Free Death Trap by Patricia Hall

was some time before the old lady unlocked and unbarred what sounded like a battery of keys and bolts and bars on the other side.
    â€˜Oh, it’s you,’ she said without enthusiasm. She was quite a tall woman and could look down her nose with what Kate found unnerving hauteur. ‘You’d better come in. It’s cold out there.’ She led the way into her sitting room and sank into a chair. She was wrapped in several cardigans but still looked chilly. Only one bar of the electric fire in the empty grate was switched on and the room felt cold and damp and no lamps were lit.
    â€˜Did you find Mrs Chamberlain?’ she asked, waving Kate into the chair on the other side of the fireplace and leaning back wearily in her own.
    â€˜Yes, I did,’ Kate said. ‘She’ll come round to see you tonight after she’s closed up her stall. About eight o’clock, she thinks.’
    Mrs Beauchamp sighed and pulled her cardigan, silky and not very warm-looking, more closely round her. ‘I’m usually in bed by then,’ she said. ‘It’s been so cold this winter, you know.’
    There had been times when she was growing up that Kate and her brother and sisters had not been warm enough, usually when her mother had not been able to pay the coalman, but she could not understand why this woman, surrounded by obviously expensive objects, would be crouched in semi-darkness over a miserable fire like this.
    Mrs Beauchamp fell silent for a moment and Kate thought she was falling asleep, but her eyes suddenly sparkled again with what looked like anger. ‘It’s difficult to believe that you will end up living in the servants’ quarters of your own house, isn’t it?’ she said.
    â€˜Pardon?’ Kate said, not quite believing what she had just heard.
    â€˜This was the kitchen, with the scullery and offices behind,’ she waved towards what Kate assumed was the garden door. ‘My son Miles says it’s necessary. There’s such a shortage of housing, you know.’
    â€˜I know,’ said Kate with feeling. ‘But you mean this is your house? You own it? You’re our landlady?’
    â€˜Well, technically I suppose I am. But my son looks after all the business side of things for me. I have nothing to do with it. Of course, this wasn’t our house before the war,’ Mrs Beauchamp said vaguely. ‘We were in Eton Square then, when we weren’t in the country.’
    â€˜Eton Square?’ Kate asked. The address meant nothing to her. But Mrs Beauchamp did not seem to hear her.
    â€˜I was presented at court in – what was it? – 1906. All the gels were then.’
    And Kate realised that she did not mean the war which was on everyone’s mind when she was a child, though she could barely remember it, even though Liverpool was still picking itself up from the ruins while she was at school. Mrs Beauchamp must mean the war before that, the war her grandfather from Dublin had come over to fight for the British even while his own country was on the point of revolution.
    â€˜It was Queen Alexandra then, of course. Such parties we had,’ Mrs Beauchamp said. ‘Such beautiful young men. So many dead.’ She closed her eyes and Kate thought again that she had fallen asleep and was about to get up and creep out, slightly bemused by the old lady’s reminiscences, but Mrs Beauchamp roused herself again and grasped her arm.
    â€˜It was the war, of course, that began the slide. Both my brothers were killed in 1915, and the heir to the estate was a distant cousin we hardly knew.’
    â€˜Why not you?’ Kate asked, puzzled.
    â€˜The estate was entailed. It went to the male heir, however distant. I was the only daughter and I got nothing at all.’
    â€˜That doesn’t sound very fair,’ Kate said. The only things that had ever been inherited in her family were her Irish grandmother’s knick-knacks which