A New Lease of Death Read Free

Mrs Primero for about fifty years. A real ancient retainer of the old school. Living like that, you might think they’d have become friends rather than mistress and servant, but Alice kept to her place and they were “Madam” and “Alice” to each other till the day Mrs Primero died. I knew Alice by sight. She was quite a local character when she came into town to do their shopping, particularly when Painter started bringing her in Mrs Primero’s Daimler. D’you remember how nursemaids used to look? No, you wouldn’t. You’re too young. Well, Alice always wore a long navy coat and what’s called a “decent” navy felt hat. She and Painter were both servants, but Alice put herself miles above him. She’d pull her rank on him and give him his orders just like Mrs Primero herself. He was Bert to his wife and his cronies but Alice called him “Beast”. Not to his face, mind. She wouldn’t have quite dared that.’
    ‘You mean she was frightened of him?’
    ‘In a way. She hated him and resented his being there. I wonder if I’ve still got that cutting.’ Wexford opened the bottom drawer of his desk, the one where he kept personal, semi-official things, grotesqueries that had interested him. He hadn’t much hope of finding what he sought. At the time of Mrs Primero’s murder Kingsmarkham police had been housed in an old yellow brick building in the center of the town. That had been pulled down four or five years ago and replaced by this block of startling modernity in the outskirts. The cutting had very probably got lost in the move from the high pitch pine desk to this one of lacquered rosewood. He leafed through notes, letters, odd little souvenirs, finally surfacing with a grin of triumph.
    ‘There you are, the “unperson” himself. Good-looking if you like the type. Herbert Arthur Painter, late of the Fourteenth Army in Burma. Twenty-five years old, engaged by Mrs Primero as chauffeur, gardener and odd-job man.’
    The cutting was from the
Sunday Planet
, several columns of type surrounding a double-column block. It was a clear photograph and Painter’s eyes were staring straight at the camera.
    ‘Funny, that,’ said Wexford. ‘He always looked you straight in the eye. Supposed to denote honesty, if you’ve ever heard such a load of rubbish.’
    Burden must have seen the picture before, but he had entirely forgotten it. It was a large well-made face with a straight though fleshy nose, spread at the nostrils. Painter had the thick curved lips that on a man are a coarse parody of a woman’s mouth, a flat high brow and short tightly waving hair. The waves were so tightly crimped that they looked as if they must have pulled the skin and pained the scalp.
    ‘He was tall and well-built,’ Wexford went on. ‘Face like a handsome overgrown pug, don’t you think? He’d been in the Far East during the war, but if the heat and the privation had taken it out of him it didn’t show by then. He had a sort of glistening good health about him like a shire horse. Sorry to use all these animal metaphors, but Painter was like an animal.’
    ‘How did Mrs Primero come to take him on?’
    Wexford took the cutting from him, looked at it for a moment and folded it up.
    ‘From the time the doctor died,’ he said, ‘until 1947 Mrs Primero and Alice Flower struggled to keep the place going, pulling up a few weeds here and there, getting a man in when they wanted a shelf fixed. You can imagine the kind of thing. They had a succession of women up from Kingsmarkham to help with the housework but sooner or later they all left to go into the factories. The place started going to rack and ruin. Not surprising when you think that by the end of the war Mrs Primero was in her middle eighties and Alice nearly seventy. Besides, leaving her age out of it, Mrs Primero never touched the place as far as housework went. She hadn’t been brought up to it and she wouldn’t have known a duster from an antimacassar.’
    ‘Bit of