The Murder of My Aunt

by Richard Hull

  Then I went back to the kitchen and waited. My first care was to see that Edward had not already mingled with the horse-radish roots the things he had just carefully been digging up. I should not have been surprised if he had, because, though I had been rapid, it really oughtn’t to have taken him so long. It was some time before I knew what the delay was, but afterwards I discovered that the silly boy, in his uncertainty of which plant really was an aconite, had been wandering round the garden selecting bits here and there of all sorts of things. Hence it was that I reached the kitchen first. But I had barely done so when I heard footsteps coming softly through the hall and Edward, with his shoes in one hand and a bunch of goodness knows what roots in the other, appeared.

  On the whole I had decided to catch him absolutely red-handed and frighten him thoroughly; and so I waited until he was just about to mix the two bunches before I stepped out from behind the scullery door.

  He was quite frightened enough. He jumped into the air and gave a sort of strangled scream – fortunately it did not wake any of the household – and bolted. In a very few seconds he was down the stairs again, so quickly that I was glad I had decided to make my arrangements before frightening him instead of after. Carefully I removed his roots and put them in the incinerator. Soon afterwards I heard the door of his car being shut and the noise of it moving cautiously off down the drive. Very quickly, and rather sadly, I went up to the window that overlooked the road in front of the house, and the point where I had crashed into the dingle.

  As Edward reached there, I could see his hand go down to the brake-lever or the gears, and next second something happened. Down, down the steep slope into the bottom of the dingle crashed Edward and his car, turning over and over as it went, and bursting into flames. One suit-case was thrown clear, but practically nothing else was left of Edward or his car.

  I have now only to add a title to these notes, and the one I have chosen perhaps needs a word of explanation. Well, ‘of’ can be possessive, can’t it? Can mean ‘of or belonging to’?