Read Online A Dangerous Deceit by Marjorie Eccles - Free Book Online Page B

his machine shop on Tuesday morning.
    â€˜A tragic accident,’ commented Mr Stanley Dowson, foreman at Aston’s Engineering, who found his employer lying dead when he went into the foundry. Mr Aston, though previously thought to be in good health, had apparently collapsed and fallen into a heap of sand some hours earlier, but as the foundry was not working that day was not discovered until later in the morning. Mr Dowson said, ‘He must have tripped and knocked himself out when he fell into the sand. He was a good employer and will be much missed.’
    The police, and Mrs Lily Aston, the deceased man’s wife, declined to comment. An inquest is to be held next week.
    Dearest Plum,
    I could scarcely believe my luck when Butterworth sent me to cover the sudden, unexplained death of Arthur Aston – because I didn’t exactly clothe myself in glory in his eyes over reporting the Snowman case, did I? I’d raised too many questions for his liking. As editor and owner of the paper, it’s in his interests to keep in with the police, and neither he nor they liked my pieces hinting at incompetence in their failure to discover the identity of the Snowman – or the few bits I’d managed to get past Butterworth when he was ‘hors de combat’. The police blamed their failure on having had so few clues to work on (which I knew meant none!) and it’s fairly evident they’ve now abandoned all hope of solving the case.
    Harold Butterworth doesn’t really approve of women reporters – he thinks they have a disregard for deadlines, not to mention slipshod grammar, spelling and punctuation. As if the
Folbury Herald
ever had deadlines, and as if his own grammar, spelling etc. is faultless – even when he’s sober! But men who do have those sort of abilities don’t exactly see the
Folbury & District Herald
as a stepping stone to Fleet Street, so he has to make do with me and young Ernie, who’s only just left school and can’t be trusted yet to cover anything more than WI meetings and then not always. He’s stuck with me and he thinks I’m stuck with the
Herald,
which is true, in a way. Well, of course, I’m a woman, I have to take what I can get and be grateful for it, have I not? Especially when there’s something more rewarding in the offing.
    All the same, I have to keep myself thoroughly in hand when he’s around. Be a good girl and eat my porridge. There’ll be plenty of better things than porridge if things go as we plan – and I don’t see why they shouldn’t. I am more than halfway there with Felix.
    And ‘stuck’ really doesn’t cover it, does it? I’m here by choice, after all. It fits in very well, working on this provincial rag. It’s given me the chance to become friendly with Felix by getting involved with that group of his, this WSG, Workers’ Support Group – although it amuses me to know that most of them only tolerate me because I occasionally get the odd article into the national press and they realize they need support of that kind more than ever after the colossal failure of the General Strike last year. They are a joke, really, so pathetic, so amateur. Except perhaps for Mesdames Evans, Trefusis and Barton-Smythe, the ex-suffragists. They can’t ever forget that they fought tooth and nail for the vote, chained themselves to railings, were dragged by the hair to police cells, sent to prison, force fed and all the rest of it. And I dare say they’re prepared to do it again for what they see as a cause – courageous women! They despise the men in the group for what they regard as weakness and I must say I see their point. Most of them seem to have lost the heart for fighting – just when they ought to see it’s more necessary than ever before. But that isn’t my problem, since it’s Felix I’m really interested in, not that rag tag and bobtail lot.