Читать книгу A Case of Grave Danger - Sophie Cleverly - Страница 7

The Edgar that it referred to was my grandfather, now five years dead, and my father Edgar Junior was his only remaining son. I’d told Father that he ought to change it to Edgar Veil and Son and Daughter Ltd, but he had only laughed and ruffled my hair.

I had been serious, though. Why shouldn’t I be recognised as part of the family business just because I was a girl? I did a lot more work than Thomas did.

Well, except for when I was picking apples instead.

The glass in the shop window was rippled with age, but you could still see through it. Now, as I glanced up, I could see a woman on the outside, looking in at the porcelain flowers.

A mourner, I thought. A widow in black. She must be here to arrange a funeral.

Yet there was something strange about her. I couldn’t see her eyes behind the waterfall of black lace and pale hair that cascaded past her shoulders, yet I felt for sure they were now staring straight at me.

Bones began to growl softly, a low rumbling in his throat.

‘Shh, boy,’ I said. ‘Don’t scare the customers.’

I thought I ought to go out and greet her, but then the woman quickly turned her head and darted across the street, hitching up her skirts as she went.

I frowned. Why had she looked so furtive? But before I could think anything more of it, I heard raised voices coming from the house.

‘I did not take your silly file!’

‘Thomas! Don’t you dare talk that way to your father!’

My family could be rather a nightmare at times. Was it any wonder that I often preferred the company of the dead? At least they seldom argued.

With a sigh, I headed back to the kitchen.

* * *

That evening, after supper, Father lit the gas lamp and we all sat round the fire in the parlour. I tried to read my book, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but I couldn’t concentrate and my eyes kept slipping away from it. It was dark outside, and I could hear the rain falling over the crackle of the fire. Bones was sleeping on the rug, pawing at imaginary rats in his dreams.

Thomas wasn’t talking to Father after their squabble earlier. He sat in the corner of the room, painting wooden soldiers with a grim expression on his face. Occasionally I heard him mutter something to himself under his breath about not being a thief.

I began to think again about the missing file as I stared into the flames. Maybe Father had just misplaced it, but was there a chance that someone had taken it? Who would want to steal records on a boy that nobody knew? If they’d known who he was, and that he was dead, they would have come to claim him, wouldn’t they? Unless Thomas was right, and someone had murdered the blond boy. I felt a tingle of a shiver run down my spine.

We’d had murder victims in before, of course. Not many, but enough. Yet the blond boy, who now lay in his apple-free coffin, seemed different somehow.

Tap.

‘What was that?’ asked Thomas.

I’d heard it too. I looked to the window. Only darkness.

Bones’s ears pricked up, and suddenly he was on his feet, staring in the direction of the sound.

‘Perhaps it was the tree outside,’ said Father, tapping the bowl of his pipe out into the ashtray. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask the groundskeeper to cut it back. The branches are getting too near the house.’

‘It didn’t come from upstairs,’ Thomas insisted. ‘It came from out there.’ He pointed to the front window.

‘Probably only the rain, my dear,’ said Mother. ‘Come along now, Thomas, it’s past your bedtime.’ She stood up and shepherded my little brother out of the room, despite his protests.

Father simply shrugged and went back to reading his newspaper.

But I hadn’t looked away from the window. Because I had seen something that the others had not.

A flash of white eyes in the darkness, and a shadow disappearing into the night.