Read Dying in the Wool for Free Online

nose and bow lips.
    The bell rang as I opened the door. The waitress, taking away Tabitha’s full ashtray and placing a clean one on the table, blocked me from view. Then Tabitha was pushing back her chair, and coming towards me. I was about tohold out my hand when she gave a beaming smile, grabbed me and pulled us into a clinch. We kissed each other on the cheek.
    ‘Kate, thank you so much for coming! I’ll order another pot of tea.’
    After the preliminaries about my journey and whether I found my way easily, she said, ‘You’re so kind to come at such short notice. I hope you don’t mind my turning to you for help. You were always so capable. Do you remember I couldn’t think straight when that poor chap in St Mary’s died under my care?’
    I nodded. ‘You’d become attached to him.’
    She sighed. Her fingers played a silent requiem on the tablecloth. She looked much younger than her thirty years, almost like a schoolgirl.
    ‘You get to the bottom of things, Kate. You tracked down the brother of that Cavendish waitress.’
    ‘Even though he wished I hadn’t.’ I smiled. ‘But I think people have a right to know the truth – no matter how hard it is.’
    You can never tell whether someone will immediately blurt out every single detail of their story, or sidle up to the matter in hand so slowly as to trip over it. Tabitha is a sidler-up and tripper.
    Finally, she said, ‘I look for Dad all the time. Just before I came in here, an old chap went shuffling by the ironmonger’s and I thought, is that him? It wasn’t. It never is. But I don’t stop looking you see. Sometimes, if there’s a knock on the door, I think it’s him.’
    ‘Would he knock on his own door?’
    She lit another cigarette. ‘No. But none of it has to make sense. I even dreamed he came back, walking through the fields from the mill, with some other men, saying he’d not been lost at all and we’d only thought him lost. Mind you, it’ll be Easter a week on Sunday. Resurrections and all that.’
    ‘So you think he’s lost, and not dead?’
    ‘He’s not dead. I’m sure of that.’
    ‘How can you be so sure?’
    ‘I just am. I know in my heart and soul. You know when someone is dead.’
    There was logic to that. But just because you knew when a person was dead, that did not mean you could be certain that someone was alive. There seemed to me to be a shade of difference between her declaring him ‘not dead’ and asserting that he was alive. Perhaps he was not dead because she could not bear that.
    When someone has gone missing, there is always that edginess, that looking out of the corner of the eye. Even when your head knows that he will never come back, that part of you that hopes beyond all reason just won’t give up. When trying to find out what happened to Gerald, I had spoken to his colonel, pushing him for names, survivors who might have some scrap of information for me. He grew impatient. In the end, he said, ‘My dear madam, please understand that the words “Missing in Action” frequently mean “blown to smithereens. Nothing left to identify”.’
    If she saw the shadow cross my eyes, Tabitha thought it was for her.
    ‘It’s come between me and Hector, my fiancé,’ she confided in a low voice as if the waitress would be listening, ready to spread gossip, which perhaps she would to make up for having to watch everyone else eat egg custards. ‘He practically holds his breath and turns purple if he suspects I’m going to harp on about Dad again. At first he was patient but now …’ She blew a perfect smoke ring. ‘If you can’t find an answer for me, Kate, I’ve got a horrible feeling this wedding will never happen.’
    ‘Tabitha. I can stay with you until Saturday. The following week I must go to London for my aunt’s birthday dinner. It would be more than my life’s worth to backout. Then we have the Easter weekend. Let’s see whether I can be of any help. Perhaps by this Friday we shall have a