Free Dear Departed by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles Page B

far?’ There were negatives all round. ‘Anything come in on the telephone last night?’
    ‘Just the usual attention-seekers and Daft Dorises,’ Hollis said. ‘Apparently there were strange lights in the sky over the park Tuesday night.’
    ‘There are strange lights in the sky over the park every night,’ Slider said. ‘It’s on the flight path to Heathrow.’
    Wingate Road, where the victim had lived, was just off the main road, but surprisingly was a little haven of quiet. It was a short street with a pub at one end, a nice, small, old-fashioned-lookinghostelry called the Anchor. It was obvious from the state of the pub and the houses that the street had been gentrified. Everything was in a condition of cherished middle-class repair, and the parked cars were rust-free and mostly under three years old.
    The terraced houses dated from the 1850s, earlier than adjacent streets: two storeys plus semi-basement, square stuccoed fronts, the pitch of the roof hidden by a ruled-off parapet, the age given away only by the lovely proportion of the tall sash windows, each divided into nine small panes. At some point all the residents had been seized by a common urge to paint their stucco in a dusty pastel shade. The effect was delightful, like a tube of Refreshers.
    ‘That’s it,’ Atherton said, indicating a house of pale hyacinth blue. ‘Gloriosky! There’s a parking space. I wonder if one of these is her car?’
    ‘Didn’t you ask what’s-her-name – Marion Davies? You were there long enough.’
    ‘She wouldn’t have known, anyway,’ Atherton said. ‘Women never cease to amaze me. When you think of the hours they spend rabbiting to each other about shopping and hairdressers, and they don’t even know what sort of car each other drives.’
    Slider parked the car, pulled two pairs of gloves from the box in the dash compartment, and got out.
    ‘Did you bring the key?’ Atherton demanded.
    ‘Yes, dear,’ Slider said patiently.
    Inside the house, the long hall was cool and dim, a pleasure after the heat of the day, and it smelt beautifully clean, with an undertone of furniture polish. The staircase rose up straight ahead, the handrail a shining snake of wood, smoothed and rubbed to a rich patina by a hundred and fifty years of hands. Though the house looked small from the street, it went back a long way, and the ceilings were lofty, eleven or twelve feet high, Slider thought. It was a wonderful house, built with the fine proportions and attention to detail that were characteristic of the age: the skirtings, the panelled doors and brass door-furniture, the decorated cornices and ceiling roses, the handsome fireplaces.
    ‘Looks as if she made a decent living from this company of hers,’ Atherton said.
    ‘Or maybe she just had good taste,’ Slider said. There was nothing expensive about the furnishings, but the simplicity with which everything was arranged made it look good. The floors had been stripped and polished, and there were a few rugs here and there for comfort; modern furniture, plain walls and curtains, and no clutter.
    There were two rooms on this floor. At the front, with the bay window, was the drawing room. The sofa and two armchairs were in coarse off-white material, grouped round a heavy glass coffee-table. Against the walls were hi-fi equipment, television and video, and a range of bookshelves. There were no pictures on the walls, just two four-foot-by-two framed posters. One was a movie poster for
Casablanca.
‘That must be worth a bit,’ Atherton remarked. The other advertised a Festival Hall concert by the London Symphony Orchestra, with a date from the 1950s. Boult and Curzon, Slider noticed. Frivolity was limited to a number of large plants in big floor pots, their leaves glossily polished. The room was so big it was a little too bare for Slider’s taste, but there was no denying it was stylish.
    The rear room was slightly smaller, square and fitted out as an office, with the usual