Just what the devil did the letter mean by ‘do the right thing’? What was the right thing? And what would happen if he, Sir Marcus, didn’t do the right thing?
‘That you, love?’ Barbara Loveday called out as she heard the front door open and shut. ‘I’m in the kitchen!’
And Trudy, who was wearily hanging up her things in the tiny hallway, couldn’t help but smile. Of course her mother was in the kitchen – Barbara Loveday was rarely anywhere else. Throughout their childhood, she and her older brother, Martin, had spent more time in that tiny, comforting space than anywhere else in the small terraced house in the rather rundown area of Botley they called home.
As a suburb of the city, Botley might lack Headington’s lofty hills and smart new housing, or Osney Mead’s more bohemian and colourful canal-side charm, but Trudy couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. And on a cold, disappointing day, with her bones aching and her eye blackening nicely, she was more than happy to traipse through to the kitchen, where she knew the appetising smell of something tasty cooking, and a warm, loving welcome from her mother could be guaranteed to greet her.
‘You’re home earl—oh, Trudy, love!’ Barbara said helplessly, her face creasing in concern as she saw her daughter’s face. ‘What happened? Come here.’
For a moment, as her mother’s ample form enfolded her and pansy-brown eyes – the mirror image of her own – inspected her face carefully, she didn’t mind feeling as if she was about six years old again. It was, after all, very nice to know that someone loved and cared for you, and here, in this little kitchen, with its cracked linoleum floor and cheerful yellow curtains, she felt safe and appreciated once more.
Which was more than could be said of how she’d felt back at the station.
‘Here, love, sit down. Let me make you a nice cuppa. I’ll put something on that eye. I’ve got some cream that’ll do the trick. I only wish we had a nice bit of beefsteak to put on it.’
Trudy couldn’t help but grin – even though it made her face hurt. Because if the Loveday family had been able to afford a nice bit of beefsteak, she knew full well they’d never be foolish enough to waste it on her face. It would be cooked and scoffed in no time at all.
‘Mum, it’s nothing,’ she insisted, sitting down at the tiny kitchen table, shoved up against one wall to preserve space, and then looking down as Maggie the cat rubbed against her ankles. She reached down absently to stroke her black-and-white fur. But the loud purring that resulted, Trudy suspected cynically, was more likely intended as a spur for someone to feed her than as an offer of support or sympathy for her human companion.
Trudy was wise to the ways of feline cunning.
‘So, what happened this time then?’ Barbara demanded, standing by the sink as she watched the kettle start to boil, hands planted firmly on her ample hips.
Trudy sighed. She really didn’t want to get into this fight again. The same old argument about whether or not women belonged in the police force had been running in the family home ever since she’d told her parents what she wanted to do for a living.
‘Like I said, Mum, it’s nothing. I just slipped and fell on the icy pavement, that’s all.’
Well, that wasn’t totally a lie, Trudy mused. The pavement had been icy. And if she hadn’t so much slipped as launched herself into orbit in order to bring down a bag-snatcher…well, her mother certainly didn’t need to know that.
‘Don’t give me that, Gertrude Mary Loveday,’ her mother warned, making Trudy wince. Only her mother ever called her by her detested full first name – and then only when she was in trouble.
Named after one of her dad’s sisters, who had died young in the war, Trudy had always insisted on the diminutive, practically from the time she had first learned to talk. And teasing from her schoolmates when they’d discovered her proper Christian name had only reinforced her determination to remain strictly – and only – Trudy.
Now she shot her mum a sharp glance.
‘And don’t give me that look, neither,’ Barbara Loveday shot back crisply. ‘You were out chasing villains, weren’t you? That’s how you got that shiner, my girl. Do you think I’m stupid?’
Trudy resisted the urge to slump over the table and hold her head in her hands. ‘Mum, that’s my job,’ she wailed helplessly. ‘That’s what the police do.’
Barbara sniffed. ‘I daresay it is,’ she agreed stiffly. ‘But why are you one of the ones that’s doing it, that’s what I can’t understand. Silly, I call it. I thought when you went to college to learn to do typewriting and shorthand, you’d become a secretary.’ Her mother ploughed on, with the now all-too-familiar lament. ‘You’d have been the first in either my family or your dad’s to do that! Us Butlers and Lovedays have always worked in shops or factories, or on the buses, like your dad. You’d have been the first one to work in a nice office. Even our Martin works with his hands.’
‘He’s a carpenter, Mum,’ Trudy said wryly. ‘He’s earning good money and always will. He’s got a trade.’
‘Yes, that’s true enough,’ Barbara said, taking time off from berating her daughter to beam with pride at the contemplation of her firstborn. ‘I wish he was still living at home, though.’
Trudy smiled. Martin had moved out of the family home over a year ago, to lodge with a friend of the family nearer his work up in Cowley. And, like any other young, fit and good-looking man, very glad he’d been to get out from under his parents’ watchful eyes too. Not that Trudy would ever tell them so! While she had a good idea what the rascal got up to of a Saturday night, she rather thought her mum and dad were still in blissful ignorance.
‘And you could have been a secretary.’ Predictably her mum went straight back on the attack as she heaped three spoonfuls of tea leaves into the teapot and poured boiling water over them. ‘Instead of sitting there now, looking like someone who’s been dragged through a hedge backwards.’
Trudy bit back a groan. No matter how many times she’d tried to explain to her mother that working in a boring office, doing boring, meaningless clerical work, wasn’t for her, Barbara Loveday had never accepted it.
Which was rather ironic really, Trudy thought, fighting back the urge to laugh. For once she’d finished her police training at Eynsham Hall, and been stationed at St Aldates, she’d spent more time typing up reports, filing and making cups of tea for her superiors than any secretary.
It had all been so far removed from what she had thought of as proper police work that she’d despaired of ever being given more responsibility.
So now, just when she’d finally made it onto the beat, and had even managed to get one or two nice little arrests to her name (two shoplifters and a case of minor arson), this disaster with the bag-snatcher had to go and happen! It just wasn’t fair!
She could still see the rather guilty look on Sergeant O’Grady’s face when he’d seen her black eye, and the uncomfortable look on DI Jennings’s face when he’d read her report.
As
