Read Online Trust Me by Lesley Pearse - Free Book Online

‘Mummy’s dead,’ Dulcie blurted out. ‘She fell down the stairs. Daddy said we had to come here.’
    Maud Taylor was seventy-five, a small but rotund woman with a face so lined she often joked she looked like a dried prune. Laughter was her way of coping with the hard life she’d been dished out with, and her eight children had rarely seen her fazed by trouble or disaster, yet she looked amazed by what Dulcie had just said and clutched the two children to her tighter, looking to the older of the two men for confirmation.
    He just nodded, for he hadn’t realized until now that Dulcie was aware of the outcome of her mother’s fall. ‘I’ll explain inside,’ he said, noting the old lady was wearing nothing but a flannel nightgown. He nodded to his younger companion to wait in the car.
    PC Hewitt was forty-two, a warm-hearted, stout man with a shock of prematurely white hair. As a father of four himself, and a veteran of hundreds of cases where the news of a sudden and often violent death had to be broken, he was an ideal choice, but added to this he had a reputation for getting at the truth in awkward family situations.
    The senior officer who had attended at the scene of Anne Taylor’s death was of the opinion Reg Taylor had hurled his wife to her death following attempted strangulation. His fingermarks showed clearly on her neck, and even though Reg had freely admitted he’d caught her by the throat in anger seconds before he claimed she fell backwards down the stairs, and appeared utterly devastated by her death, he refused to say what had started the fight. Indeed, his only real concern was that his children should be taken to his mother’s as soon as possible.
    Hewitt’s brief was to discover if the children had overheard the fight, and to find out whether the Taylors’ marriage had always been a violent one. As Maud Taylor led them into her home, he noted the smell of mildew and mice. He had been stationed briefly at New Cross during the thirties and had been appalled then at the squalid conditions in Deptford. He could remember calling at tiny houses like this one and finding a whole family in each of the three rooms.
    Yet once Maud had lit the gas light in the kitchen, he was surprised by its cleanliness – a clean cloth on the table, a dresser crammed with well-dusted china and ornaments, a well-scrubbed draining board and gleaming white sink.
    Maud staggered to a chair, sat down and drew both the little girls on to her knee. ‘Where’s my Reg?’ she asked, looking up at Hewitt with tear-filled eyes.
    A lump came up in his throat. He’d met her breed of woman so many times, hard as nails because of what life had thrown at them, but fiercely protective of their children, even if they were now grown men. She looked so vulnerable in her nightgown, she hadn’t even realized yet she hadn’t got her teeth in. Judging by the pride she took in her home, she’d be horrified when she did remember.
    ‘He’s being questioned down at the station,’ Hewitt replied. ‘You can see him tomorrow morning, I expect, but for now we just had to get the children settled.’
    Maud looked from one to the other of them, perhaps noting May’s puzzlement and Dulcie’s tense frown. ‘You two go upstairs and get into Granny’s bed,’ she said. ‘As soon as I’ve talked to the policeman I’ll be right up to you.’
    May got up off her knee immediately, but Dulcie clung to the old woman. ‘I want to tell you about it,’ she whispered.
    ‘You can in just a little while. I’ll bring you up some cocoa. Just go on up now, I won’t be long.’ She lit a candle for Dulcie to take with her and nudged her towards the door.
    Hewitt noticed the agonized look on the child’s face and guessed she could tell him a great deal. But the fatherly side of him couldn’t bring himself to insist on questioning an eight-year-old at three in the morning. It could wait a few hours.
    ‘Thank you,’ he said, once Maud had watched