A Presumption of Death by Dorothy L. Sayers, Jill Paton Walsh

Harriet.
    ‘Well, she was a devil of a tease,’ said Rita. ‘She loved having fun. She would flirt with anybody.’
    ‘And once or twice people thought she was serious,’ said Muriel, ‘and got very put out when she just laughed it off. I was always telling her it wasn’t kind.’
    ‘And she just laughed at you, I suppose?’ said Rita. ‘We’re a mixed bunch here, Lady . . . Harriet, I mean. We’ve got all sorts of background; up and down the country, rich and poor. You can tell a lot from our voices – that Muriel and me are out of different boxes: she is nicely brought up – we’re all different. But Wendy didn’t fit with any of us. Don’t get me wrong; we rub along all right. We have a good laugh together over it. But . . .’
    ‘Wendy didn’t laugh?’ prompted Harriet.
    ‘She was quick enough to laugh at us,’ said Rita.
    ‘About what sort of thing?’ asked Harriet.
    ‘Well, she thought of herself as a cut above her company,’ said Rita, who seemed to have dropped her hostility and decided to co-operate. ‘Not because she was posh – she wasn’t as posh as Muriel here, as far as I can tell. Not that I know about that sort of thing. But she was clever; she was better educated than anyone else here. She’d been to university.’
    ‘Only Reading University,’ offered the stringy young woman from the far end of the table. ‘It wasn’t Oxford. Besides, surely people don’t get murdered for having a degree in Modern Languages.’
    ‘Well, I could have murdered her for carrying on about the English being narrow and insular,’ said Muriel. ‘And name-dropping. Place-name-dropping, that is. Nice, and Grenoble and Madrid, and Zurich.’
    ‘No, you couldn’t, Muriel, don’t be silly,’ said Rita. ‘If you were capable of killing anyone, you would have murdered me. Several times. We do get ratty with each other when we’re tired and hungry,’ she added, turning to Harriet.
    ‘Of course you do,’ said Harriet. ‘But have I got this right: none of you got on easily with Wendy; none of you liked her?’
    ‘Oh, no, wrong,’ said a rather older woman. ‘We’re giving the wrong impression. Wendy was lovely; she was lots of fun. She could be a bit outrageous, but it was only fooling around. She never meant to be unkind. People could take it wrong, that’s all.’
    ‘What about boyfriends? Did you say she flirted?’
    ‘All the time. But that was as far as it went. We’re all sleeping in a hay-loft here, Lady Peter. We would know if anyone wasn’t in their bed.’
    ‘We sleep soundly, though,’ said Rita.
    ‘And of course, wickedness is possible in the forenoon, and the tea-break,’ said Muriel, ‘as well as by night.’
    ‘We work all day except Sundays,’ said the older woman. ‘And I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m too dog-tired for wickedness any time of day from the lunch-break onwards.’
    This remark was greeted with rueful laughter.
    ‘Do you know who was upset? Who had taken her more seriously than she meant? Could you give me names?’ Harriet was met with an embarrassed silence. ‘I know it feels like sneaking to the teacher. But Wendy was killed by someone who could do it with his bare hands, very quickly. He didn’t need a weapon. He could strike again any time. So let’s start with that dance.’
    ‘She didn’t go,’ said Rita at once. ‘She said she had a headache, ho, ho.’
    ‘You didn’t believe her?’
    ‘Well, I thought her headache might have been called Roger.’
    ‘You had better explain that, Rita,’ said Muriel.
    ‘Wendy had gone out a couple of times with one or two local fellows: Archie Lugg, for one, and Jake Datchett. They were offering to fight each other over her, and she thought that was positively hilarious. She called them the bumpkins. She had promised both of them a dance on Saturday. But a month ago she met Roger Birdlap – he’s an RAF officer over at Steen Manor – and she fell head over heels for him.