Murder of a Snob Read Online Free Page A

guessed you’d want to know. That’s why I waited until you came.”
    Her words were well formed, but the intonation was unmistakably Cockney. Her voice might once have been a pleasing contralto, but with the years it had dropped almost to tenor. “I told myself it doesn’t matter talking to the police because they don’t tell the newspapers anything they don’t have to. And it wouldn’t be fair to him—” she nodded in the direction of the house “——to put me in the papers. And fair’s fair, whatever a man has done!”
    â€œQuite so!” agreed Crisp. In her conversational stance he recognised the recluse. She was not talking directly to him. She was talking to herself and allowing him to listen. “Will you begin with your name, please?”
    â€œI had better begin with my name.” Crisp observed that even his question registered as her own thought. “I’m a married woman. Agnes Julia Cornboise.” She added her address.
    â€œCornboise,” repeated Crisp. “Are you related to that young man staying in the house?”
    â€œSo that’s his name is it!” The old lady seemed deeply impressed. “Well, I never! He must be that nephew of his he’s told me so much about. Then, of course, I’m his aunt by marriage, though there’s no need for him to know that.” Again she nodded at the house. “I’m his wife, though we’re separated these thirty years or more.”
    â€œD’you mean that you’re Lord Watlington’s wife—that you’re Lady Watlington?” For a moment, Crisp suspected her mental balance.
    â€œOh, I don’t take any notice of all that! And it certainly wasn’t why I came and sat in his garden.” She was amused. “Me setting up as a ladyship at my time o’ life and living in Kilburn—I’d never hear the last of it!” She became abstracted. Crisp gave her time. “Did I say thirty years? It’s thirty-two years, come next October, since we parted, because he wanted to. He never told me why, though I guessed. It wasn’t another woman. Though it’s wrong to say so, I wish it had been, because he’d have got tired of anybody but me. He never did get tired of me. Why in thirty years, I’ve got more than twenty big bundles of his letters—the nice ones, I mean: I didn’t keep the other sort.
    â€œNice letters,” she repeated. “You’d think we’d gone on living together and only parted a week or two before they were written. I suppose I ought to have known better at the time than to marry him. But there it is! What’s done can’t be undone. At least, it oughtn’t to be, when it’s marriage.”
    She showed signs of drying up. She began to knit, somewhat clumsily. Crisp had already winnowed two small points and wanted more.
    â€œAnd you wrote nice letters back to him?” he prompted.
    â€œI never wrote to him at all. Only picture post-cards, saying I’d got the letters. He’d write when the mood was on him, sometimes three letters in a week and sometimes none for a couple of months. Used to write about me as if I was still a young woman.”
    â€œThat’s very unusual,” said Crisp. “Why did he desert you?”
    â€œ Who said he deserted me!” She was indignant. “If I said anything to make you think that, I did wrong. Fair’s fair, whatever I’ve suffered. He always sent me the money he said he would. And lots of extra, sometimes. But the extra was because he wanted to bribe me into going against my principles and have a divorce. Those were the letters I didn’t keep. And now you’ve made me forget what I was saying.”
    â€œYou were telling me why you are here in this garden, said Crisp. His eye was caught by the van from the mortuary, which was drawing up at the front door. He added: