Free The Secret House of Death by Ruth Rendell Page B

she’s sent that boy of hers with a streaming cold. What’ll I get them on playing? Musical Parcel? Squeak, Piggy, Squeak?’
    Murder was the favourite party game among the undertens in Orchard Drive. When no one suggested playing it, Susan knew they must have been forewarned by their mothers. Had those mothers told their sons what she had told Paul, that Mrs North had had an accident and been taken away? What do you tell someone who is old enough to wonder and be frightened but too young, far too young by years and years, to understand?
    â€˜I hope to God,’ said Mrs Dring, ‘young Paul won’t have an accident with that watch his dad sent him.’ She was unusually subdued this afternoon, softer-voiced and gentler, for all the dazzling aggressiveness of her red hair and the lilac suit she declared her husband had knitted. ‘Has Mr Townsend been in touch yet?’
    The watch had arrived by the first post and with it a card bearing a reproduction of Van Gogh’s Mills at Dordrecht , a gloomy landscape that Julian had evidently preferred to the more suitable teddy-bear mouthing, ‘Hallo, six-year-old’. He approved of culture being rammed home during the formative years. But there was no note inside for Susan and he hadn’t phoned.
    â€˜He must have read about it,’ said Doris indignantly, passing with a tray of sausage rolls.
    Mrs Dring frowned at her. ‘Perhaps he’ll put something about it in his own paper.’
    â€˜It isn’t that sort of paper,’ said Susan.
    It was only because she had wanted to keep Paul’s interest from the tragedy next door that she had decided to go ahead with the party as planned. But now, as the little boys shouted and romped to the loud music from the record player, she wondered how much of this noise was reaching Bob. Since Louise and Heller had been found, he had only left Braeside for two visits to the police station. All the curtains, not just those upstairs, remained drawn. Gossip had reached the workmen on the cemetery road and today none of them had come up to the back door for their tea. Susan didn’t care to think of Bob alone in there, living, moving, sleeping in the house where his wife had been shot. If he heard the children, would he take their merriment as the outward sign of her own indifference to his sorrow?
    She hoped he wouldn’t. She hoped he would understand and understand, too, that she hadn’t yet called on him because she felt as yet he was better alone. That was why she hadn’t been among the stream of tip-toeing housewives who knocked almost hourly at the Braeside door, some of them with flowers, some with covered baskets, as if he was ill instead of sick at heart.
    Doris met Susan after the inquest was over and took her back for lunch in the over-heated room the Winters called their ‘through-lounge’. An immense fire was burning. Susan saw that Doris’s gentle, sympathetic mood had passed now. Her curiosity, her avidity for gossip, had returned, and, wondering if she was being just, Susan recognised in the huge fire, the carefully laid tray and the gloss of the room, a bait to keep her there for the afternoon, a festive preparation in return for which she must supply the hostess with every juicy tit-bit the inquest had afforded.
    â€˜Tell me about the gun,’ Doris said, helping Susan plentifully to fruit salad.
    â€˜Apparently this man Heller smuggled it in from America. His twin brother was in court and he identified the gun and said Heller had tried to commit suicide in September. Not with the gun. The brother found him trying to gas himself.’ Doris made eager encouraging noises. ‘He shot poor Louise twice, both times through the heart, and then he shot himself. The pathologist thought it rather strange that he’d dropped the gun, but he’d known that happen before in cases like this. They asked me if I’d heard the shots, but I