A Commonplace Killing Read Online Free Page A

not passed away in the night, briskly pulled back the bedclothes. The waft of ammonia smarted her eyes.
    “Mother,” she said, “wake up, dear. It’s time for you to go.” The old lady blinked dazedly as the sodden nightdress was pulled over her fragile bones. “Let’s get you on the po, dear. One. Two. Three…”
    With the poor old thing drooped on the commode in naked and bewildered silence, she checked the bed. The frayed towel that Mother had been lying on was sopping wet, but the bedspread was only a little bit damp, and only needed airing. She opened the window and put it on the ledge. The towel and the nightdress would all need washing, but unless she could persuade Evelyn to take care of it, that would have to wait.
    “I’m going up to Nag’s Head,” she said as she wiped down the rubber undersheet, Mother gazing at her in wonder. “I’ve got to try and get some bread. It’s going on the ration on Monday.” She fetched another threadbare towel from a pile at the end of the bed and spread it over the rubber sheet.
    Before putting Mother back into bed, she inspected the worst of her bedsores, sprinkling Fuller’s Earth on them; then she slipped a clean nightdress over the frail bones. She lifted the old lady off the commode, amazed, as she always was, that someone could be so diminished and yet still be here.
    “You haven’t the foggiest what I’m on about, have you, Mum?” she said. “Never mind, dear: you’re better off out of it. You really are.”
    The commode was full, which was good because it meant that the fresh towel would stay dry for a while. The amount of washing she did was terrible. She closed the seat. She would offer Evelyn a bob or two to deal with it. There was no time now to make another trip to the backyard, and it wasn’t as if Mother would know one way or another. If she’d had more time she might have wiped the poor old thing’s face and brushed her hair so that she looked a little less senile, but as far as anyone could tell, Mother didn’t mind about that either.
    She always used to look smart as a bandbox, she thought. Then she broke up the digestive biscuit into a saucer of lukewarm tea which she placed on the night-table. She knew that it would still be there the next time she checked.

3
     
     
    D ivisional Detective Inspector Jim Cooper had been asleep in his armchair for no more than a few hours, perhaps three or four, when the telephone woke him on what was supposed to be his first day off in three months. Nodding off had not been a simple matter: it had taken a large glass of whisky and almost the whole of the Stokowski recording of the St John Passion–
It is done; such comfort for suffering human souls! I can see the end of the night of sorrow
–which was the last thing he could remember before the jangling of the telephone roused him.
    His first thought was that it would be something bad. His second, as he stumbled to the hallway to pick up the receiver, was that he had been a damn fool to drink a tumbler of whisky on a pretty much empty stomach, especially when he ordinarily touched nothing more rigorous than a half-pint of Bass, and that only very infrequently. His third thought was that, with whisky at twenty-five bob a bottle (always supposing you could lay your hands on the stuff), the blasted jigger had cost him the best part of one and threepence.
    He snatched up the receiver.
    “Got a woman here who’s been strangled, sir.”
    Unless discussing Arsenal FC or the post-war decline in goalkeeping, Detective Inspector Frank Lucas, the senior CID officer on duty at Caledonian Road over the weekend, was a man of very few words –all of them spoken with a weary inflection guaranteed to induce enervation in even the most ebullient of listeners.
    “She’s on a bomb-site, sir,” Lucas continued, not waiting to be asked, “just off the Cally Road. Next to the railway line.”
    Cooper cursed. Tucking the receiver under his chin, he hunted among the