Unhappy Returns (Pollard & Toye Investigations Book 9) by Elizabeth Lemarchand

Author:Elizabeth Lemarchand [Lemarchand, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sapere Books
Published: 2019-02-17T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

‘My position is simply intolerable, Superintendent,’ Mrs Trevor-Montley assured Pollard, her full cheeks quivering with impotent indignation. ‘After my husband died — he was a consultant at one of our leading hospitals before he retired — this house was too big for me. I wanted to stay in my old home with all its happy memories, so I sold the first floor to a man called Blount, for conversion into a flat, and kept the ground floor as a flat for myself, with the dear garden. Blount undertook to make the sort of flat that would attract really nice people, but he turned out to be completely unreliable. He made two cheap little flats and let them to people that one has absolutely nothing in common with. As far as the Hutchinsons go, I might be a great deal worse off: they’re a quite inoffensive retired couple from somewhere in the Midlands, I believe. But the Barrow girl is a very different matter. Blount is absolutely uncooperative in the matter, and my solicitor tells me that I can get no redress from the law, unbelievable though it seems.’

The room was overheated, and crowded with furniture, china and silver. Pollard controlled his irritation with difficulty. He was convinced of the genuineness of Bill Sandford’s alibi, and it was maddening to have to listen to this querulous verbiage for the sake of getting unnecessary confirmation for the record.

‘You’re referring, I take it, to the man who visits Miss Barrow here?’ he prompted.

Mrs Trevor-Montley sighed heavily, and made a despairing gesture with pudgy hands.

‘I am. I have spoken to her as if she were my daughter, reasoned with her, and finally suggested that her conduct is most unsuitable in a house in a good residential district like this. On every occasion she has been coolly insolent. Yes, coolly insolent,’ Mrs Trevor-Montley repeated, as if savouring the phrase with satisfaction. ‘She informed me that she had no intention of leaving her flat, and that her way of life was her affair and not mine. And to think that she is secretary to one of the partners in a very reputable firm of solicitors. I asked my own solicitor if it were not my duty to warn them about Miss Barrow’s morals, but he advised against it.’

‘That was sound advice,’ Pollard told her. ‘The laws of slander and libel are very dicey, you know. I wonder now, Mrs Trevor-Montley, if you can help us by thinking back to the afternoon of Wednesday, November the nineteenth. Last Wednesday week.’

‘As it happens I remember it very well. The behaviour of that pair upstairs was particularly outrageous. I was just getting up from my afternoon rest at about half past two when the man arrived in his noisy dilapidated car, and parked it immediately outside. He then played a flourish on the horn. This was simply to annoy me, as he knew perfectly well that Miss Barrow would not have come home at that hour.’

‘Did he go up to her flat?’

‘He did.

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