Death and the Princess by Robert Barnard Page A

pleasantly without pretensions: she probably made a good steak and kidney pie, and he could fix up a shelf or mend a fuse without making a fuss about it. Small business people, perhaps, or local government office workers. The room was dotted with framed snapshots of children and grandchildren: Bill Tredgold had not been an only child.
    ‘So you’re not satisfied either,’ said Mrs Tredgold — the motherliness coming warmly through the nasal Midlands accent. ‘And I must say I’m glad to hear it, because I certainly am not.’
    ‘Now, Mother,’ said her husband, for all the world as if he were in a J.B. Priestley play.
    ‘Well, I’m not, and that’s flat. And it’s no good saying raking the thing up won’t bring him back, because I’m not daft and I know that. That doesn’t stop me wanting to get to the bottom of it all.’
    ‘I’m interested to hear why you’re not satisfied,’ I said. ‘Because you’re quite right that I’m not.’
    ‘Well, there was the window, for a start. The other policeman who called, he said it was tight shut. Well, a mother knows these things, and our Bill would never sleep with the windows closed: he’d had asthma as a child, and he always wanted them open, to get the fresh air. And don’t say he might have changed, because he slept hereoften, when he’d been round for a meal, and it was always the same — the windows were open, winter or summer.’
    ‘I see. Yes, that is the sort of thing people don’t change their minds about. Of course, the girl could have insisted.’
    ‘Our Bill wasn’t one to take any insistence from a girl.’
    ‘Did you know the girl?’
    ‘Never even heard him mention the name. It’s terrible, isn’t it, but that’s how it is these days, our Bill as well as the rest.’
    ‘Did he tell you he was going to Knightley?’
    ‘Not to say tell. Our Bill went all over: he was a real reporter, and we’ve always been that proud when we saw his name in the Standard, but we never knew quite where he’d be. He kept in touch, though, and by chance he did ring up the day before he died, and he mentioned then he’d be going into Shropshire.’
    ‘But he didn’t say anything more than that?’
    ‘Not really. I just said, “Oh, on to a story, are you?” and he said, “Have you ever known me not?” ’
    ‘That’s interesting. So it wasn’t — well, just a night away with a girl?’
    ‘Oh, I could tell he was on to something — he was never off duty, our Bill. If he took a holiday in Benidorm, he’d still manage to come back with something for the paper.’
    ‘You say you hadn’t heard the girl’s name. Did you hear about most of his girl-friends?’
    ‘Well, no. On the whole he kept that part of his life private.’
    ‘We’re chapel, you see,’ put in Dad.
    ‘And he was brought up in it, but somehow it just didn’t stick.’
    ‘So he didn’t normally mention his girl-friends?’
    ‘Hardly ever. Only generally, you know, because he knew we wouldn’t approve. Now they say he’d been seeing a lot of this Princess Helena, at one time. You’d havethought he might have mentioned that, knowing we’d be interested, but he never did. I suppose you could say he was just that bit cagey-like. I suppose it came of being a reporter.’
    ‘Perhaps — they’re not the most open people. Can’t afford to be. Tell me, I suppose they’ve sent back the things he had with him at Knightley?’
    ‘Oh yes, after the Inquest.’ She dabbed at her eyes with a little scrap of flowered handkerchief.
    ‘Did he have the tools of his trade, so to speak, with him? Was there any sort of notebook, for example?’
    She cast me a quick, intelligent look. ‘No, there wasn’t. I noticed at the time. It was so odd. There was hardly anything in his briefcase at all, and he never went anywhere without his notebook, because he always had two or three stories on the boil as it were. It was a sort of family joke, wasn’t it, Ern, that he always had them in