‘She wouldn’t say who, but there weren’t many to choose from. Linda could’ve been another victim. Even if she wasn’t, she must have known. She and Trisha were closer than twins.’
He explains why he did not unburden himself of this terrible knowledge at his trial. ‘I couldn’t bring myself to cause her family more pain.’ Trisha’s abuser must be a potential suspect for her murder. But he fears the police will not see it that way. ‘They still think Beryl might have done it. Because she’d have been paying Trisha’s alimony until I got a job.’
That seems a very unlikely motive for murder. Money is the least of his new wife’s problems. There is pride, of course, and resentment. But is she that kind of person? We shall find out tomorrow. The self-effacing Beryl Stanton Smith has agreed to set the record straight exclusively for our readers.
Chapter Two
A thick tweed coat over her clean overall, short brown suede boots with tassels and cleated soles on her feet, and the furry brown hat from Debenham’s keeping her head and ears warm, Rene slithered more than once on icy patches as she made her way gingerly along Church Street at half past seven in the morning, every so often grabbing with woolly-gloved fingers at a doorknob for support. The wind was cutting, still threatening rather than strong enough for snow, but bitter all the same. Looking at the sky, where dawn was breaking over Bleak Moor to the east, she saw no prospect of sunshine to lift the chill from the day.
She yawned, but from cold rather than tiredness. Early rising was the habit of her lifetime, part and parcel of the well-ordered existence she had fashioned too long ago to recollect. Keeping busy was another part of that life, and she had been quite overjoyed by the prospect of taking care of the policemen from North Wales, for she controlled her world, and the people in it, with domestic order, food, and ritualised routines designed to keep anarchy at arm’s length. She regarded domestic skills as instantly redeployable in innumerable settings, and since the dye and print mill on the corner by Trisha’s place closed ten years ago, where she had been in charge of quality control, Rene had successfully and profitably charred and cooked for most of the strangers who holidayed in the many village cottages now given over to tourism. In the process, she also made a whole new batch of friends, some of whom lived abroad, and she often thought the postman must be quite envious when he pushed postcards from Paris and crinkly airmail letters from Australia and America and even Hawaii through her letter-box.
As she progressed along the street, the railings intruding on her peripheral vision like shafts of black light, she noted absent-mindedly which housewives were not scrubbing their doorsteps and polishing their letter-boxes properly, and shook her head. Pausing for breath, she watched the rooks clattering in the trees, making that dreadful noise of theirs even before first light was properly over the horizon. Whatever time of the year, that sound obliterated all other birdsong, and she could not imagine how the people who lived with it day in and day out could bear it. When she was a child, the local guns came every so often to cull the rooks before the nesting season, and would line up, spaniels and retrievers to heel, alongside the railings, which were blacker then, with gold paint on the finials. She remembered as if it were yesterday the sharp crack as the guns went off, the noise ricocheting off the church walls, then the sound of the rooks crashing like stones through the trees, snapping twigs as they went, and the thud as they landed on the graves below. Sometimes their wings were torn off during that plummeting to earth, and hung off branches like broken black fans, and always there was a shower of spiky black feathers settling to earth for a long time afterwards, and the smells of blood and gunsmoke draped in the air.
He explains why he did not unburden himself of this terrible knowledge at his trial. ‘I couldn’t bring myself to cause her family more pain.’ Trisha’s abuser must be a potential suspect for her murder. But he fears the police will not see it that way. ‘They still think Beryl might have done it. Because she’d have been paying Trisha’s alimony until I got a job.’
That seems a very unlikely motive for murder. Money is the least of his new wife’s problems. There is pride, of course, and resentment. But is she that kind of person? We shall find out tomorrow. The self-effacing Beryl Stanton Smith has agreed to set the record straight exclusively for our readers.
Chapter Two
A thick tweed coat over her clean overall, short brown suede boots with tassels and cleated soles on her feet, and the furry brown hat from Debenham’s keeping her head and ears warm, Rene slithered more than once on icy patches as she made her way gingerly along Church Street at half past seven in the morning, every so often grabbing with woolly-gloved fingers at a doorknob for support. The wind was cutting, still threatening rather than strong enough for snow, but bitter all the same. Looking at the sky, where dawn was breaking over Bleak Moor to the east, she saw no prospect of sunshine to lift the chill from the day.
She yawned, but from cold rather than tiredness. Early rising was the habit of her lifetime, part and parcel of the well-ordered existence she had fashioned too long ago to recollect. Keeping busy was another part of that life, and she had been quite overjoyed by the prospect of taking care of the policemen from North Wales, for she controlled her world, and the people in it, with domestic order, food, and ritualised routines designed to keep anarchy at arm’s length. She regarded domestic skills as instantly redeployable in innumerable settings, and since the dye and print mill on the corner by Trisha’s place closed ten years ago, where she had been in charge of quality control, Rene had successfully and profitably charred and cooked for most of the strangers who holidayed in the many village cottages now given over to tourism. In the process, she also made a whole new batch of friends, some of whom lived abroad, and she often thought the postman must be quite envious when he pushed postcards from Paris and crinkly airmail letters from Australia and America and even Hawaii through her letter-box.
As she progressed along the street, the railings intruding on her peripheral vision like shafts of black light, she noted absent-mindedly which housewives were not scrubbing their doorsteps and polishing their letter-boxes properly, and shook her head. Pausing for breath, she watched the rooks clattering in the trees, making that dreadful noise of theirs even before first light was properly over the horizon. Whatever time of the year, that sound obliterated all other birdsong, and she could not imagine how the people who lived with it day in and day out could bear it. When she was a child, the local guns came every so often to cull the rooks before the nesting season, and would line up, spaniels and retrievers to heel, alongside the railings, which were blacker then, with gold paint on the finials. She remembered as if it were yesterday the sharp crack as the guns went off, the noise ricocheting off the church walls, then the sound of the rooks crashing like stones through the trees, snapping twigs as they went, and the thud as they landed on the graves below. Sometimes their wings were torn off during that plummeting to earth, and hung off branches like broken black fans, and always there was a shower of spiky black feathers settling to earth for a long time afterwards, and the smells of blood and gunsmoke draped in the air.
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