A Fatal Secret

Chapter 10

At the dower house they were again out of luck. Neither of the residents, it seemed, were at home.

This time, at Trudy’s suggestion, they had gone around to the back and to the kitchen entrance, which meant that a maid admitted them to the house. She appeared to be a village girl born and bred, still feeling happy to have her first job with ‘the family’.

Perhaps her relative inexperience led her to rashly inviting them into the kitchen, where the cook – a middle-aged, comfortably padded woman – looked on them with less enthusiasm.

But the coroner soon had her eating out of his hand, and within a few minutes, both he and Trudy were seated at the cook’s well-scrubbed kitchen table, eating wonderful, still slightly warm scones with home-made plum jam, and sipping from large mugs of tea.

Mrs Jones, the cook, had nothing but sympathy for the Proctors.

‘That poor little lad,’ she said, seeming pleased that her jam was going down well with her handsome, silver-haired visitor. ‘To think of him falling down that well. It don’t bear thinking about.’ She shuddered theatrically, and gave a mournful sigh. ‘Poor Miss Emily was distraught, I heard Mr Oliver say the other day. And I don’t wonder at it.’

‘I don’t suppose you saw anything odd that morning, Mrs Jones, did you?’ Trudy asked, surreptitiously licking her sticky fingers and hoping that nobody else had noticed. Was it only her who couldn’t seem to eat jam and scones without making a mess of it?

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