Английский для смелых. Истории о духах и привидениях / Great Ghost Stories

 The murder had been a deed of peculiar horror, and there was nothing of sympathy in the mind of the public towards the perpetrator. Charles Linkworth, who now lay under capital sentence, was the keeper of a small stationery store in Sheffield, and there lived with him his wife and mother. The latter was the victim of his atrocious crime; the motive of it being to get possession of the sum of five hundred pounds, which was this woman’s property. Linkworth, as came out at the trial, was in debt to the extent of a hundred pounds at the time, and during his wife’s absence from home on a visit to relations, he strangled his mother, and during the night buried the body in the small back-garden of his house. On his wife’s return, he had a sufficiently plausible tale to account for the elder Mrs Linkworth’s disappearance, for there had been constant jarrings and bickerings between him and his mother for the last year or two, and she had more than once threatened to withdraw herself and the eight shillings a week which she contributed to household expenses, and purchase an annuity with her money. It was true, also, that during the younger Mrs Linkworth’s absence from home, mother and son had had a violent quarrel arising originally from some trivial point in household management, and that in consequence of this, she had actually drawn her money out of the bank, intending to leave Sheffield next day and settle in London, where she had friends. That evening she told him this, and during the night he killed her.