Read A New Lease of Death for Free Online

into the drawing room and afterwards she heard him and Mrs Primero quarrelling.’
    ‘This brings me to the first point I want to raise,’ Archery said. He flipped through the transcript and, putting his finger at the beginning of a paragraph, passed it to Wexford. ‘This, as you know, is part of Painter’s own evidence. He doesn’t deny the quarrel. He admits that Mrs Primero threatened him with dismissal. He also says here that Mrs Primero finally came round to see his point of view. She refused to give him a rise because she said that would put ideas into his head and he would only ask for another increase in a few months’ time. Instead she’d give him what she understood was called a bonus.’
    ‘I remember all that well,’ Wexford said impatiently. ‘He said she told him to go upstairs and into her bedroom where he’d find a handbag in her wardrobe. He was to bring that handbag down to her and this, he said, he did. There was about two hundred pounds in the handbag and this he could have, take it away in the handbag and look upon it as a bonus on condition he was absolutely circumspect about bringing the coal at the required times.’ He coughed. ‘I never believed a word of it and neither did the jury.’
    ‘Why not?’ Archery asked quietly.
    God, thought Wexford, this was going to be a long session.
    ‘Firstly, because the stairs at Victor’s Piece run up between the drawing room and the kitchen. Alice Flower was in the kitchen cooking the lunch. She had remarkably good hearing for her age, but she never heard Painter go up those stairs. And, believe me, he was a big heavy lout if ever there was one.’ Archery winced faintly at this but Wexford went on, ‘Secondly, Mrs Primero would never have sent the gardener upstairs to poke about in her bedroom. Not unless I’m very mistaken in her character. She would have got Alice to have fetched the money on some pretext or other.’
    ‘She might not have wanted Alice to know about it.’
    ‘That’s for sure,’ Wexford retorted sharply. ‘She wouldn’t have. I said on some pretext or other.’ That made the parson draw in his horns. Wexford said very confidently, ‘In the third place Mrs Primero had a reputation for being rather mean. Alice had been with her for half a century but she’d never given Alice anything bar her wages and an extra pound at Christmas.’ He jabbed at the page. ‘Look, she says so here in black and white. We know Painter wanted money. The night before when he hadn’t brought the coal he’d been drinking up at the Dragon with a pal of his from Stowerton. The pal had a motorbike to sell and he’d offered it to Painter for a bit less than two hundred pounds. Apparently Painter hadn’t a hope of getting the money but he asked his friend to hold on to the bike for a couple of days and he’d contact him the minute anything came up. You’re saying he got the money before noon on Sunday. I say he stole it after he brutally murdered his employer in the evening. If you’re right, why didn’t he get in touch with his friend on Sunday afternoon? There’s a phone box at the bottom of the lane . We checked with the pal, he didn’t move out of his house all day and the phone never rang.’
    It was a very tempest of fact and Archery yielded, or appeared to yield, before it. He said only:
    ‘You’re saying, I think, that Painter went to the wardrobe after he’d killed Mrs Primero in the evening. There was no blood on the inside of the wardrobe.’
    ‘For one thing he wore rubber gloves to do the deed. Anyway, the prosecution’s case was that he stunned her with the flat side of the axe blade, took the money, and when he came downstairs, finished her off in a panic.’
    Archery gave a slight shiver. ‘Doesn’t it strike you as odd,’ he then said, ‘that if Painter did it he should have been so transparent about it?’
    ‘Some are. They’re stupid, you see.’ Wexford said it derisively, his mouth curling. He still had no