21 Codicil

Miss Crane’s fate has taken pride of place in the newspapers, putting our little town on the map. 

A murder is a fascinating event if you are not the victim, and crowds of people flock to the scene of the crime, some with binoculars, since the nearest you can get is now across the road, since there is red and white sticky tape across Miss Crane’s front door and wooden railing all round it. Apparently, one or two enterprising neighbours have been earning a tidy bit on the side by letting people observe the goings-on from upstairs windows. It’s not every day that you get corpses with scissors in their backs, so journalists are also making hay while the sun shines.

I have strict instructions not to talk to anyone, but Miss Crane’s neighbours make the best of the situation, pointing out her abject poverty and strange ways, and giving journalists proxy tours of their own little cottages in the terrace, since Miss Crane’s is unavailable.

A distant relative is found who is prepared to give her a dignified burial, complete with wreathes, which includes ones from the town clerk and Mama, the former for putting our little town on the map and bringing visitors and their trade – if only temporarily - and the latter for sentimental reasons and sincere regret that there would be no more made-to-measure fashion from that source. I think Mama really liked Miss Crane. She was one of those people of whom one says “there but for the grace of God go I”.

Mama has a weakness for the weak.

It isn’t long before grass literally grows over the tragedy. To all intents and purposes,  the perpetrator of the crime has disappeared without trace, leaving yet another unsolved murder for the constabulary to chew over.

But the story doesn’t quite end there, for when the contents of her will are published, Everyone realizes that she has been pulling the wool over their eyes. She really is the miser Mama suspected her to be. She has fooled everyone. Her fortune runs into thousands and thousands, all stored in coins in some of those baggy stockings of hers, tied with strips of cloth left over from cutting out garments, and crammed into a hole under the floorboards under her sewing table.

So near and yet so far.

Of course, the money for the blue dress wasn’t in a baggy stocking. Mama gave me some of it for having had the presence of mind not to leave it there.