The Scold's Bridle Read Free

he. He would have been happy with crumbling plaster and a view; she was happy with all mod. cons and neighbours so close they rubbed shoulders every day. It was a policeman's lot to give in to a wife he was fond of. His hours were too unpredictable to allow him to impose his own yearning for isolation on a woman who had tolerated his absences with stoical good humour for thirty years.
    He heard the door open behind him and turned, producing his warrant card from his breast pocket, to greet the fat elderly man who approached. "DS Cooper, sir, Dorset police."
    "Orloff, Duncan Orloff." He ran a worried hand across his wide, rather pleasant face. "We've been expecting you. Dear me, dear me. I don't mind admitting Jenny Spede's howling is a little difficult to take after a while. Poor woman. She's a good soul as long as nothing upsets her. I can't tell you what it was like when she found Mathilda. She came rushing out of the house screaming like a banshee and set her wretched husband off in sympathy. I realized something dreadful must have happened which is why I phoned your people and an ambulance. Thank God they came quickly and had the sense to bring a woman with them. She was really quite excellent, calmed the Spedes down in record time. Dear me, dear me," he said again, "we live such a quiet life. Not used to this sort of thing at all."
    "No one is," said Cooper. "You've been told what's happened, I suppose."
    He wrung his hands in distress. "Only that Mathilda's dead. I kept the Spedes here until the police car arrived-thought it best, really, what with them collapsing in heaps about me-mind you, I wasn't going to let my wife downstairs till it was safe-one can't be certain about things-anyway the uniformed chaps told me to wait until someone came to ask questions. Look, you'd better come in. Violet's in the drawing-room now, not feeling too well in the circumstances, and who can blame her? Frankly, not feeling a hundred per cent myself." He stood aside to let Cooper enter. "First door on right," he said. He followed the policeman into a cosy, over-furnished room with a television on low volume in the corner, and bent over the prostrate figure of wife on the sofa. "There's a Sergeant to see us," he said, raising her gently to a sitting position with one hand and using the other to swing her legs to the floor. He lowered his large bulk on to the sofa beside her and gestured Cooper towards an armchair. "Jenny kept screaming about blood," he confided unhappily. "Red water and blood. That's all she said."
    Violet shivered. "And Jesus," she whispered. "I heard her. She said Mathilda was 'like Jesus.'" She raised a hand to her own bloodless lips. "Dead like Jesus in blood red water." Her eyes filled. "What's happened to her? Is she
really
dead?"
    "I'm afraid she is, Mrs. Orloff. It's only approximate, but the pathologist estimates the time of death between nine o'clock and midnight on Saturday." He looked from one to the other. "Were you here during those three hours?"
    "We were here all night," said Duncan. He was clearly drawn between his own perceived good taste of not asking questions and an overwhelming need to satisfy a very natural curiosity. "You haven't told us what's happened," he blurted out. "It's much, much worse if you don't know what's happened. We've been imagining terrible things."
    "She hasn't been
crucified
, has she?" asked Violet tremulously. "I said she's probably been crucified, otherwise why would Jenny have said she looked like Jesus?"
    "I said someone had tried to clean up afterwards," said Duncan, "which is why there's red water everywhere. You hear about it every day, old people being murdered for their money. They do terrible things to them, too, before they kill them."
    "Oh, I do hope she wasn't
raped
," said Violet. "I couldn't bear it if they'd raped her."
    Cooper had time to feel regret for this elderly couple who, like so many of their peers, lived the end of their lives in terror because the media