Free Designs on Life by Elizabeth Ferrars Page B

outside the cupboard already, that’s how his coat got wet. He must have got out of the house only just before Mrs. Haddow started looking into things. He went back to his office and fixed up with his partner and secretary to fake that alibi for him. The partner would have been as much affected as Boyle if they’d had to produce the money, and it seems the secretary’s the partner’s mistress. Together with the fact that Winters once paid attention to Wragge’s wife, which Wragge was afraid to admit, he thought he’d got things all nice and safe. But he forgot that he’d picked up the loaf of bread. It was just one of those little automatic actions that so often give people away. It’s those, as often as not, that tell you all you need to know about them.”
    “Well, I trust,” Mr. Shew said, “and so, I’m sure, does Mrs. Haddow, that such a thing never happens again. D’you know, we haven’t had a drop of water in the house for two days? Of course, we couldn’t turn it on again until the pipe was mended, and that night it froze again and it’s been frozen ever since. I don’t know when we shall be able to lead a normal life. And my poor Miss Pattison’s no better. Of course”—and he tittered—“it’s really very amusing in some ways. Here am I, Chairman of the Baths and Cemeteries Committee, and I can’t get a bath!”
    “Perhaps you could get a coffin,” Mr. Cust suggested, bunching all his features together and laughing through his fingers.

THE TRUTHFUL WITNESS
    “Mrs. Nettle,” the child said. “Mrs. Nettle—it’s cold enough for snow, isn’t it?”
    The elderly woman, sitting in the armchair near the fire, went on with the swift darning of the grey sock stretched over her hand.
    “I shouldn’t wonder,” she agreed.
    “I think it’s going to snow,” the child said. “It is, isn’t it, Mrs. Nettle?”
    “I shouldn’t be surprised,” the woman said.
    “When it snows, I’m going to make a snowman,” the child said.
    Snipping off an end of grey wool, the woman reached for another strand with which to re-thread her needle.
    “You need a lot of snow for that,” she said.
    “Then I hope it snows and snows. I hope it snows all day and all night and all tomorrow and all the day after.”
    “Nasty messy stuff,” the woman said. “Messy and cold and wet.”
    “But children like snow, don’t they?” Turning from the window, the child came to lean on the arm of the old woman’s chair. “Mrs. Nettle—they do, don’t they, Mrs. Nettle?”
    The corners of the woman’s mouth twitched and she lowered her hands and her darning into her lap.
    “That’s right, love, they do. I should’ve remembered. All the same, don’t you go bringing a lot of slush into the house on your boots, or I’ll get after you, I can promise you.”
    With a deep sigh and her eyes fixed intently on the woman’s, as if to extract a different promise, the child said, “I hope it starts soon.”
    “Well, if it doesn’t, it’ll come some other time, that’s something you can be sure of. You’ve never seen snow, have you, living in Egypt?”
    “No.”
    “And you’re six years old.”
    “That isn’t very old,” the child said defensively. “There are lots of things I’ve never seen. I’ve never seen the Tower of London.”
    “There are lots of things I’ve never seen, and won’t either,” the woman said.
    “Have you ever seen an elephant?”
    The conversation continued beside the bright fire, while outside the afternoon sky darkened unnaturally early, looking as if it had grown so heavy that it might sink down to rest on the tops of the trees, and the trees bent and tossed their branches wildly, as if they were protesting at the threatened load, and the wind made strange wailing noises in the chimney.
    A little before five o’clock the child’s mother came home. She came running up the garden path, clutching her fur coat round her with one hand and holding on her little felt hat with