Free A Restless Evil by Ann Granger

left, didn’t you?’ she said.
    â€˜What on earth do you mean?’ Ruth heard herself ask.
    â€˜You got left,’ repeated Dilys patiently. ‘Like me. Your feller left you, too.’
    â€˜Nonsense,’ said Ruth. ‘You knew my husband. He died.’
    â€˜Not him,’ said Dilys scornfully. ‘Before him. A young feller.’ She glanced at the patch of blackened scraps and feathery pale ash. ‘Surprised you kept ’em so long,’ she said.
    With that, as if she knew she’d uttered an unanswerable statement, Dilys turned and plodded off on her way home.
    How could she know? How could the woman know? Was it
just by some instinct or – Ruth’s heart pounded at the thought – had Dilys found the key, worked out that it opened the box and read the letters? She hadn’t thought Dilys had that much curiosity in her. Now she wasn’t sure.
    Drat the woman, thought Ruth. Drat the whole Twelvetrees, clan.
    Dilys was employed by them as a cleaner for the ‘rough work’, the scrubbing of the ancient flags on the kitchen floor, the cleaning of windows, the taking up of rugs and beating the living daylights out of them in the backyard. In winter, Dilys cleaned out the log-burning stove in the sitting room. Dilys was good at peeling spuds and carrots, releasing Hester for the making of her complicated sauces.
    Of course, Ruth and Hester could easily have managed all these things between them. But what other work would Dilys have found in Lower Stovey? Employing Dilys was what the Reverend Pattinson, Ruth’s father, would have called an act of Christian charity. What was more, the link between their two families covered two generations.
    Many years ago, Dilys’s mother had been employed by Ruth’s mother to scrub the vicarage floors. Dilys’s brother, Young Billy, had mown the vicarage lawns before he left the village to make his way in the outside world. When Ruth and her late husband had returned to Lower Stovey to set up home in the Old Forge, Dilys had turned up on the doorstep on their first morning there, stolidly announcing, ‘You’ll want me to do for you, will you?’ Not a question, just a statement.
    So why was it, then, that the sight of Dilys’s shapeless form and work-worn hands added to that sense of guilt which Ruth seemed to have been destined from birth to carry around with
her, weighing down her shoulders and unable to be shed. Sinbad had the Old Man of the Sea and she, Ruth, had Dilys.
    Ruth could remember, as clearly as if it had happened yesterday, the very first time she’d set eyes on Dilys Twelvetrees. They’d both been five years old and it had been their joint first day at school.
    The school, of course, had been Lower Stovey Church Primary School. It no longer existed as a school. Dwindling numbers had led to its closure some years back, followed by sale and redevelopment. The buildings had been converted into a close of maisonettes, done rather cleverly. The people who lived in School Close were not villagers, although they were residents. They commuted to jobs in Bamford or elsewhere. They might show their faces occasionally of an evening in the Fitzroy Arms, but otherwise they were invisible, taking no part in village life. Or, as Ruth phrased it to herself, what passed for life in Lower Stovey these days.
    The Reverend Pattinson had believed it right and proper that his daughter should attend primary school with the other village children. The inevitable boarding school would come later. This wasn’t because her parents couldn’t bear to send her miles away. It would be nice to think that, but untrue. Had they considered it the right thing to do, they’d have ferried her back and forth to some private school. But they had considered it right she should attend Lower Stovey Church Primary. Possibly they’d also been happy to save on fees for a few years and the chore of the daily