Free A Restless Evil by Ann Granger Page B

contrived to spill green poster paint over Ruth’s laboriously just-finished painting of the Queen in her Coronation Coach. In winter, the Twelvetrees sisters wore knitted pixie hoods. Their shoes were never cleaned, neither were their teeth. Which is why, thought Ruth sadly, I’ve got my own teeth now and poor Dilys has got a false set.
    Moreover, there was one thing about both Dilys and Sandra which secretly fascinated and frightened the infant Ruth. From time to time their arms and legs sported unexplained bruises, not the sort caused by falling down and scraping your knees in the playground. These were long narrow bruises and appeared in clusters. She never dared to ask Dilys about them.
    How on earth did my father ever imagine I’d fit in at Lower Stovey Primary? wondered Ruth now, not for the first time. The teachers had been kind but it had made matters worse, causing her to be dubbed ‘teacher’s pet’ and to have ‘goody-goody’ chanted at her. It was true she never misbehaved. She couldn’t. She was the vicar’s daughter and he had told her, as had her mother, that she must set an example. An example of what? At five you really don’t understand. Ruth had interpreted it as meaning you always did as you were told and never opened your mouth without permission.
    Originally she was to have suffered at Lower Stovey Church Primary until she was eleven. But one day, when she was nine, she had come home and innocently repeated some new words learned that morning in the playground. These words (she had no idea what they meant) were apparently so wicked as to necessitate her being taken away from the school almost at once. The day she’d walked out of the gates for the last time
had been one of the happiest of her life.
    After that she’d been dispatched, despite her tender years, to boarding school, a wind-swept institution on Dartmoor which might have shared much of its regime with the celebrated prison there.
    From then on, Lower Stovey had only been visited at holiday times and later, in university vacations. Her mother’s letters would occasionally mention some village event which would update Ruth on her former schoolmates. Sandra married a soldier and went off to foreign climes with him, something it was hard to imagine. Dilys got married too, but was abandoned by her husband within a year. She’d returned home to her parents, which suited them as Mrs Twelvetrees (who also, from time to time, had sported odd bruises), had been rendered housebound by an affliction of her legs. She died not long afterwards and Dilys stayed on to keep house for her ageing father. Her married name was abandoned by common consent and she’d become Dilys Twelvetrees again, as if her marriage had been a sort of blip and could be ignored.
    So it had been until Ruth’s return to Lower Stovey with her husband some twelve years earlier. Both her parents were dead by then. The vicarage was a private residence inhabited by Muriel Scott and Roger, then a boisterous pup of whom his mistress would blithely assure everyone that ‘he’d quieten down as he got older’. If only! Age, in Roger’s case, seemed to have disposed of what little canine reason he’d ever possessed. The school was on the verge of closing. Somehow, seeing Dilys on the doorstep that first morning, far from being unwelcome, had been almost a comfort. Something at least was the same. Probably exactly the same. Ruth wondered whether, in secret, Dilys still despised her.

Chapter Five
    I
    Dave Pearce stood before the bathroom mirror, his mouth opened as wide as was physically possible, and performed a series of stretches and contortions in an effort to inspect one of his own teeth. The mirror was inconveniently placed, not high enough for him. Tessa insisted that fixed any higher, it would be too high for her. It meant he had to half-crouch in an attitude hard to maintain. The light wasn’t good