Ann Granger (35 page)

I was perhaps too harsh on Lefebre. His situation had been a difficult one. Who doesn’t hide some awkward fact, perhaps to oblige a friend? Who doesn’t hesitate to make a statement that will ‘set the cat among the pigeons’? What medical man is not cautious in his diagnosis? How can he discuss someone who may be his patient with an outsider? But I still felt that Lefebre had somehow misled me at Shore House.

Ben would say, of course, that half of London flies under false colours, if not all of the time, then at least some of it. It is the way of the world. Perhaps he’s right. He told me that just before he came down to Hampshire, he had charged a dreadful man with deliberately abandoning a baby of eighteen months on King’s Cross station. The plight of all the unwanted children up and down the country distressed me greatly. My own upbringing had been haphazard, but I’d always been loved.

Not all unwanted children lived in poor families. In well-to-do families, too, a child might become an ‘inconvenience’, due perhaps to remarriage, or being a girl when a boy was desired, or plain and awkward when pretty and charming was wanted. Or even, like Lucy, be the hapless orphaned baby with a quarter stake in the family firm, an object of fear and resentment.

The fate of these wealthy unloved children varied. They might be left alone with only servants to care for them; be bundled off to boarding schools, some of them with harsh regimes; or physically well cared for but emotionally neglected. ‘A half-finished piece of embroidery left on a chair’, was how young Lucy Roche had heartbreakingly described herself before her marriage. No wonder she clung to the man who had said he loved her!

I didn’t tell Ben about Lefebre’s visit, any more than I told him of Charles Roche’s suggestion I become companion to his sister Phoebe. I could well imagine his reaction to either piece of news.

Ben seemed content that I was living in Dorset Square again, for the time being, at any rate.

‘At least I know where you are,’ he said. ‘Let this be a warning to you, Lizzie!’

‘Very well! Don’t preach at me, Ben.’

‘I’m not preaching and I don’t want us to argue. But I do want you to be…’

‘Yes?’ I asked when he fell silent.

He shook his head. ‘In truth I don’t want you any other way than you are.’

This was straying into territory I wanted to avoid. I sought to change the direction of this conversation by saying, ‘I can’t help thinking of Andrew Beresford. What will he do? He would have looked after Lucy and made her happy, given half a chance.’

‘Given a chance, we’d all like to make the woman we love happy,’ said Ben simply.

‘Thank you,’ I said after a long silence. ‘But we always seem thrown together in such violent circumstances. How can we forget all these things and just concentrate on ourselves?’

‘Or how can you be married to an inspector of police who will come home to his dinner from a scene of indescribable wickedness and horror?’

‘Don’t!’ I said quickly. ‘I only need some time.’

‘Of course.’ After a moment he went on awkwardly: ‘We are still walking out, aren’t we, Lizzie?’

‘Yes, Ben,’ I told him. ‘We are still walking out.’

Although the inscription below is found on a gravestone in Oxfordshire, in Chipping Norton parish churchyard, and not in Hampshire, (and is one hundred years earlier than the date of Lizzie’s journey to the south coast), nevertheless it provided the spark from which this story grew.

Here

Lieth the Body of

PHILLIS wife of

JOHN HUMPHREYS

Rat Catcher

Who has lodged

In many a Town

And Traveled [sic] far and near

By Age and death

Shee [sic] is struck down

To her last lodging here

Who died June Yar [sic] 1763

Aged 58

Also by Ann Granger

LIZZIE MARTIN MYSTERIES

The Companion

FRAN VARADY CRIME NOVELS

Asking for Trouble

Keeping Bad Company

Running Scared

Risking It All

Watching Out

Mixing with Murder

Rattling the Bones

MITCHELL AND MARKBY CRIME NOVELS

Say It with Poison

A Season for Murder

Cold in the Earth

Murder Among Us

Where Old Bones Lie

A Fine Place for Death

Flowers for His Funeral

Candle for a Corpse

A Touch of Mortality

A Word After Dying

Call the Dead Again

Beneath These Stones

Shades of Murder

A Restless Evil

That Way Murder Lies

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

A MORTAL CURIOSITY
. Copyright © 2008 by Ann Granger. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.minotaurbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Granger, Ann.

   A mortal curiosity / Ann Granger.—1st ed.

            p.  cm.

   ISBN-13: 978-0-312-36352-9

   ISBN-10: 0-312-36352-4

   1.  Teenage mothers—Fiction.   2.  Maiden aunts—Fiction.   3.  Rich people—Fiction.   4.  England—Fiction.   I.  Title.

PR6057.R259 M67  2008

823'.914—dc22

2008011564

First published in Great Britain by Headline Publishing Group, an Hachette Livre UK Publishing Group

First St. Martin’s Minotaur Edition: August 2008

eISBN 9781466823884

First eBook edition: July 2012