Free Bones in the Belfry by Suzette Hill Page B

hopeless, never listen to anything! Daddy was quite right – a head stuffed with nothing but sea air!’
    Yes, he had said that quite often, I recalled – indeed, right up to the day before his death in the nursing home when I had absent-mindedly poured Lucozade into his whisky glass. He had been so incensed we thought he might rally, but capricious to the end he fooled everyone. I seized on the memory of our parent as a means of diversion from the pictures, and we spent a congenially masochistic time dwelling on our life with him.
    What with the wine and the family reminiscences, the problem of the paintings started to fade and I began to feel pleasantly relaxed. But Primrose has inherited from our father the uncanny knack of stirring things up just when you think they have simmered down; and suddenly, apropos of nothing, she said, ‘Of course, they’ll never drop that case, you know. They never do, not fully. They’ll let it go dormant for a while and then sometime – even years later – start gnawing away again. You mark my words, it won’t be the end of it.’
    It had been quite a demanding day and I suppose I was feeling sleepy, for the import of her words didn’t really register and I said lazily, ‘What case? Don’t know what you’re talking about.’
    ‘The Molehill Murder of course! That woman parishioner of yours, the one that left you all the money – though why you had to go and give it away like that I simply can’t imagine. Sometimes I think I have a complete idiot for a brother!’ Even in my welling panic I reflected that Primrose had always been mercenary.
    ‘Oh well,’ I mumbled, ‘it seemed a good idea at the time. Hadn’t got much use for it really. You know how it is …’
    ‘No, I don’t, as a matter of fact,’ she rejoined tartly. ‘I don’t know at all. Sometimes I think you live in another world, Francis! But still,’ she relented, ‘I suppose it could be worse. After all, you might have turned into a drunkard – or a bishop.’
    I enjoy a good tipple, but having a rather uncertain stomach and being prone to headaches, thought the first option almost as unlikely as the second. Then recalling the episode of Bishop Clinker and the White Ladies I also wondered why Primrose should in any case have made the distinction. The two fates, I had learned, were not mutually exclusive.
    Grasping the topic of bishops as a means of steering matters away from Elizabeth and my inexplicable bounty, I said hastily, ‘Talking of bishops, I think old Horace may be gearing up for another visit. There was a bit of a shindig at one of my weddings a couple of weeks ago and I think he’s got wind of it.’
    Primrose was surprisingly sympathetic; and, the Molehill affair safely circumvented, we spent some time mulling over the officiousness of high office. My sister addressed the subject with characteristic pungency, being herself currently embroiled in some complicated dispute with the burgers of Lewes. From what I could make out, it revolved around the rival claims of the town’s High Street and her Morris Oxford, although the finer points of the saga rather escaped me. Suffice it to say, she was in one of her litigious moods and I felt a glancing sympathy for the municipal authorities. I could have done with Primrose to help me with Clinker, but then with a pang of trepidation remembered that I already had an ally in that sphere – Mrs Tubbly Pole.
    The next day, with Primrose’s curiosity fortunately faded, the pictures were consigned to her spare room where, amidst the general clutter of trunks, cardboard boxes and other accumulated debris, they melted into reassuring anonymity. Then, having finally completed my prescribed tasks in house and garden, and, as instructed, having bade a ceremonious farewell to Boris and Karloff, I was free to return to Molehill – considerably lightened in one way but with the shadow of Clinker still looming in another …
     
    In fact, when I arrived home,