She folded her arms. ‘If you must know, it was all about her last will and testament. In the days before she died, she would pat my hand and tell me how she’d recently changed her will. She certainly had. The day after her death, I opened the will and found she’d left everything to the local cat’s home.’
‘So you wrote a new will?’ whispered Katie, her face awash with amazement.
Mrs Brewer nodded. ‘Aunt Ellie’s habit of scribbling on things gave me plenty of samples of her signature. The original will gave me samples of how the witnesses to it had signed. It was easy to rewrite the thing, leaving everything to her son. Of course, if anything went wrong, any piece of paper with my practice forgeries on it would be incriminating evidence. I had to get the letter back, no matter how slim the chances that anyone would spot the mismatch of dates.’
‘But luckily,’ said Mrs Penzler, glancing in my direction, ‘someone did spot it.’
‘I’ve spent half my life being pleasant to that miserable old bat,’ said Mrs Brewer in a low voice. ‘I showed her nothing but kindness. That will was her idea of a joke. Nasty old crone. I deserve her money.’
‘Well,’ said Mrs Penzler, in the clipped tones she normally reserved for badly-behaved kids, ‘I’m not sure we’d all agree with that. We’ll see what the police have to say.’
I gave Mrs Penzler the permission letter and picked up my school bag. Katie Brewer looked like she’d just been slapped on the face with a wet fish. I mouthed ‘Sorry’ to her. She shrugged and gave me a lop-sided smile as if to say, ‘T’ch, parents, eh?’.
On the way out of school, Muddy caught me up. He’d been fixing one of the computers in the IT suite.
‘That leak in your shed,’ he said. ‘Good news.’
‘Great!’ I said. ‘I could do with some good news.’
‘I’ve had a last minute cancellation,’ said Muddy.
‘Brilliant!’
‘If I move some jobs around, I can treat your leak as a red alert emergency repair situation.’
‘Excellent!’
‘So I can get to it much sooner than I originally thought.’
‘Fantastic! When?’
‘Two weeks next Thursday.’
I grumbled to myself all the way home.
Case closed.
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Five Seconds to Doomsday Page 12
