in this brutal way?’
    â€˜Oh no. We’d had no contact with her, not since the funeral, had we, Amos? We weren’t privy to her private life, dear me no. Mind you — we did hear . . .’
    â€˜Yes?’
    â€˜Well, one of our New Israelites — a member of our Tabernacle — comes from here, from Hutton. Three buses there, three buses back, every Sunday without fail. You won’t find that sort of faith in the Anglicans! Anyway, Fred Hebblethwaite, he told us that since she’d come here, she’d got very fond of a boy — ’
    â€˜Black!’ intoned Amos Macklehose.
    â€˜A black boy,’ agreed Judith Macklehose, her eyes clearly seeing the brand of Cain. ‘He comes to do the garden for her, so they say. Fourteen! Not, of course, that there’s anything in it. But I do say it’s funny . . .’
    â€˜We know about blacks, from Los Angeles,’ Mr Macklehose assured me, rubbing his greasy hands in an agony of sincerity and insultingly including me in on hisremarks with an implicit assumption that as a policeman I would agree. ‘Can’t walk the streets these days without getting attacked. Brutal thugs. We’ve had to be strict in our Tabernacle. Not admitted. Of course they’ll go to anything with a bit of Enthusiasm.’
    â€˜So if you’re looking for a likely suspect,’ his lovely wife assured me, ‘it’s my belief you need look no further. Making no judgments, of course.’
    â€˜Of course,’ I said. ‘Naturally not. So you both have lived in Los Angeles, have you?’
    â€˜Yes. Yes indeed!’ enthused Amos. ‘Met there, did we not, Judith? So in spite of the Sin and the Shame — and there is Sin, there is Shame — Los Angeles will always be a very special place for us. As you might say, The Promised Land. And the Dad did very nicely there too!’
    â€˜I don’t detect any American in your accent,’ I said to Judith.
    â€˜I went,’ she intoned, ‘on an Exchange Visit.’
    â€˜That’s