Free The Candle Man by Alex Scarrow Page A

. . .’
    Dr Hart waved his hand. ‘I’m sorry. Very nosy of me.’
    ‘No, honestly, that’s all right. We met in . . . Covent Garden.’
    He smiled. ‘I see.’
    He suspected Matron was right about one thing: Kelly was a working girl. No doubt about it. It was in her diction. So careful and deliberate in the way she talked. But every
now and then she let slip and missed a consonant, or dropped an ‘h’. A girl quite obviously working very hard to disguise it.
    Matron’s instinct at the beginning of the week was to suspect this girl was on the make somehow. Some scoundrel looking to hoodwink the unfortunate chap. She’d told him about
a story she’d once read in one of the penny papers about a scurrilous housemaid who’d hoodwinked her way into the will of a senile old millionaire, convinced him he had no living
relations or heirs, that he was entirely alone. With a cautionary cocking of an eyebrow, she’d alluded that perhaps ‘that girl who keeps visiting our Mr Argyll’ might be up to
similar tricks. But then there was no one quite so cold-hearted and cynical as Matron. And even she was now prepared to admit that perhaps she’d probably misjudged the poor girl.
    Dr Hart liked to think he had a fairly good measure of people; after all, he met and fixed up all manner of people here who drifted into St Bartholomew’s at every hour of night and day.
And Mary Kelly, to his eye, looked very much like a young woman hopelessly in love.
    And why not? It irked him so that his parents’ stuffy generation still invested so much stock in a person’s class. That a person should be condemned to never better their station
because of an accident of birth, an accident of accent and diction. What with Mr Argyll being an American, he was certain something as old-fashioned and uniquely English as class meant
absolutely nothing to the man. Dr Hart sometimes rather fancied he’d be more at home in a country like America, where a person was a measure of what they actually achieved rather than merely
being the sum of their manners and bearing.
    An American gentleman and a working-class English girl in love? Good grief, the world was full of far more unlikely things.
    ‘I suspect you will make a first-rate nurse for our patient when you get him home, Miss Kelly. First-rate.’
    ‘Yes.’ She smiled. ‘I’ll have him back to his old self, so I will.’
    ‘I’m certain you will. He seems a very resilient gentleman, does Mr Argyll. And, I suspect he’s a jolly lucky man to have someone like you to care for him.’
    Mary sipped tea from the cup. Fine china and a slender handle that allowed only a couple of fingers through its eye. She spread her little finger out, like the other ladies in
the tea shop were doing.
    What now?
    Dr Hart thought John was almost ready to be discharged from the ward. He’d even asked her if Mr Argyll’s home had suitable access for a wheelchair, as initially he would need
one.
    She’d nodded, but in actual fact her mind had been racing. The lodging house? Her room? No. She couldn’t take John back to that squalor. Even his befuddled mind would instantly work
out that they couldn’t possibly have been living together there.
    A hotel? She had the money.
    No, that wouldn’t do. She’d let slip to John they had a home together. A foolish bloody slip. But there it was; she’d said ‘home’. She had only two or three
days left now and then they were going to discover there was no home, that she was an imposter, a charlatan.
    I should run. Right now.
    She toyed with that idea as she carefully forked at the cake on the plate before her. She could take that money of John’s and disappear. It was back home, under her bed. She could go back,
grab it and run away. Another city, another country, another life. But she dismissed the notion without even being sure why.
    Yes . . . why?
    She fished for an answer to that question. And the answer came back surprisingly easily.
    ‘He needs me,’