Free The Company She Kept by Marjorie Eccles

Tannersley, a modern house. New furniture, much more to my taste than all this,’ she said, her quick glance sweeping round the room, accompanied by a slight shiver, as if dismissive of old ghosts and echoes. ‘All this will go.’
    â€˜Quite a change in your life, then,’ Mayo remarked. ‘And in Miss Robinson’s, too, I imagine?’
    Quickly, she said, ‘Yes, but she was very happy for me. In any case, we never expected to live together permanently. We always knew it was possible that one of us might want to move out for some reason, or get married ...’ She hesitated. ‘She had the chance of a very nice flat in Bulstrode Street a few weeks ago and decided to move in immediately. She didn’t want to be left here on her own for any length of time.’
    Mayo knew Bulstrode Street but kept his expression neutral. After this? Bulstrode Street? Right in the middle of the sad no man’s land of bedsits and one-person flats just beyond the town centre. An enclave for single people, living alone, many of them women – and as such, an area with an ongoing prowler problem. Abigail caught his eye. Maybe, their exchange of glances said, they’d have the answer to her death sooner than they imagined.
    Maybe, thought Mayo, adding to himself that the dead woman was unlikely to have been as happy at the change in her fortunes as the good doctor wanted to think. Her naïve assumption of her friend’s acceptance of the big change in her life surely involved a certain amount of self-deception, or even guilt, that she herself was coming off decidedly better in the switch-round than Angie. He reminded himself of the photo of the murdered woman, now in his pocket. Petite, with a lot of blonde hair, an above-the-knees skirt, wearing the high heels that many short women considered indispensable. But that first assumption, at the first sight of her body with its disarranged clothes, that she’d been a tart, that was all wrong – he’d been right to have doubts about that. One look at the closed, prim little face told you otherwise. She was simply the sort of woman, he suspected, who had got herself locked into a style of dressing that had once suited her, with a hairstyle that was many years too young for her ageing face and a skirt length, despite its current fashion, several inches too short for her. A woman, he strongly suspected, afraid of growing old.
    â€˜I shouldn’t have let her go,’ Dr Freeman said abruptly. ‘I should have looked after her better. But it was only temporary, that flat of hers, until she got herself fixed up with somewhere better. Though as a matter of fact, I’m inclined to think she’d probably already found it. At lunch on Sunday she was very excited. She’d only hint at what it was but I guessed. She was like that, you know – she used to get a childish enjoyment out of keeping a secret, she liked to keep you guessing.’ The ghost of a smile briefly touched the corners of her lips. ‘She spoke about a very important meeting with some man and she laughed and said it was going to change her future, and in the context of what we’d been speaking about, I took it to mean she was going to view some new accommodation.’ Her long capable fingers convulsively clutched the glass that had held the mineral water. ‘Oh God, perhaps I was wrong –’
    â€˜No, that may be very helpful. We’ll make inquiries with all the house agents in the town, unless ...This man – I don’t suppose she told you his name, where he lived, what he did for a living?’
    â€˜Nothing at all. Though I must confess I wasn’t paying all that much attention. I had other things on my mind, the new house for one thing ...’
    He finally stood up, after establishing that the doctor had had a surgery the previous day until seven. She’d gone straight home when it finished and at eight-fifteen her