The Santa Klaus Murder by Mavis Doriel Hay Read Free Book Online Page A

one.”
    Of course I’d heard this sort of talk before; it always disgusts me rather and I can’t believe that Father would think of Miss Portisham like that. I told George so.
    â€œThen there’s this affair with Bingham. Apart from anything else, Father wouldn’t want to lose his invaluable secretary. If he noticed anything between her and Bingham, he might be pretty keen to stop it.”
    â€œBut you’ve just said yourself that they could live here and Mrs. Bingham could still run Flaxmere,” I pointed out.
    â€œFather mightn’t see it that way. He might think she’d want to leave and he’d begin by telling her that she ought to do better for herself than that, and then he’d think of a sure way of keeping her here. I tell you, I don’t like the situation.”
    â€œI’m sick of talking about it,” I told him. “I can’t do anything; I don’t think that anything need be done, and I won’t do anything. If you’re really worried, the best thing you can do is to work it so that Father asks Hilda to come and live here. She is a companion to him, which I’m not; she could run the house very well, which I can’t; she’d be the best possible antidote.”
    â€œBy Jove!” said George. “That might be a solution!”
    At least I had given George something new to think about. I warned him to be careful in anything he might say to Hilda. If she thought he was hatching a plot to coerce Father, she’d shy right off.
    As far as I was concerned, I felt sorrier than ever for Miss Portisham. But the important thing about this conversation is that it shows how worried and uncertain George was about Father’s will. He wouldn’t want anything to happen to Father just then because he was afraid the will might produce “sensational revelations,” but he did see a ray of hope in the idea of Hilda coming to Flaxmere, and he would be only too anxious to get that arranged and trust to her influence with Father to make the world safe for Melburys.

Chapter Four
    Tuesday
    by Mildred Melbury (Aunt Mildred)
    Those days of waiting for Christmas, after the family has collected at Flaxmere, are always difficult. The children are excited and noisy and everyone is on edge, being afraid that things won’t go smoothly and that Christmas Day will not be quite the festival of good will which we have a right to expect. Of course, none of us anticipated the shocking tragedy which was to occur, but I always do feel that families which have once broken up are best kept separate. There can be occasional visits, of course, but to attempt to bring everyone together again in the same happy family atmosphere they enjoyed as children is to my mind a mistake. And of course the “in-laws” complicate matters; not that Patricia and David and Gordon are not all very nice people, but they are not part of our own family, properly speaking, and cannot be expected to fit in perfectly. That, however, is only my own opinion; no criticism is intended, and of course my poor brother arranged things in his own house as he saw fit, though there is no knowing how far he may have been influenced by those who were scheming for their own ends.
    As far as I am concerned, I am always glad to come back to Flaxmere. I am trying to describe the events of Tuesday—Christmas Eve—as they seemed to me at the time, so I will endeavour to write as if the terrible happening that took place on Christmas Day had never occurred. But I must emphasize that although there was a certain uneasiness in the party, as I have tried to explain, there was nothing, nothing whatever, to make me suspect for a moment that such a dastardly blow against my poor brother was even then being planned. For planned beforehand it certainly must have been.
    Eleanor, with her husband, Gordon Stickland, and her two children, Osmond and little Anne, were the last of the party to