Mrs, Presumed Dead Read Free Page B

then she had noticed how rare it was to see more than one of the residents walking out of doors at any given time. Each morning, some time after the husbands had left, there was a flurry of motorised departures, as those women blessed with children took the second cars out for the school runs. They did not all come back at the same time, their returns staggered by the demands of shopping and other errands.
    Then, through the day, most of the residents would make occasional forays on foot, to shop, to walk dogs, to wheel infants. But these expeditions seemed rarely to coincide, and the Friday morning was the first occasion Mrs Pargeter had seen more than two of the women out at the same time, as they converged on Vivvi Sprake's house.
    She watched them through the net curtains left by the Cottons. Mrs Pargeter did not really like net curtains, but the late Mr Pargeter had always favoured them. Though of course he never did anything in their marital home of which he needed to be ashamed, he had always valued privacy. One of his recurrent aphorisms had been, 'What is not seen requires no investigation.' And his wife, respecting his judgement in all such matters, subordinated her taste to his caution in the matter of net curtains.
    She thought, as the newcomer, it would be appropriate for her to arrive a little later than the others, and she watched them as they crossed from their neat front doors to Vivvi Sprake's equally neat front door. She had glimpsed most of them during the preceding days and had already, as most people do with unintroduced neighbours, formed impressions of them.
    Vivvi was the only one she could actually identify by name, but the others she had christened in her own mental shorthand.
    The six houses in Smithy's Loam curled in an elegant horseshoe around the road which enclosed the central green. Their individuality had been used as another selling point at the time of their building – look what an unregimented development this is, a random cluster of distinctively designed houses, all different, all set in plots of different shapes. But each plot had the same area and the conformity of materials used made the houses look more like a matching set than if they had been identical.
    The resident of Number One, 'High Bushes', directly opposite, had apparently not left the house since Mrs Pargeter's arrival. But there was no doubt that she was there. Her windows also had the protection of net curtains, and from behind them a shadowy figure monitored each coming and going to the loop of road at whose entrance the house stood like a sentry-box. Each time Mrs Pargeter entered her front door, she could feel the eyes boring into the back of her head, but whether their motive was malevolence or simple curiosity she could not tell.
    In Mrs Pargeter's mental shorthand, the woman in 'High Bushes' became Mrs Snoop the Spy.
    She carried this Happy Families notation into her names for the other residents. Two women lived in Number Two, 'Perigord'. Mrs Pargeter had in fact only seen one of them, but the existence of the other was a logical deduction. The one she had seen looked too young, and too uninterested in the pair of small children she shepherded, to be anything other than a foreign au pair . Mrs Pargeter had dubbed her Miss Bored the Belgian's Daughter.
    And in her fancy, Miss Bored's mistress, whose car left the close as early as those of the husbands, became Mrs Busy the Businesswoman.
    Vivvi Sprake's house was Number Three, incongruously called 'Haymakers', and next door at Number Four, 'Hibiscus', lived a woman whose hasty exits and averted eyes made her Mrs Nervy the Neurotic.
    Mrs Pargeter's immediate neighbour at Number Five, 'Cromarty', who had made no gesture of welcome to the newcomer but who cleaned her windows at least once a day, was dubbed Mrs Huffy the Houseproud.
    As she moved away from the net curtains and picked up her handbag, Mrs Pargeter looked forward to putting real names to her cast of Happy