Free Death and the Maiden by Gladys Mitchell Page B

I can’t go on like this. You can’t expect it. I know you think I’m rude to Uncle Edris, but it’s the way I keep him from frightening me, that’s all.’
    â€˜Now, what does that mean?’ asked Miss Carmody. ‘It sounds like nonsense again.’
    â€˜I’m going to get a job. In fact, I’ve got one. It is at four pounds ten shillings a week, and I have already been interviewed. It’s time I had my own money. I don’t intend to live on charity, and I shan’t!’ cried Connie, ending up with a gasp.
    â€˜Charity?’ said Miss Carmody, disguising, she hoped, her real feelings. ‘But, Connie dear, there was never any question of that. I’ve been only too glad to have you. You must know what an interest and comfort you’ve been, and I always thought—’
    â€˜Well, you need not think it any more! I’m off!’ said Connie crudely. Miss Carmody was deeply upset. She swallowed, looked with compassionate horror at her niece, and then walked out of the room.
    â€˜Well, well,’ said Mrs Bradley, getting up, ‘and how old are you now?’
    â€˜Nineteen,’ replied Connie, ashamed of her tender age.
    â€˜So much? Perhaps you are right. No, I’m sure you are right. Will you live with your aunt, or are you going into lodgings, I wonder?’
    â€˜I intend to go into a flat,’ replied Connie, betraying by her tear-filled eyes her sense of her own bad behaviour. ‘You know, about Aunt Prissie, I don’t really mean to be nasty, but I feel I must get away! It’s all too much for me. Sometimes I think I’m going mad! And you don’t know how unfairly I’ve been treated!’
    â€˜Oh, dear!’ said Miss Carmody, coming back with slightly pink eyelids. ‘But you will be polite to Crete and Edris? I wouldn’t like them to think that you had left me because of them, you know. It would hurt their feelings, and I should not like to do that.’
    â€˜I don’t see why they should live on you,’ said Connie. ‘And I don’t mind whose feelings I hurt, except, perhaps, yours, Aunt Prissie.’ She looked helplessly at her aunt, and then burst into tears. Miss Carmody took her hurriedly out of the room, but her anguished sobs could be heard all the way up the stairs.

Chapter Six
    â€˜I put the fly well to my side of him, showing him no gut: he turned out to take it, but before doing so, he swam round it to see if there was gut on the other side. He saw it and sheered off. I can never get anyone to believe this simple and truthful tale.’
    J. W. H ILLS ( A Summer on the Test )
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    M rs BRADLEY , who had spent much thought upon the results of her expedition with Miss Carmody, spent some time on the following day discussing the circumstances of the boy’s death with the Tidsons. Mr Tidson clung to his theory that the boy had been enticed into the water by the naiad.
    â€˜I knew it would happen,’ he said. Mrs Bradley watched him with her sharp black eyes; summed him up, pursing her beaky little mouth; assessed him against a background of extravagance, ill-luck, hot sunshine and green bananas; and had to give him up, or, rather, to pigeon-hole him. She had done the same with the conversation between Connie and Miss Carmody in the lounge. There was something hidden in that talk which she meant to bring to light when she could.
    Meanwhile Laura had written entertainingly from Liverpool, where she and her friend Kitty were contriving to combine bananas with pleasure. They had managed, wrote Laura dashingly, to contact a man who had known something of the Tidsons in Santa Cruz de Tenerife.
    The Tidsons, it appeared, had been well known at the Sporting Club, the English Club and the Yacht Club, chieflybecause of Crete’s unusual and striking beauty. There had been some scandal of the domestic kind in which Mr Tidson, having stepped out of his own and into the