Past Tense Read Free Page A

Wakefield sat herself down in the right-hand front pew and picked up the prayer book there.
    Her solitary splendour in that pew, though, was not destined to last long. Seconds after she was seated, a tall youngish man wearing a dark suit and a black tie slid into the pew in which she was sitting. He sat down beside her, bowed his head, and gave every appearance of entering into silent prayer. ‘“Whom I shall see for myself and shall mine eyes behold, and not another”,’ finished the Reverend Derek Tompkinson, reaching his stall after first reverencing the altar and turning to face the congregation. Janet cast a covert glance in the direction of the newcomer but was little the wiser after that beyond being aware that the man’s suit was of a light wool and had been cut in a slightly un-English way.
    â€˜The first hymn,’ announced the vicar, ‘is “Father, Hear the Prayer We Offer” which is number 172 in the green book…’ Under cover of the general rustling of activity, caused by the taking up of hymn books and the searching for the right page and the starting up of the organ again, the newcomer leant over towards Janet and whispered in her ear, ‘Phew! That was a near thing. Just made it in time, thank goodness. Mother always said I’d be late for my own funeral but if I was late for Granny’s there’d be big trouble. Well, I’m not, am I?’

Chapter Two
    Sheila, Mrs Linda Luxton’s deputy at the Berebury Nursing Home, in St Clement’s Row, took a deep breath and carefully counted to three before she spoke. They had learnt the hard way at the Home that, while people who wanted to become resident there queued up for a bed in the place, good care staff were very much more difficult to come by and keep.
    Ellen Steele was good care staff in the sense that she had an idle, no-good husband, a heavy drinker to boot, and an even more ne’er-do-well son, who was forever in trouble, and thus she could not easily afford to leave the employment there.
    â€˜Smashed, you say?’ said the deputy matron, playing for time.
    â€˜Smashed into little pieces,’ said Ellen Steele energetically, ‘dozens of them and it wasn’t me, Sheila. Honest. And I just can’t work out what happened to it.’
    â€˜Are we talking about that vase that stood on her shelf?’ Shelves were few and far between in the less-than-ample residents’ rooms at the Berebury Nursing Home. ‘The pretty red and green china one?’
    Ellen nodded. ‘That’s right. Beautiful isn’t…wasn’t it? It was the only thing that old Josephine would have there. She was really fussy about it.’
    â€˜I must say it looked valuable,’ said Sheila, wondering what they would have to say about the breakage to the family.
    â€˜But if you ask me it was the only thing of hers that was, ’cepting those rings that she always wore. Lovely, they were.’
    â€˜Biggest diamond I’ve ever seen,’ agreed Sheila, momentarily diverted. ‘The other one was a sapphire…a Sri Lankan sapphire, I think she once told me it was.’
    â€˜Matched her blue eyes lovely, it did,’ said Ellen. ‘Like ice, they were.’
    â€˜But as to the vase being valuable, I couldn’t say for sure,’ said Sheila.
    â€˜Most of them stand their photographs along that shelf,’ continued Ellen, ‘but Josephine wouldn’t never have nothing there but that vase. Ever.’
    â€˜I’ve an idea that she’d lost people in an accident and couldn’t bear to look at their photographs,’ said the deputy matron absently. Strictly speaking care in the home only related to the here and now, but in every care home the past always cast its long shadows towards the present.
    â€˜Kept all of them tucked away in a drawer, she did,’ said Ellen, from whom no secrets of Josephine Short’s room could very well