Chapter and Hearse Read Online Free Page A

be.’
    The foreman scratched his head. ‘I hadn’t thought of it like that.’
    â€˜Only if you’re right-handed,’ said Simon. ‘The lady who lived here before must have been a southpaw.’
    â€˜Both her hands had burns on them,’ the man informed him ghoulishly.
    â€˜Though they never did find out how she got them,’ chimed in his mate, Fred.
    â€˜Electrocuted in the utility room, she was,’ said the foreman lugubriously. ‘But don’t you let that worry you. They went over that room with a fine-tooth comb after it had happened.’
    â€˜Couldn’t find a thing amiss, though,’ said Fred in his role as Greek chorus. ‘They never did work out what went wrong.’
    â€˜Really?’ said Simon, absently moving in the direction of the worktop. The kettle had come to the boil and switched itself off. ‘Tea?’
    â€˜Milk but no sugar for me,’ said the foreman, undiverted. ‘Thought it must have been something to do with the ironing board, they did, because that was lying on the floor beside her when her husband found her. There was a pile of nearly dry washing in the laundry basket beside her too.’
    â€˜And,’ supplemented his assistant eagerly, ‘because she always did the ironing while she watched her favourite afternoon programme on television.’
    â€˜My wife too,’ said the foreman. ‘Thanks,’ he added, cradling the mug between his large, dirt-ingrained hands. ‘I don’t know which channel, though,’ he added in the interests of accuracy, ‘because I’m not there then.’
    Simon decided that this was not the moment for quoting that famous question, ‘But what was the play like, Mrs Lincoln?’
    â€˜Two lumps for me,’ said his mate, stretching his hand out for his tea. ‘They thought she died just before the programme came on at four o’clock … and that’s what the man who did the post-mortem said too.’
    â€˜Pathologist,’ supplied Simon.
    â€˜But they never found out how she came to be electrocuted,’ repeated the foreman, addressing himself to his drink. ‘Never.’
    â€˜Funny, that,’ murmured Simon Cullen.
    â€˜It said in the paper that her husband was at work at the time it happened,’ expanded the foreman.
    â€˜At a meeting all afternoon,’ chimed in Fred. ‘It said that too. About a dozen people there with him all the time.’
    â€˜My wife spends a lot of her time at work in meetings,’ said Simon. ‘I know, because she tells me when not to ring the office.’
    â€˜If you ask me,’ opined the foreman, pushing back his chair, ‘most meetings are a waste of time. Let’s get started here, Fred.’
    Simon swept up the empty mugs and drifted off to take a look at the utility room with new eyes. It was situated off the kitchen and housed the central-heating boiler and the washing machine, as well as all the impediments associated with living in a sizeable house in the country – including Simon’s new green wellies. The Wetherbys’ ironing board had gone and Simon had stood the Cullens’ one there in its place, but otherwise the room looked very much as it must have done in the days of the previous occupants.
    Propped up beside the ironing board and the radiator was the clothes horse which Simon and Charlotte had brought with them from their old house. In fact, the only relic of the Wetherbys’ regime was one of those old-fashioned wooden airers, which could be lowered by a thin rope, loaded with damp washing and then hoisted back up to the ceiling above the boiler to dry.
    Simon examined everything in the room with his customary care but was no wiser at the end of his survey. In fact, had he but known it, he reached the same conclusion as the investigating authorities had done – that something had electrified the metal of the ironing