No Man's Nightingale Read Online Free

soaking handfuls of the tissues.
    When he walked in Dora was at home and Maxine, on the point of leaving, never a swift process, was telling her the tale of his perfidy. ‘Well, like I said, I’m sure I’m very sorry but I couldn’t clean the bathroom. If you find a nasty tidemark round the bath Mr Wexford has only himself to blame. Mind you, the idea of having a bath when you’ve got two showers in the house seems very peculiar to me, not to say weird. But to cut a long story short, I went upstairs with the Mr Muscle and the sponge et cetera and found the door shut as I expected. He’d been a long time in the bath but if people are going to use all that water when we’ve got a drought on the horizon, they may as well make the most of it, is what I say.’ Here a long stare at Wexford, lips temporarily compressed. ‘Well, I went back after a good twenty minutes and the door was still shut. Locked, I suppose, though I wasn’t going to try it, was I?’
    ‘I don’t know why not,’ interrupted Wexford.
    A humourless laugh and, ‘Well, if you don’t know I’m certainly not going to tell you.’ Maxine proceeded to do so. ‘Naturally, I presumed you was in there in the altogether, though I must say an hour and a half had gone by. It was all of twelve, past midday, and then Mrs Wexford come in and I felt I was called upon to explain, not that she did call upon me. I hope I know my duty, that’s all.’
    Dora placated her, checked that she had taken her money, exchanging those smiles of wonder and exasperation women typically produce at the incomprehensible behaviour of men, and hurried her out.
    ‘Why did you have a bath at ten thirty in the morning?’ she asked.
    ‘I didn’t. I said I was going to. But maybe I will on Maxine’s days in future. If I hadn’t escaped I think I’d have sacked her.’
    ‘Oh, for God’s sake don’t do that, Reg.’
    Maxine spent ten minutes chatting without respite to Dr and Mrs Crocker while they tried to watch a DVD of
Mad Men
, season three. She had given them a biographical account of her son Jason from his breech birth – an agonising labour, they nearly lost him and her – until the present day, so now embarked on her horrible discovery at St Peter’s Vicarage. Dr Crocker was an altogether tougher customer than Wexford when it came to being forceful with women and told her to get on with her work, he and his wife were concentrating on the television. Maxine left them alone for about a quarter of an hour, she had to while she swept leaves from the front path and the patio, but then returned to remark that there were some people who said you shouldn’t watch TV in the daytime, it was bad for your health, not to mention your eyesight, and she’d never allowed her kids to watch it before 6 p.m.
    ‘I’m the health expert, not you,’ said Dr Crocker. ‘You leave our eyesight to me. Now off you go and shut the door behind you.’
    It wasn’t the way she was accustomed to her clients talking to her, as she told Jason and Nicky when she dropped in on them on her way home.
    ‘Is that what you call them? Clients?’ Nicky didn’t dislike her mother-in-law – well, as good as a mother-in-law or as bad as – but she kept up a mild feud with her because you weren’t supposed to get on with your husband’s mother, it was a well-known fact. ‘That’s really weird.’
    Maxine was a worthy adversary for she too approved of mother-in-law versus daughter-in-law discord. ‘Don’t you use words like that to me. I happen to know you left school without no GCSEs.’
    ‘Knock it off, Mum,’ said Jason. He was watching television with Isabella on his knees. ‘Weird’s not a bad word. Nicky wouldn’t use one of them in front of Issy. Go on about Dr Crocker.’
    So Maxine went on about Dr Crocker, her audience expressing the opinion that his conduct was very likely the onset of Alzheimer’s, the same applying to Wexford when the tale was told of his bath or non-bath.
    ‘I