A New Lease of Death Read Free Page A

a tartar, was she?’
    ‘She was what God and her background had made her,’ Wexford said gravely but with the faintest suspicion of irony in his voice. ‘I never saw her till she was dead. She was stubborn, a bit mean, what nowadays is called “reactionary”, inclined to be an autocrat and very much monarch of all she surveyed. I’ll give you a couple of examples. When her son died he left his wife and kids very badly off. I don’t know the ins and outs of it, but Mrs Primero was quite willing to help financially provided it was on her terms. The family was to come and live with her and so on. Still, I daresay she couldn’t afford to keep up two establishments. The other thing was that she’d been a very keen churchwoman. When she got too old to go she insisted on Alice going in her place. Like a sort of whipping boy. But she had her affections. She adored the grandson, Roger, and she had one close friend. We’ll come to that later.
    ‘As you know, there was an acute housing shortage after the war and a hell of a servant problem too. Mrs Primero was an intelligent old woman and she got to thinking how she could use one to solve the other. In the grounds of Victor’s Piece was a coach house with a sort of loft over the top of it. The place for the coach was used to house the aforesaid Daimler. No one had driven it since the doctor died – Mrs Primero couldn’t drive and, needless to say, Alice couldn’t either. There was precious little petrol about but you could get your ration, enough to do the shopping and take a couple of old dears for a weekly jaunt around the lanes.’
    ‘So Alice was that much of a friend? Burden put in.
    Wexford said solemnly, ‘A lady can be accompanied by her maid when she goes driving. Anyway, Mrs Primero put an advert in the Kingsmarkham
Chronicle
for a young able-bodied man, willing to do the garden, perform odd jobs, maintain and drive the car in exchange for a flat and three pounds a week.’
    ‘
Three pounds?
’ Burden was a non-smoker and no lover of extravagant living, but he knew from doing his wife’s weekend shopping what a little way three pounds went.
    ‘Well, it was worth a good bit more in those days, Mike,’ Wexford said almost apologetically. ‘Mrs Primero had the loft painted up, divided into three rooms and piped for water. It wasn’t Dolphin Square but, God, people were glad of one room back in 1947! She got a lot of answers but for some reason – God knows
what
reason – she picked Painter. At the trial Alice said she thought the fact that he had a wife and a baby daughter would keep him steady. Depends what you mean by steady, doesn’t it?’
    Burden shifted his chair out of the sun. ‘Was the wife employed by Mrs Primero too?’
    ‘No, just Painter. She’d got this little kid, you see, she was only about two when they came. If she’d worked up at the house she’d have had to bring the child with her. Mrs Primero would never have stood for that. As far as she was concerned between her and the Painters there was a great gulf fixed. I gathered she’d hardly exchanged more than a couple of words with Mrs Painter all the time Painter was there and as for the little girl – her name was Theresa, I think – she barely knew of her existence.’
    ‘She doesn’t sound a very nice sort of woman,’ Burden said doubtfully.
    ‘She was typical of her age and class,’ Wexford said tolerantly. ‘Don’t forget she was a daughter of the lord of the manor when lords of the manor still counted for something. To her Mrs Painter was comparable to a tenant’s wife. I’ve no doubt that if Mrs Painter had been ill she’d have sent old Alice over with a bowl of soup and some blankets. Besides, Mrs Painter kept herself to herself. She was very pretty, very quiet and with a sort of deadly respectability about her. She was a bit scared of Painter which wasn’t hard to understand, she being so small and Painter such a great hulking brute. When I talked to her