Read Online Who Saw Him Die? by Sheila Radley - Free Book Online Page A

deliberately misleading the police and the Coroner – I now believe that he drove at my brother with the intention of killing him.’
    â€˜Now hold you hard,’ said Chief Inspector Quantrill, making the Suffolk idiom sound magisterial. ‘This driver –’
    â€˜John Reuben Goodrum,’ supplied Sergeant Lloyd, consulting her notebook. ‘Known as Jack Goodrum.’
    â€˜Ah. Right, then, Miss Bell: do I understand that you’re personally acquainted with this Jack Goodrum?’
    â€˜No, Mr Quantrill, I am not. But despite the impression he gave at the inquest, Goodrum is no stranger to Breckham Market. And he would have known full well who Cuthbert was.’
    Quantrill looked to Sergeant Lloyd for information. She flicked through her notes again. ‘Until a month ago, Mr Goodrum had always lived and worked in the Ipswich area. He bought The Mount in April, but wasn’t able to take up residence before October 5th. The Coroner saw that fact as significant. He said that Mr Bell had undoubtedly survived so long because his habits were well known – all the local drivers slowed right down when they saw him.
    â€˜But Mr Goodrum, as a newcomer to the town, didn’t know Mr Bell and couldn’t be expected to keep an eye open for him. That was why the Coroner found that no blame for the accident could attach to Mr Goodrum.’
    â€˜So I read, in the newspaper report,’ said Eunice Bell drily. ‘But Goodrum spent several weeks of each year in Breckham Market when he was a boy. He got to know Cuthbert well. What’s more, he had good reason to harbour a grudge against my brother. And that’s why I believe that when Goodrum returned to the town and learned that the man who wandered the streets was Cuthbert, he seized the opportunity to take his revenge.’
    Miss Bell presented the story in crisp detail. When she and her brother were in their early teens, there had been a butcher’s shop just off Victoria Road, on a site now occupied by the Shell filling station. The butcher, who had supplied meat to the Bell household, was a man named Reuben Goodrum. Reuben had a grandson, Jack, who came up from the Ipswich area every summer during the school holidays to help in the shop and with the deliveries.
    Reuben Goodrum owned a piece of grazing land which adjoined the far end of the grounds of Tower House. The Bell children were forbidden to play outside their own garden, or to mix with the local children; but Cuthbert had always liked to sit on the high garden wall watching the animals in the butcher’s field, and in doing so he had struck up a summer acquaintance with the butcher’s grandson. Cuthbert was a year older than Jack Goodrum, but smaller and weaker, and he had soon come to hero-worship the bigger boy.
    â€˜One could hardly call it friendship,’ reflected Eunice Bell. ‘I imagine that Goodrum merely tolerated my brother. The association had to be kept secret from our parents, of course, but Cuthbert was always talking to me about the boy: it was Jack Jack Jack all the time. My brother must have followed him about like a puppy – and of course that meant going out of the garden, and no doubt getting into all kinds of mischief.’
    â€˜You say, no doubt , Miss Bell,’ commented Quantrill. ‘You didn’t know what they actually got up to, then?’
    â€˜No, and I didn’t wish to. I was older than Cuthbert and I felt responsible for him. I knew there would be trouble enough if our parents found out that he was roaming about with the butcher’s boy, regardless of what the two of them were doing. But even in those days,’ she added wryly, ‘I had very little control over my brother.’
    The unauthorised holiday relationship between Cuthbert Bell and Jack Goodrum had continued until Cuthbert was about seventeen. Then, at last, it had been discovered by his father. Something had been done that enraged