decided, as she reconciled herself to a cold night. The paperwork on the Cottons’ new number couldn’t have got through. Or maybe there had been a delay on connecting the phone.
Yes, something like that.
It was odd, though…
? Mrs, Presumed Dead ?
Four
The next morning Mrs Pargeter made no further attempt to contact Theresa Cotton. Instead, she risked the scorn of a gas repairman and was rewarded – or at least vindicated – by the discovery that there was something genuinely wrong with the central heating boiler.
The gas repairman, obedient to the long tradition of his calling, had not got the relevant replacement part with him, but managed, in direct contradiction to the long tradition of his calling, to locate and fit it within twenty- four hours.
So Mrs Pargeter, with warmth now restored to her new home, thought no more about her failure to contact its former owner.
¦
At eleven o’clock on the Friday morning there was more concerted movement in Smithy’s Loam than Mrs Pargeter had seen since her arrival.
Up until then she had noticed how rare it was to see more than one of the residents walking out of doors at any given time. Each morning, some time after the husbands had left, there was a flurry of motorised departures, as those women blessed with children took the second cars out for the school runs. They did not all come back at the same time, their returns staggered by the demands of shopping and other errands.
Then, through the day, most of the residents would make occasional forays on foot, to shop, to walk dogs, to wheel infants. But these expeditions seemed rarely to coincide, and the Friday morning was the first occasion Mrs Pargeter had seen more than two of the women out at the same time, as they converged on Vivvi Sprake’s house.
She watched them through the net curtains left by the Cottons. Mrs Pargeter did not really like net curtains, but the late Mr Pargeter had always favoured them. Though of course he never did anything in their marital home of which he needed to be ashamed, he had always valued privacy. One of his recurrent aphorisms had been, “What is not seen requires no investigation.” And his wife, respecting his judgement in all such matters, subordinated her taste to his caution in the matter of net curtains.
She thought, as the newcomer, it would be appropriate for her to arrive a little later than the others, and she watched them as they crossed from their neat front doors to Vivvi Sprake’s equally neat front door. She had glimpsed most of them during the preceding days and had already, as most people do with unintroduced neighbours, formed impressions of them.
Vivvi was the only one she could actually identify by name, but the others she had christened in her own mental shorthand.
The six houses in Smithy’s Loam curled in an elegant horseshoe around the road which enclosed the central green. Their individuality had been used as another selling point at the time of their building – look what an unregimented development this is, a random cluster of distinctively designed houses, all different, all set in plots of different shapes. But each plot had the same area and the conformity of materials used made the houses look more like a matching set than if they had been identical.
The resident of Number One, ‘High Bushes’, directly opposite, had apparently not left the house since Mrs Pargeter’s arrival. But there was no doubt that she was there. Her windows also had the protection of net curtains, and from behind them a shadowy figure monitored each coming and going to the loop of road at whose entrance the house stood like a sentry-box. Each time Mrs Pargeter entered her front door, she could feel the eyes boring into the back of her head, but whether their motive was malevolence or simple curiosity she could not tell.
In Mrs Pargeter’s mental shorthand, the woman in ‘High Bushes’ became Mrs Snoop the Spy.
She carried this Happy Families notation into her names for the other residents. Two women lived in Number Two, ‘Perigord’. Mrs Pargeter had in fact only seen one of them, but the existence of the other was a logical deduction. The one she had seen looked too young, and too uninterested in the pair of small children she shepherded, to be anything other than a foreign
And in her fancy, Miss Bored’s mistress, whose car left the close as early as those of the husbands, became Mrs Busy the Businesswoman.
Vivvi Sprake’s house was Number Three, incongruously called ‘Haymakers’, and next door at Number Four, ‘Hibiscus’, lived a woman whose hasty exits and averted eyes made her Mrs Nervy the Neurotic.
Mrs Pargeter’s immediate neighbour at Number Five, ‘Cromarty’, who had made no gesture of welcome to the newcomer but who cleaned her windows at least once a day, was dubbed Mrs Huffy the Houseproud.
As she moved away from the net curtains and picked up her handbag, Mrs Pargeter looked forward to putting real names to her cast of Happy Families’ wives.
But of course at that stage she had no reason to suspect that amongst them might be included Mrs Merciless the Murderess.
? Mrs, Presumed Dead ?
Five
Vivvi Sprake was an over-hearty presence in yellow dungarees, one of those people whose emotional range does not encompass subtlety.
“And what did your husband
The object of her interrogation gave an equable smile. “He was in business on his own account.”
“Oh, what sort of line?”
“All kinds,” Mrs Pargeter replied, charmingly but uninformatively.
“Finance?”
“Yes.”
“Commodities?”
“At times.”
“Was he a broker?”
“That kind of thing, yes.”
Vivvi seemed tacitly to recognise that that was as far as she was going to get, so she shifted her approach. “Carole’s husband Gregory’s in Commodities.”
“Oh?”
“I assume you must have met Carole by now.” Vivvi Sprake spoke with great care, restraining her northern accent as one might a kitten capable of suddenly breaking free to do something disgraceful on the floor. “I mean, with her being right next door to you.”
“No, I haven’t yet.” So Mrs Huffy the Houseproud was called Carole. Slowly the names were coming together.
“Oh well, I must introduce you.” Vivvi darted away to collar a woman with rigidly coifed blonde hair, who wore a grey blouse and matching skirt.
The quarry was brought forward for presentation to the guest of honour. “This is Melita Pargeter – Carole Temple.”
“Hello.” Carole made no pretence of being interested in her new neighbour.
“Hello, I’ve seen you cleaning your windows,” said Mrs Pargeter comfortably.
“Oh?” The tone implied affront.
“Well, I could hardly miss you, love, could I? I’ve been going in and out so much the last few days. You know how it is with a new house – you keep remembering things you’ve forgotten. Didn’t you find that when you first
