Miss Pinkney’s Lodger

LIKE a fledgling bird, Miss Pinkney was all a-flutter. Her heart was fluttering with excitement, her feet fluttered in and out of the rooms of her cottage. Once she went to the front veranda to gaze with critical eyes at the crazy pavement extending to the front gate. Once she went to the back of the cottage and gazed over the well-tended vegetable garden to the line of lilac-trees masking the rear fence and partially obscuring the cream-painted building beyond, the building in which Mervyn Blake, the great Australian author and critic, had died from apparently natural causes.

Miss Pinkney was finding life most interesting. Indeed, she had found it so the moment she learnt that Mr Mervyn Blake had rented the property beyond her own. Thereafter her sedate and somewhat bucolic life was enlivened by interest piled upon interest in the visits to theBlakes of famous authors, artists, and radio personalities.

Thencame the discovery of Mervyn Blake dead in his writing-room at the bottom of his garden, the building just beyond Miss Pinkney’s back fence. For days the police were all over the place. They even raised their heads above the division fence and stared at Miss Pinkney when the hem of her skirt was pinned to her waist and she was wearing old shoes andgardening gloves, being then engaged with her vegetables.