Free Last Post by Robert Barnard Page A

like as an old woman. Or rather, I can, but I prefer not to.”
    â€œNot a pretty sight. Not a pretty listen either. There certainly is an obsession or two at work there, not just about lesbians, I suspect, but pretty much anyone who steps outside the general run. I got no sense at all that she’d talked to the local bigwigs about this, but there was a mention of my granddad—May’s father. She didn’t say she’d told him of her suspicions, quite the reverse: I think she implied she had got her suspicions from him. But that could be a cover-up. She may well have reported to him.”
    Jean stretched her mouth in distaste.
    â€œAll this seems quite extraordinary, so many years on.”
    â€œYes, doesn’t it?”
    â€œAnd I think I do understand why you wanted to talk to me.”
    â€œI hope so. I feel it’s an intrusion, but I hope it’s a justified one. And there was something else.”
    â€œSomething else?” Was there a new tension in that plump, comfortable body sitting opposite her?
    â€œI’d got a letter several days before the funeral.” Eve rummaged in her pocket. She had brought only the first page of the letter, not wanting to show her hand too clearly, and particularly anxious not to bring into the open the mentions of what was done to “John.” She handed the page over, and Jean Mannering spent some time studying it. Finally she put it down on the table.
    â€œWas my name at the end of this?”
    â€œThe name was ‘Jean,’ yes.”
    â€œNo surname or address?”
    â€œNo, not anywhere.”
    â€œBut it’s not my handwriting, you know.”
    â€œIt’s very like it.”
    â€œYes. All girls of my generation were taught to write in this standard upright legible way. I suppose they were all destined for useful but not particularly important jobs where legibility was a definite plus: secretaries, schoolteachers. I remember your mother’s hand was pretty similar. Do you have the letter I wrote to you yesterday?”
    â€œI think so.” Eve rummaged again in her handbag. “Yes, here it is. I haven’t compared them, because it only came this morning. But it looks very similar.”
    â€œAt first glance it does. But look at the t s on this letter: I never have the loop at the bottom: my t s are always straight down and cut off from the next letter. And this letter always does a Greek e in certain positions—after an s, for example.” She got up and went to the desk. “Look, this is a letter I’m in the middle of writing to the bishop. That’s the writing of the letter you got this morning. Compare it to the first letter. That was not written by me.”
    â€œBut it is from someone who knows about you, isn’t it?”
    â€œApparently so, yes. I don’t like the thought of that. I presume the first word on the next page is ‘dramatics,’ isn’t it?”
    â€œIt is. She—this person, I should say—knows parts you have played.”
    â€œDoes she or he? A Huddersfield person? It could be a ‘he,’ you know. It’s perfectly easy to imitate a standard woman’s style of handwriting—much easier than a man’s, which aims at originality, forcefulness, things like that.”
    â€œYes, I suppose it is. Have you any idea who might have done this?”
    â€œNone at all. Aunt Ada occurs to mind.”
    â€œYes, I’ve thought of her. But it’s a clever letter. It gets the tone right. I don’t think Aunt Ada is a clever person. She would let her prejudices, her distaste, filter into the letter, and it doesn’t.”
    Jean thought.
    â€œThe letter writer’s not always right, you know. For instance, May and I had not been in regular correspondence for years.”
    â€œBut she wanted to convince me—she surely wrote knowing May was dead and it would be I who read it—that it was part of a