Late, Late in the Evening

'And the man who put Mr Ward in that hole and buried him. Suppose she knows who that was, eh? And suppose she told us, and we told Mrs Bradley, and she told the police! We might even get our names in the papers!'

'I wouldn't want that, unless they'd caught the murderer first and locked him up.'

'Well, they'd have done that, of course, on our information.'

So I committed myself to the enterprise and we began with Mrs Grant. We found her sitting on her doorstep as usual rocking herself to and fro and moaning about her ague.

'I hab de ague bery bad, bery bad,' she told us.

'I'm sorry to hear it,' said Kenneth in a grown-up way, keeping the collecting-box behind his back, for we did not want to frighten her off before we had got any information out of her which she might possess. Besides, it was rumoured in the village that she was a Catholic, although, so far as was known, she never went to church. Anyway, I doubted whether she would give anything towards the Sunday school's Foreign Missions because, after all, she herself was a foreigner and might think it a cheek of the English to send out missionaries. She might even have feasted off a missionary in her earlier life, I thought. 'Still,' my brother went on, 'I suppose even the ague is better than being murdered.'

'Murdered? Mudder ob God, who is murdered?'

'Surely you know,' I said, taken aback, all the same, by what I believed to be a blasphemous exclamation. 'You heard about the girl at the sheepwash, and now Mr Ward.'

'Nobody don' tell me notting. No friends I got in dis place.'

'No, they're not a very friendly lot,' said Kenneth. 'We can tell you about the murders if you like.'

'You come in. I gib you glass ob good wine.'

'No, thank you all the same. We're Band of Hope,' I said, afraid that Kenneth was going to accept the invitation. 'Have you seen the doctor lately?'

'Doctor no damn good. I tell him not to come no more. I got no more letters to gib him.'

'Letters?' We pricked up our ears.

'Long time young lady send embelopes to me. Inside is letter in smaller embelope address to Doctor Tassall. It is an arrangement. He treat me free for my ague, I gib him his letters. Dey come first from France, den London, but no more. Young lady she don' write no more letters and I don' have money to pay doctor, so I tell him not to come no more, and he don' do notting for de ague, anyway. Now I go indoors, sit by fire. Goodbye.'

'Well, that wasn't much good,' said Kenneth, as we walked on down the village street. 'Not that I expected much from her.'

'I think we ought to make a note about the letters,' I said. 'Letters are always important. Look at the letter Laurie wrote to Meg, pretending it came from his tutor. There was an awful row about that. And look at the letter that man in the pub wrote to Jellicoe that could have got Mike Jackson expelled when he biked over at night to pay the five pounds.'

'Tell Mrs Bradley about the letters, do you mean?' Kenneth was obviously impressed by my arguments, for, although he had not read Little Women, he, like me, had wallowed in the Captain magazine which was in bound volumes in our local public library at home, and especially did we love the school stories by P. G. Wodehouse.

'Well, I bet it's something nobody but Mrs Grant knows about,' I said. 'What only one person knows must be a secret of some sort and secrets, like letters, are always important.'

We walked on and then stopped outside the Widow Winter's house. She was on our list, but neither of us wanted to knock on her door.

'We could leave her till last,' said Kenneth, 'and then perhaps we shan't need her at all.' We went on to Mother Honour's, but all she said when she saw our box was,

'I'm here to take money, not give it. Out you get!'

So out we went. We stood outside the little post-office and looked at the tumble-down cottage across the road.

'She must know something,' said Kenneth. 'After all, her shop door is bang opposite. If only I hadn't put my ha'penny in this silly tin I could have bought some sweets and then perhaps she'd talk to us.'

'Not for only a halfpenny; I said. 'We'd better try Miss Summers next, I suppose. She lives nearly opposite Mrs Grant, so we might hear something more about the letters.'

'They can't be all that important.'

'They must be, or else they wouldn't need to be kept so secret.'

'They wouldn't be about the murders, anyway. They might be love-letters. Something silly, anyway, I'll bet. I thought Amabel was an awfully silly girl, didn't you? Besides, you and I used to have a secret post, don't you remember?'

'Yes, but it was only a shoe-box with a slit in the lid. Well, do we try Miss Summers or don't we?'

So we tried Miss Summers, but it was not any good. As soon as she spotted the collecting-box she said,

'You're the third lot that's come bothering me. Don't you know it's against the law to beg?'

'It isn't for ourselves,' said Kenneth.

'Don't you tell me that! You children are all the same. You know what to do with a hatpin, I'll be bound!'

'Well,' said Kenneth, when we got outside, 'if we didn't then, we do now, and it is in a good cause. Even