Three Little Maids(4)
2
Viviane finished her second cup of coffee in her kitchen and pondered still over the reason for Jon Kent taking off so early. He was recently seconded to Harcombe and, obviously, wanted to give of his best. Bill, her husband, she knew would have been the same. In the Met he’d put everything he’d got into being a good cop and his reward had been a massive heart attack at the age of forty three, six years ago now, leaving her alone as a young widow at thirty nine, and a single parent to two teenagers.
It being Friday, she was working in the Central library, instead of touring the Sussex countryside on the mobile van, dispensing books to the housebound and those readers in the scattered outlying villages. And it promised to be another warm working day in town.
She’d cooked a full breakfast for Simon, now packing his case upstairs, and her clock said it was ten am. Meanwhile she had to get a move on. She was driving Simon to the railway station and going in to work at ten thirty, an hour later than usual. The library opened at half nine, and Friday being one of their busiest days, she couldn’t afford to take more time off
She called up the stairs, ‘Hurry up, can’t you? I’ll be late and you’ll miss the train.’
‘Okay, mum.’
Her eighteen-year old son was spending the weekend with his sister, Jill, a second year medical student in London. In two months’ time Simon was embarking on a police career like his father. Her daughter took after their grandfather, Doctor Terence Pilbeam, who had been a Police Doctor.
Viviane was glad that she’d finally decided to have someone else living in the old red brick, creeper covered four storey house in Lower Park road overlooking the Victoria Park. She’d worried over it for quite some time after she inherited the house from her Great-Aunt Ida along with Beazy, her large Main Coon cat. Her aunt had been a retired headmistress of a local private girls’ school.
Realising that her children from now on would be spending more time away from her, Viviane knew that pretty soon she would feel like a solitary dried pea rattling around in a tin can in the empty house. Her aunt, no doubt, felt the same. She had established the self-contained top apartment some years ago, and rented it to a fellow teacher.
Viviane had let it to DI. Kent only recently when they’d met up unexpectedly on the pier three weeks ago and shared old times with him. She hoped she wouldn’t regret this as, inevitably, it might stir up old memories and would be forced to fight the sadness creeping back all over again.
She grimaced back fiercely in the small hand mirror by the kitchen sink at the rash of freckles on her small nose, freshened up her coral pink lipstick and raked a comb through the thick crop of short russet red curls. And prayed that her small blue mini wasn’t held up by the build-up of early morning traffic into the busy town centre.
She didn’t have much time after that in the library to think about Jon Kent’s early outing. The counter work kept her busy as usual till her weekly regulars, the Wilberforce sisters came in. They were two elderly ladies, Thora and Alice, who were unlike in appearance and had very different tastes in reading. Thora, whom Viviane, judged to be the eldest, was the tallest. Lean and bony, her pale blue eyes were gimlet sharp and her wide smile produced a row of large protruding tombstone teeth and she wore her cream straw boater jauntily on her pepper and salt frizzed hair. She read romance avidly, whereas quietly speaking Alice with her small bird like features, bright conker brown eyes, read nothing but crime fiction.
‘Good morning, Mrs Gordon,’ they chimed together over the library counter.
‘Good morning, ladies.’
‘It’s a lovely day out. Just the weather we want for the Carnival next week. Let’s hope it lasts awhile longer, my dear,’ Thora said placing her books down carefully in a neat pile in front of Viviane. ‘We must make the most of it.’
‘Yes, it is gorgeous,’ Viviane agreed, sorting out the dates ready for the computer. ‘Perfect if it continues for the Carnival week.’
‘Have you heard the news yet, about the dead body found on the cliff top, Mrs Gordon? They believe that it was a young girl’s,’ Alice said in a sepulchral whisper over the counter. ‘I wonder if she’s anyone we know?’
Viviane felt an icy chill freeze down her spine despite the sunny warmth in the library. ‘What body, Miss Wilberforce?’
The sisters exchanged conspiratorially glances. Thora nodded and continued for her sister. ‘Fred Hill, the hotel porter, told us all about it when he brought in our morning newspapers. His sister’s boy, Jimmy Barty, Fred said came across the body on the cliff top while on the way to work in the Fish Market. He’s still at school to get his A levels and it has shaken him up dreadfully.’