THE COMPLETE BLACK AND DOD COZY MYSTERIES BOOKS 1–3 gripping British historical cozy 1930s murder mystery series by Janes Diane

Author:Janes, Diane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lume Books Historical Cozy Mysteries, A Joffe Books Company
Published: 2023-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

NINETEEN

Their first port of call on Saturday morning was in Epperstone, a village about ten miles away, where permission had been given for them to interview Alice, one-time housemaid to the late Miss Tilling, who was now working for a retired major and his wife.

Alice was, as her friend Martha had warned them, a great gossip; and if anything, she was even more garrulous than Martha herself had been. Alice had evidently heard all about the troubles at St Agnes’s, but it had never occurred to her to associate the death of her previous mistress with them. All the same, when encouraged to speak freely, she had a good deal to say about various parishioners, most of it garnered from her acquaintances who worked below stairs in Durley Dean. ‘Mr and Mrs Cocklington, now, they are as nice folk as you would ever care to meet and would do anyone a good turn. Real Christians they are and no mistake. Their cook, Flora, told me that they have refused to take sides over all this business at the church and just carry on as they always did, being kind and generous to everyone what crosses their path.’

‘How about Mr Vardy? Did you know him?’

‘I can’t say as I know much about Mr Vardy,’ Alice conceded reluctantly. ‘My cousin Wilf worked for him a couple of years back and reckoned he was a fair old tyrant, but then it’s always been said in the family that our Wilf’s a right lazy lad, so it would be small wonder if Mr Vardy hadn’t got on to him.’

Miss Flowers was ‘a funny old stick’ according to Alice, and so prim and proper that she still had the newspapers ironed each day, while Mrs Welshman was ‘a fairly peaceable sort’, though she had engaged in a long-standing dispute with Mr Sopwith, the butcher, over a Christmas goose which had been past its best, with the result that she had taken her business elsewhere. Miss Grimes had fallen out with Miss Flowers back before the war, though no one could remember what it had been about, and they hadn’t spoken to one another in the best part of twenty years. ‘Mind you, it’s no wonder Miss Grimes can’t remember the cause of their rowing, because she is so forgetful now that she can’t remember anything much, poor old soul.’

Given half a chance, Alice would have worked her way through all the inhabitants of Durley Dean, providing details of their minor squabbles and domestic mishaps going back over the last couple of decades, and Tom had to keep dragging her back to more relevant areas.

Asked whether the various members of the congregation of St Agnes’s had been in the habit of visiting Miss Tilling and perhaps borrowing some of the books which had belonged to her late father, Alice agreed at once that there had been plenty of callers connected to the church. ‘Though I wouldn’t know about the books, sir, as Miss Tilling would have taken folk up and down the stairs to look at them herself.

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