Read Online Anne Perry's Silent Nights: Two Victorian Christmas Mysteries by Anne Perry - Free Book Online

brought a touch of glamour with her. She could speak of the latest plays and books, music, and that sort of thing. But then I saw it was deeper than that. They understood something that I did not.” A sadness filled her face again, a kind of loneliness that Runcorn found, to his amazement, that he understood. It was a knowledge of exclusion, as if someone had gone and left her alone in the dark.
    “Was she happy?” he asked impulsively.
    She looked at him with surprise. “No.” Then instantly she regretted it. “I mean that she was restless, she was looking for something. I … no, really, please disregard me, I am talking nonsense. I have no idea who could have been so deranged by envy or fear, as to have done such a thing.”
    He had the overpowering feeling that she was lying. She knew something she was not prepared to tell him. “The best thing you can do for her, Mrs.Costain, is to help us find who killed her,” he said urgently.
    She rose to her feet, her face weary, her eyes very direct. “Do you believe that it would be best, Mr. Runcorn? How little you know us, or perhaps anyone. You are a good man, but you do not know the wind or the waves of the heart. Landlocked,” she added, walking to the door. “You are all landlocked.”
    It was too late for Runcorn to see anyone else that night, and his mind was in too much confusion to absorb any more. He thanked Costain, and went out into the darkness to walk back to Mrs. Owen’s lodging house. The rain had stopped and the wind was bitter, but he was thankful to be alive. He liked the clean smell of the sea, wild as it was, and the absence of human sounds. There were no voices, no clip of horses’ hooves, no rattle of wheels, only the hoot of a tawny owl.

I t was difficult to gain an interview with Newbridge and it took Runcorn the best part of the morningbefore he finally stood face-to-face with him in his withdrawing room. The house was old and comfortable. Possibly it had stood in those grounds for two centuries or more, occupied by the one family in times both fat and lean. There were portraits on the walls that bore the same cast of features back to the times of Oliver Cromwell and the Civil War. They were dressed in the ruffles and lace of the Cavaliers. There were no grim-faced, white-collared Puritans.
    Some of the furniture had been magnificent in its time, but it now bore marks of heavy use—legs were uneven, one or two surfaces were stained and needed refinishing. But Runcorn had time to notice no more than that before he was aware of Newbridge’s impatience.
    “What is it you want, Mr. Runcorn?” There was a thickness to his voice and he moved his weight from one foot to the other as though he were anxious to be elsewhere. “I have nothing I can tell you about poor Olivia’s death. If I had, I would have told Faraday, for God’s sake! Is it not bad enough that we have to live with this tragedy without having to drag out all our memories and our grief over and over again forstrangers?” He stood leaning against the mantelshelf, an elegant man, tall and a little lean, with thick wavy hair that grew high from his forehead. His eyes were hazel, deep set, and there was the thin, angry line to his mouth that Runcorn had first noticed in church.
    Runcorn found his tolerance already stretched. Loss had different effects on people, and most of them were not attractive. In men it often turned to anger, a kind of suppressed fury as if they had been dealt a blow.
    Runcorn bit back his own emotions. “In order to have some better idea of who might have killed her, sir, I need to know more about her. Her family are overweighed with grief just now, and of course they see only one side of her. It is very difficult to speak anything but good of loved ones you mourn. And yet they were also human. She was not killed by accident. Someone was consumed by an unholy rage, and stood face-to-face with her, and even at the last moment, she did not run away. That