Free The Fingerprint by Patricia Wentworth

Pigeon Hill.”
    “And your Miss Browns taught there?”
    “Not exactly. I just knew them. They—they were some sort of relation of Aunt Grace’s. They taught in another school.”
    He thought she was making it up as she went along. But in the name of all that was ridiculous, why? He was looking at her curiously.
    “Is it your school you don’t want to talk about, or theirs? And why?”
    She said in a hurry,
    “I didn’t like being there. I don’t want to think about it or talk about it ever.”
    Yet she wrote to Miss Brown—a totally unnecessary performance!
    “Well, if it’s like that, I think I should let the whole thing fade. People are always saying they’ll write letters that never get written. Why not let it go down the drain?”
    Tears welled up in the pansy-brown eyes. She said in a little soft, obstinate voice,
    “I can’t.”
    Johnny shrugged his shoulders and got up. He said, “Well, it’s your funeral,” and had got as far as the door, when she stopped him.
    “Johnny—”
    He turned.
    “What is it?”
    “I didn’t like your saying that about funerals.”
    “I am devastated!”
    “You’re not—you did it to be horrid! I’ll just send this one letter, and then I won’t write again.”
    He said, “I wouldn’t send it at all,” and went out of the room.
    Half an hour later he looked from a window and saw a small green figure emerging upon the road. Miss Mirrie Field taking the air? Or going to post a letter? He ran after her and caught her up.
    “Air—exercise—or business?”
    She had put on the warm topcoat which matched her tweed skirt and pulled a green beret over her curls.
    “I just thought I’d like a walk.”
    “Then I’d like one too. And after tea we’ll go and do that flick in Lenton.”
    She sparkled up at him.
    “You are kind!”
    The general shop which was also a branch post office was only a few hundred yards away.“ He was wondering whether she had Miss Brown’s letter in her pocket, and whether she would let him see her post it, when she said,
    “I just want to go into Mrs. Holt’s and get some safety pins. I think it’s such an amusing shop—don’t you? Sweets, and cauliflowers, and bootlaces, and nailbrushes, and safety pins, and strings of onions—it’s so funny having all those things together!”
    The shop stood at the corner where the Deeping road ran off. It was an old crouched cottage with a new shop-front stuck on to it. On one side there was a garage with a couple of petrol pumps, and on the other a frightful little drab brick house which replaced the picturesque but insanitary cottage demolished by a bomb-splinter in ’44, the bomb itself having fallen in the middle of a field without so much as killing a sheep.
    As they crossed over to Mrs. Holt’s, Mary and Deborah Shotterleigh came out of the shop with two bull-terriers, an Airedale and a Peke. All the dogs barked joyfully and jumped up. Mary and Deborah could just be heard lifting ineffective voices, but the dogs barked on. When the larger of the bull-terriers sprang up in an attempt to lick Mirrie’s chin she gave a little scream and clutched hold of Johnny.
    “Down, Jasper! Down, Jane! Pingpong, you’ll get trodden on! No, Leo!” shrieked the Shotterleigh girls.
    Mirrie continued to clutch and the letter which had slipped from her pocket fell down under the feet of the dogs. By the time that she had run into the shop and Mary and Deborah were explaining that Jasper and Jane were really only puppies and the greatest darlings in the world, Johnny had retrieved it. Well, of course there is only one thing to do with a picked-up letter and that is to post it, always provided it is duly stamped and addressed. This letter was certainly stamped Johnny walked across to the posting-slit which had been let into the old cottage wall and dropped it in. But before he did so he took a look at the address. It may have been one of those instinctive actions, or he may have thought that he would