Read Online Bridesmaids Revisited by Dorothy Cannell - Free Book Online Page B

is the question that’s kept me awake more nights than I care to think about.”
    “Crafty bugger!” Frank growled down at his walking stick. “He’s had this ticking over in his head from way back, he has. Started buying up houses round here some twenty years gone. And like a ruddy fool when the wife took sick I says to myself, why not sell and take her for a holiday on the continent, like she always wanted?”
    “Don’t go blaming yourself, Frank, just because you were the last holdout next to them at the Old Rectory.” Irene patted his shoulder and fixed her blue eyes on me. “One of the first to sell was the couple that owned the corner shop just off High Street on Hawthorn Lane. Apparently a rumor went buzzing round that a supermarket was going up not half a mile down by Gallows Cross and they panicked. It was before I moved here. But surprise, surprise, it didn’t happen, not then and not later! If you ask me, it was Amelia Chambers’s wicked employer that spun the story.”
    “I was taken in.” Susan wiped her massive hands down the front of her damp pinny and shifted her gooseberry gaze between me and the woman with black and orange hair. “So was them that used to own Irene and Tom’s cottages. That awful man always paid more—almost double sometimes what the properties would have brought from any other buyer. And to sweeten the pot we all got to stay on if we wished at a twopenny rent.” Her face worked itself into a series of doughy shapes, like a ball of day-old pastry being thumped about by a furious pair of hands. “It seemed too good to be true. And of course it was.”
    “You never suspected that there was a scheme afoot to buy up the village for some commercial project?” I asked.
    “We’re a trusting lot,” said Frank heavily. “But that don’t mean we’re complete fools. We had the town council get an assurance in writing that nothing like that was in the works. But turns out it isn’t worth the paper it’s written on; not when you get out your magnifying glass to read every word of the fine print.”
    “Couched in very clever terms,” put in Irene. “With his millions that man could hire the very best lawyers, couldn’t he? While all we’ve got down here is a nice old bumpkin of a solicitor to check things over. Eighty if he’s a day and asleep at his desk, you might say.”
    “Me and the wife wanted to buy,” Tom assured me. “We’ve always owned our own house, never thought of doing otherwise. But, like Susan says, the rent was so cheap, it was almost a joke. At first we thought we’d just stay for a year or two, save the lolly and when we found the right place move out to Upper or Lower Thaxstead.” He looked up and down the lane glistening with rain and spangled with a sudden burst of sunshine, then over to where the fields spread gently out to be bordered at their furthest edge by a satin ribbon of road. “Trouble is, there’s something about Knells that wraps itself around your heart.”
    “This village has been here since the fourteenth century.” Frank now drew a handkerchief that looked as though it hadn’t been washed since before his Jessie died, and blew his nose hard. “I was born in that cottage, same as my pa was. I played as a lad in the old churchyard and of occasion, when the devil took us, me and the Bradley lads that used to live at Number Four would shin up the drainpipe to peek inside the window of the rector’s study.”
    “The famous rector who took off for the Belgian Congo?” I asked, hoping to get more information.
    “No. His father-in-law. The old rector—Reverend McNair. Not William Fitzsimons. He’s the one that was curate and went out as a missionary to force religion down people’s throats, before coming back here to drum the pulpit for thirty years.”
    Fitzsimons, I thought. Here was additional information to what Gwen and Barney had told me. My cousin Vanessa was a Fitzsimons. Her father, Wyndom, had been my mother’s