A Well Kept Secret by A. B. King

say she appears to greatly resent my presence. As Dr Marston’s one-time colleague and personal physician, it occurred to me that you may be aware of a reason for this attitude, and I am hoping that you may also be able to throw some light on the nature of the employment arrangements between the two of them. I am also hoping that you may be able to tell me if it is possible she had been led to expect something under the terms of his will besides security of tenure of the flat?”

    The doctor leaned back even farther in his chair, folding his arms defensively across his chest. His expression openly betrayed the fact that he suspected Martin of hinting at something irregular in the relationship between the deceased man and his housekeeper, and strongly resented the inference.

    “Dr Marston died exactly as I have told you,” he said, and Martin could detect the beginnings of hostility in his voice. “Mrs Brent was employed as his housekeeper, and what she may or may not have been expecting in his will I could not possibly say; certainly he never once discussed such matters with me. Now, if you are implying anything beyond these facts-.”

    “Please, Dr Rawlinson,” Martin interrupted, holding up a hand in a placatory gesture. “I most certainly did not wish you to infer that my enquiries are suggesting anything improper in their relationship, nor am I questioning your professional judgement; I’m sure that his death was exactly as you have said. I only ask because I assumed that you would have been closer to him than anybody else that I have met so far.”

    “I am relieved to hear it.” he said, although he still sounded suspicious of Martin’s motive in asking so many questions. “To answer your question concerning Dr Marston and his domestic arrangements to the best of my understanding; I consider it most unlikely that his housekeeper had designs on anything that was his, nor entertained any expectations under the terms of his will. The ‘relationship’ as you put it was exactly what it is supposed to be; employer and employee. As you may have already discovered for yourself, she simply isn’t the sort of person who would tolerate anything beyond that.”

    “I’m more than happy to accept your word on all of that. May I ask if you happen to know how he came to employ her?”

    “There’s no great mystery about that,” the doctor answered immediately. “He saved her life after she was knocked down by a car right outside this very surgery. She was at that time, I believe, a penniless, homeless, half-starved vagrant. Being the sort of man he was, he took her home as soon as she was recovered enough to leave hospital, and together with his wife they nursed her back to full health. She was by all accounts desperate to repay him, and naturally he wouldn’t hear of it. He eventually offered her the position of housekeeper, the situation becoming vacant due to the imminent retirement of his existing one, Mrs Jefferson. She accepted, and as I subsequently learned from Dr Marston, it had proved to be a sound choice, for she was everything he would ever want in a domestic employee. Efficient, hard-working, caring, discrete, undemanding and thoroughly reliable; he claimed that he had never once regretted taking her on. I can also tell you for a fact that when his wife died, it was only by her efforts that he ever survived at all. The simple truth is that Mrs Brent was so grateful to him that she would have done anything for Dr Marston, and she was genuinely devastated when he died.”

    “And yet he only left her the tenure of the flat,” Martin mused half to himself. “If she was so devoted to him, and with him becoming dependent upon her following the death of his wife, why did he not leave her everything, or at least a decent legacy, instead of to me, a nephew he has scarcely ever seen?”

    “Assuming that your question is purely rhetorical, I can only tell you that Dr Marston was a man of impeccable