“You may wish to know what she wrote to him about.” He reached for the sheet of paper. “Helen Farrar spoke to me on the day I was going to Morley to be with my father. She was distressed about some matters being discussed by the trustees of the orphanage, the Bluebell Home. I’m sorry to say that though Mr. Aspinall was a trustee, and he gave Mrs. Farrar his proxy vote, he had long since given up responsibility or interest in what went on here.”

“I see.”

“There can surely be no connection?”

Sykes fell back on one of his usual lines. “I have no reason to suppose any such connection.”

The vicar walked him to the door. Sykes somehow missed asking him the time of tomorrow’s funeral, and so he asked the gardener instead.

He wished he had a way of contacting Mrs. Shackleton directly. But if he failed to reach her today, through her father, he felt sure that she would be at the funeral tomorrow.

Chapter 36

Chapter Thirty-Six

Mrs. Sugden took the telephone call from the estate agent. She could view the Corner Shop in Thorpefield today. Every instinct told her that it was too soon to be poking about that poor woman’s premises. He was cagey when she asked him whether Mrs. Farrar was decently buried, but gave the impression that she was. The fellow must be anxious to have the Corner Shop off his hands quickly because he offered to be at the station and give her a lift.

Mrs. Shackleton said it was important. And Jim Sykes had called round, telling her they now knew who the man was, and things were moving. “Stand by the telephone,” he had said.

She could hardly stand by the telephone while haring off to Wakefield to meet an estate agent. She didn’t like this whole business. It was too spread out and too far from home. You didn’t know what people would be like when all their born days they’d lived nowhere but the back of beyond, and that back of beyond was the place where a poor woman was done in. A back of beyond where helpless bairns were packed off to the workhouse.

At school she learned a poem, The Charge of the Light Brigade. One line came back to her: “Someone had blundered”. There was a never a time when someone high up didn’t blunder. It was always them at the top of the heap who blundered and them near the bottom of the heap who paid the price.

Not that Mrs. Sugden thought of herself as at the bottom of the heap, nor Mrs. Farrar neither. From what she gleaned of Mrs. Farrar, Mrs. Sugden regarded her as a sensible woman and a hard worker.