Not a Very Nice Woman

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‘A woman dead, you say?’ asked Inspector Graham Rase of his Sergeant, Cornelia Smith as she drove them through the midmorning traffic, back from their earlier appointment out of town.

‘Yes, a resident of the Cedars.’

‘Tell me again why we’re going there?’

‘This is the second death at the Cedars in a month, and so it flagged up.’

‘But it’s an old people’s home.’ He didn’t mean to be insensitive, but… ‘Have we any reason to think there’s foul play?’

Yet he knew the drill as well as she, and so prepared himself for the minor tragedy awaiting: the relatives, the friends, the carers accepting the inevitable.

‘Anyway,’ she added as they nearer the building, ‘the Cedars isn’t an old people’s home, it’s a trust run privately on behalf of the residents.’

Who all happen to be elderly, thought the Inspector, who knew the place and passed it often without ever being inside. Indeed so close was the building to the police station that as they approached he wondered whether he might have better advised his Sergeant to park back at base and accompany him there on foot. But his thoughts were interrupted as they joined the Crescent that shared the building’s name.

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