Grave Matters by Margaret Yorke

rather a pleasant small restaurant not far from Covent Garden; the atmosphere was tranquil and the tables were far enough apart to allow some degree of insulation from the conversation of others.
    ‘Poor Milly. Of course it was a heart attack,’ said Ellen, toying with her smoked trout. ‘She was flaked out after sorting all those books. I was afraid it might be too much for her. Some of them were pretty heavy tomes, and she dusted them all while she listed them. She should have spent longer doing it.’
    Patrick had already discovered through his friend Detective-Inspector Colin Smithers that there would be no inquest on Miss Forrest. The autopsy had shown heart failure and multiple fractures. Her little bones must have been as frail as those of a sparrow.
    ‘The awful thing was,’ Ellen went on, ‘that I was there.’
    ‘What do you mean? In the British Museum with her?’
    ‘In it, but not with her. I was late, and she was dead when I got there. They were carting her out to the ambulance. I didn’t realise who it was at first.’
    ‘Do you mean you were meeting her?’
    ‘Yes. She’d asked me to. We were going to have lunch together, just a snack, you know, in that subterranean place. I was to meet her in the hall at the foot of those stairs she fell down. I suppose she’d spent the morning upstairs somewhere among the drawings or something.’
    ‘Did you often meet her there?’
    ‘No. We’d never done it before. I knew she spent hours in museums and galleries and things because Amelia used to meet her in them. That’s how I knew about her being hard up and all that. Amelia used to stay in a private hotel in the Cromwell Road, when she came up to London – Milly hadn’t got room for her, but it was always called “staying with Mildred.” I didn’t know her all that well; we’d met a few times of course. She missed Amelia dreadfully. I think she felt her last link with her own generation had gone. I suppose she was still suffering from the shock of it.’
    ‘I expect she was.’ Patrick looked across the table at Ellen. She was looking very pale tonight and there were shadows under her eyes. ‘Did she have any particular reason for wanting to meet you?’
    ‘She had something to tell me. She said I was right about Abbot’s Lodge. That’s all she’d say on the phone.’
    ‘What could she have meant? Do you think it was about its reputation, or what you said about feeling the atmosphere there to be hostile? You told me that when we were alone in the garden but I suppose you’d mentioned it to her too?’
    ‘Yes, I had. I – the firm, that is – had been trying to find a house for the Bruces for ages, and I was very keen to get something that would be just right for them. I told Valerie and Mildred I wasn’t altogether happy about Abbot’s Lodge.’
    ‘What do the Bruces think about the house’s reputation?’ Patrick asked.
    ‘They just laughed about it,’ Ellen said.
    ‘You told them?’
    ‘I had to. I couldn’t let them buy it without knowing about it. I’d got to know them quite well during their search. My boss would probably slay me if he knew I’d tried to put them off it. It’s not the way to sell houses.’
    ‘Well, the Bruces have been all right so far, haven’t they?’ Patrick asked.
    ‘I suppose so.’ Ellen sounded doubtful. ‘Carol twisted her ankle that afternoon we were there, do you remember? And she’d put her foot through the floorboard earlier. And David said she’d scratched her arm on a rusty nail in the cellar.’
    David had said so, had he? And when had he told Ellen that?
    ‘Maybe she’s just accident-prone,’ he said lightly. ‘You’ve been down again, have you?’
    ‘Yes. I collected Milly the weekend before last, while Val was away in Denmark on some job. She lets me use her car if she’s out of the country. Then I met her at Heathrow last weekend and we both went down to Meldsmead.’ Ellen took a sip of the excellent claret they were