Who Saw Him Die? by Sheila Radley Read Free Book Online Page A

happened so quickly and so recently that she had not, until now, had a moment to stand still and think. Once Cuthbert was buried, on Friday afternoon, she must set to work in earnest.
    The clock in the hall, mid-Victorian mahogany and brass, undistinguished except for its excessive size, struck the half-hour.
    Eunice Bell looked at her watch. Half past nine, high time the detective arrived.
    She began a restless walk through the house. Her greatgrandfather, who had been more concerned with ostentation than with comfort, had sited it so that its principal rooms faced towards the town, regardless of the fact that this was due north. After her mother’s death, Eunice had established herself in two small first-floor rooms that caught the sun, and had shut up most of the others. She would have liked to use her mother’s former sitting room, the only agreeable ground-floor room in the house, but its associations were too unpleasant. Fortunately it had been possible for her to avoid even walking past the door, because the room was on its own in a passage that led only to the stairway to the tower where her father had had his study … and nothing would have induced her to re-visit that .
    But this morning, as she opened the doors of the ground-floor rooms to survey all that needed to be done, she steeled herself to confront her memories. She was no longer a frightened child, or a quaking adolescent. Her mother and father were long dead, safely buried in the family plot where Cuthbert would soon join them. She was free of them all.
    Or so she tried to convince herself. But as soon as she set foot in that dreaded corridor, where she had gone only when summoned for her birthday ordeal or, more frequently, to explain some minor breach of conduct to her mother who had then referred her to her father for sentence, the years of independent adulthood might never have been. Everything – the cold black and white tiles on the floor, the dark brown paintwork, the stained-glass window that provided the corridor with such dismal light, the heavy silence, the pervasive smell of rising damp – reminded her of her youthful unhappiness. As she forced herself to walk past that former sitting room, Eunice recalled how her mother had been accustomed to sit there for hours with the door ajar, playing patience. And how, as she had passed the doorway, trembling, on her way to the tower, the slap slap slap of her mother’s cards had presaged the punishment she was about to receive at her father’s hands.
    No. She had not been up in the tower for years, and there was no need for her to go there now. Before she could put her mind to clearing the house, she had to complete her family duty by burying Cuthbert. And she could not feel free to bury him until the police had properly investigated the suspicious circumstances of his death.

Chapter Six
    Douglas Quantrill left home to go to work in a state of domestic shock. He didn’t want to be a grandfather. He wasn’t ready for it yet. He was too young!
    He had said as much to Molly, but there was no sympathy to be had from that quarter. She had merely told him not to be so selfish; and as for being too young, she declared, that was nonsense. ‘Think yourself lucky, Doug Quantrill, that Jennifer and Nigel didn’t get married and start a family at the age we did, or you’d have been a grandfather at forty-one!’
    It wasn’t the most tactful of reminders. Starting a family had been the last thing he intended, as he had lain with his girl friend on a river bank one pre-pill summer’s evening and persuaded her – just this once – to allow him a special twenty-first birthday privilege. Molly had been a most attractive girl, and he’d certainly wanted her; but not as a wife! Marriage hadn’t entered his head. He was too young for it, he’d protested a few weeks later, when she told him tearfully that once had been enough to make her