Who Saw Him Die? Read Free

transformed his whole appearance.
    The pleasure that could be derived from being permanently clean had come to Jack Goodrum as a revelation. Now, there was nothing he enjoyed more after his morning shower than putting on clean boxer shorts (how could he ever have endured the grottiness of those sagging grey underpants that Doreen had provided for him?), a fresh shirt and socks, soft cord trousers, soft woollen sweater. He felt right, good, on top of the world at last.
    It had taken a long time. Felicity’s divorce had been very difficult, and his own hadn’t been as simple as he’d expected. Then, though he had bought the old house in April with the intention of having it renovated so that they could move in as soon as they were free to marry, it hadn’t been ready until early October. They had been married for three weeks before they were able to take up residence. And even then, when they finally moved into The Mount nearly a month ago, an unexpected problem – more accurately, a little local difficulty – had cropped up.
    Perhaps the problem ought not to have been so unexpected. Perhaps he should have anticipated it, and taken the precaution of buying a house elsewhere. But Felicity had so much liked Breckham Market, when he had driven her through the town on one of their house-hunting expeditions, and had fallen so irreversibly in love with The Mount, that even if the difficulty had occurred to him at the time he wouldn’t have had the heart to disappoint her.
    It wasn’t until after they had settled in that the problem had come to his notice. Perhaps he had let it worry him unnecessarily, but he saw it as a potential threat to his new-found happiness and he couldn’t ignore it. His luck had held, though – as his dreary first wife had prophesied it would – and the problem had been resolved. Now everything was perfect.
    Whistling triumphantly, Jack Goodrum hurried downstairs to join his beloved second wife in the breakfast room.
    â€˜G’morning my dear.’
    It had seemed odd to him at first to give a formal daily greeting to his wife when they’d been snuggled in bed together not half an hour before; but Felicity seemed to set store by it, and he loved and respected her so much that he would do anything to please her.
    She looked up from the letter she was reading. ‘Good morning, Jack.’
    She had a lovely smile, and happy eyes. Her new husband’s chest expanded with pride as he saw the transformation he had brought about in her. When they’d first met her face was so deeply lined and her fair hair so prematurely grey that he’d assumed her to be his own age, or older. But that was what twenty years of marriage to that bastard Austin Napier – a gentleman born and bred, a London barrister, no less – had done to her. In fact she was just forty. And now that she had escaped from the man and had survived a bitterly contested divorce, her face had become almost miraculously smooth and untroubled.
    She lifted it as Jack passed her chair. He bent to her and they kissed on the lips, frankly, almost like children, and yet with a tiny cross-current of sensuality that sent him to his own chair with a grin on his face. He sat down at the pretty breakfast table (sunshine coloured cloth, earthenware with a botanic garden design; a small bowl of late flowers from their own garden; and at his place a glass of fresh grapefruit juice, a rack of toast and a boiled egg) and unfolded his napkin. Felicity, as neat in her Liberty housecoat as she would be during the day in skirt and lambswool sweater, poured freshly ground, freshly made coffee. As she passed his cup, their eyes met. Smiling, they both shook their heads in mock bewilderment, dazzled by the good fortune that had brought them together.
    For both of them their second marriage was a complete beginning again. Their courtship had been that of a shyly respectable Edwardian couple, with decorous