'It can't go on like this, Ted--it just can't. I can't stick it any more.'
'Well, bloody don't then! Sling your 'ook and go, if you can't stick it! But just stop moanin' at me, al'you bear? Stop fuckin' moanin'! All right?'
She was folding her candlewick dressing-gown round her small figure and edging past him at the foot of the double bed, when be stopped her, grabbing hold of her fiercely by the shoulders and glaring furiously into ber face before pushing her back.
'You stay where you are!'
Twice previously he had physically maltreated her in a similar way, but on neither occasion had she suffered phys-ical hurt. That night, though, she had stumbled--had to stumble--against the iron fireplace in the bedroom; and as she'd put out her right hand to cushion the fall, something had happened; something had snapped. Not that it had been too painful. Not then.
As a young girl Brenda had been alongside when her mother had slipped in the snow one February morning and landed on her wrist; broken her wrist. And passers-by had been so concerned, so belpful, that as she'd sat in the Casualty Department at the old Radcliffe Infirmary, she'd told her daughter that it had almost been worthwhile, the accident--to discover such unsuspected kindness.
But that night Ted had just told her to get up; told bet not to be such a bloody ninny. And sbe'd started to weep then--to weep not so much from pain or shock but from the humiliation of being treated in such a way by the man she had married....
Julia handed back the letter.
'I think she hates him even more than you do.' Brenda nodded miserably. 'I must have loved him on though, mustn't I? I suppose he was--well, after died--he was just there really. I suppose I need something--somebody--and Ted was there, and he mad bit of a fuss of me--and I was lonely. After that.., bu doesn't matter any more.'
For a while there was a silence between the two worn, 'Mrs. Stevens?'
'Yes?'
'What about this other thing? What am I going about it? Please help me! Please!'
It was with anger that Julia had listened to Brend earlier confidences; with anger, too, that she had read letter. The man was an animal--she might have kno' it; had known it. But the possibility that he was a m derer? Could Brenda have got it all wrong? Ridiculou wrong?
Julia had never really got to know Ted Brooks. In early days of Brenda working for her, she'd met him a times--4hree or four, no more. And once, only once, ] she gone round to the Brookses' house, when Brenda been stricken with some stomach bug; and when, as had left, Ted Brooks's hand had moved, non-accidenta against her breasts as he was supposedly helping her with her mackintosh.
Take your homy hands off me, you lecherous sod, sh thought then; and she had never seen him since that Never would, if she could help it. Yet he was not an looking fellow, she conceded that.
The contents of the letter, therefore, had come as sot thing less of a shock than may have been expected, sil she had long known that Brenda had fairly regularly on the receiving end of her husband's tongue and teml and had suspected other things, perhaps....
But Brooks a murderer?
She looked across with a sort of loving distress at busy, faithful little lady who had been such a godsenc her; a little lady dressed now in a navy-blue, two-piece I10 an oldish suit certainly, yet beautifully clean, with the pleats in the skirt most meticulously pressed for this special occa-sion.
She felt an ovexwhelming surge of compassion for her, and she was going to do everything she could to help.
Of course she was.
What about 'this other thing,' though? My god, what could she do about that?
'Brenda? Brenda7 You know what you said about... about the blood? Are you sure? Are you sure?'
'Mrs. Stevens?' Brenda whispered. 'I wasn't going to tell you--I wasn't even going to tell you. But yes, I am sure. And shall I tell you why I'm sure?'
It was twenty-past two when Julia's taxi dropped Brenda--not immediately outside her house, but very close, just he-side the Pakistani grocer's shop on the comer.
'Don't forget, Brenda! Make sure you run out of milk again tonight. Just before nine. And don't say or do any- thing before then. Agreed? Bye.'
On her way home, Julia spotted the Oxford Mail placard outside a newsagent's in the Cowley Road: POLICE HUNT MURDER WEAPON and she asked the taxi-driver to stop.
Just before 3 P.M., Ted Brooks was lining up the shot, his eyes coolly assessing the angle between the white cue-ball and the last colour. Smoothly his cue drove through the line of his aim, and the black swiftly disappeared into the bot-tom right-hand pocket.
His opponent, an older man, slapped a pound coin down on the side of the table.
'Not done your snooker much harm, Ted,'
'No. Back at work in a fortnight, so the doc says. With a bit o' luck.'
Chapter Twenty-five
The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom (H. L. MENCKEN)
As Morse had expected, Lewis was already sitting waiting for him outside the museum. 'How did things go, sir?'
'All right.'
