Well-Schooled in Murder by Elizabeth George Read Free Book Online Page A

everything,” the policeman said. “Just to make certain we’ve the facts straight and proper?” He phrased it as a question, but no one thought it was anything other than an indication of what would happen next.
    Cecilia’s overall appearance suggested that going through another round of parry and thrust with the police was the last thing she could bear at the moment. She looked sapped and worn. She crossed her arms in front of her, and lowered her head to examine them as if she were surprised by their presence. Her right hand began to move on her left elbow: up, down, and around in what could have been mistaken for a caress.
    “I don’t think I can be any more helpful than I’ve been already.” She attempted patience, but the effort sounded strained. “The house is well off the road. You can see that for yourself. I didn’t hear a thing. I’ve not heard a thing for days. And I’ve certainly not seen anything. Not anything suspicious. Not anything to suggest a little boy…a little boy…” She stumbled on the words. Her hand stopped its caress of her elbow for a moment. Then it resumed.
    The second policeman wrote laboriously with the stub of a pencil. If he had taken all this down earlier in the evening, he was not giving any sign of having heard it before.
    “You understand why we need to ask you this, though,” the sergeant said. “Your house is closest to the church. If anyone had the opportunity to see or hear the killer’s movements, it would have been you. Or your parents. You say they’re not here at the moment?”
    “They’re my foster parents,” the girl corrected. “Mr. and Mrs. Streader. They’re in London. They’ll be back sometime this evening.”
    “Were they here this weekend? On Friday and Saturday?”
    The girl glanced towards the fireplace and the overmantel, on which a set of photographs were displayed. Three of them were of young adults, perhaps grown children of the Streaders’. “They went into London yesterday morning. They’re spending the weekend helping their daughter settle into her new flat.”
    “Here alone quite a bit, are you, then?”
    “No more than I like to be, Sergeant,” she responded. It was a strangely adult reply, spoken not so much with assurance as with a listless acceptance of an immutable fact.
    The despondency in her answer prompted St. James to question the girl’s presence in this place. It was comfortable enough and bore the appointments one would expect in a home deemed lived-in rather than fashionable. Good furniture filled the room; a nubby wool carpet covered the floor; watercolours decorated the wall; a stone fireplace held a basket of silk flowers arranged with more enthusiasm than artistic technique. There was a large television with a video recorder on a shelf beneath it. Plenty of books and magazines lay about, offering to occupy one’s idle time. But by her own admission the girl was an outsider, even if the mantel photographs had not identified her as such, and the emptiness with which she spoke suggested that she was an outsider everywhere else as well.
    “But you can hear noise from the road, can’t you?” the sergeant insisted. “Even as we sit here, cars go by. One can tell.”
    They all listened for a demonstration of this fact. As if on cue, a lorry rumbled past.
    “It’s not something one remembers, is it?” the girl replied. “Cars go by on streets all the time.”
    The sergeant smiled. “Indeed they do.”
    “You seem to be suggesting that a car was involved. But how can you know that? You’ve said this boy’s body was in the field behind the church. It seems to me that it could have got there several other ways, none of which I would have noticed even if I—or the Streaders or any of our neighbours—had been sitting on the verge the weekend through.”
    “Several other ways?” the sergeant said amiably, his interest aroused by this admission of knowledge.
    The girl replied, “Through the back field itself