Read Online Carnage on the Committee by Ruth Dudley Edwards - Free Book Online Page A

drawbridge was up and no one would breach the castle walls.'
    'Oh, Christ.' Amiss jumped up. 'Give me a minute. 1 must talk to Georgie.'
    'Who?'
    'Georgie Prothero, our PR guy.'
    'Oh, him. Yes. Our people have already seen him. Why do you need to ring him?'
    'He'll be in a state.'
    Pooley shook his head and picked up his newspaper. Amiss was back within a couple of minutes. 'Georgie's surprisingly calm. Tells me Jack rang him and instructed him to refer everyone to her, stop worrying and have a stiff brandy.'
    'But I thought you said she wasn't speaking to anyone.'
    'Precisely. But she'll take the blame rather than Georgie. So he's happy and she's acquired a fan.'
    'Good. Now let's choose some food and then you can tell me everything about what I'll be dealing with.'
    Coming up to ten o'clock and having snorted her way through several pages, the baroness shouted 'That's enough bilge' and hurled the book at maximum force against the oak door. Horace, who had been peacefully napping, saved himself from tumbling off her head by digging in his claws.
    Mary Lou watched with interest as the baroness leaped up shouting with pain. 'That's not the way to persuade him to let go, Jack,' she commented mildly. Ignored, she shrugged and returned to her book and did not re-emerge until the parrot had been placated with crooning and stroking and a piece of fig and returned to his cage.
    'I could die of psittacosis,' grumbled the baroness, as she began to pack her pipe with tobacco. 'I wonder if it's painful.'
    'I looked it up after he attacked me, and my incubation period would have passed by now, so I shouldn't worry. Now what was it that caused your outbreak of violence?'
    'The one about the shy, solitary monk who bonds mystically in a Sumatran rain forest with an equally shy, solitary rhinoceros. I've never read such boring drivel in my life.' She flicked a lighter, directed its enormous flame at the pipe bowl and sucked noisily.
    'Robert said your old pal Wysteria Wilcox was very keen on it.'
    The baroness expelled a mouthful of smoke vigorously towards the ceiling. 'Trixie always had a brain even a rhinoceros would despise.'
    'Have you found anything you can bear yet?'
    'How could I?' She leaned over to the pile of books to her left and picked one off the top. 'Have you sampled Flesh-Eating? It's about how timid, deaf Lionel Carter finds a purpose to his life when as a cleaner in the British Museum he first comes across a sarcophagus. It was popular with Hermione, apparently.' It thudded to the floor.
    'But you like sarcophagi. Jack. Didn't you float the idea of being buried in one in the college grounds?'
    'Buried, yes. Fucked, no. And I want Roman, not Egyptian. Figures. Not hieroglyphics.'
    'Did you look at the one Geraint Griffiths liked?'
    'Robert tells me I have to read the whole thing, but the tirade about the limitations of the Koran had me nodding off, so I adjourned to Proust's Madeleine, which appears to be a volume of impenetrable existential musings on the nature of women and small cakes. I can't stand much more.'
    'I thought Robert said there are some you'd like - or at least not hate.'
    'Yes, but I thought I'd save them for later.' She looked at her watch. 'Put on the news.'
    It was another quiet day, so the admission from the police that she appeared to have died in suspicious circumstances gave Hermione top billing.
    'Family and friends can think of no reason why anyone would harm a woman so loved and respected. Asked to comment on speculation that her death might be associated with her chairing of the Knapper-Warburton Prize, the organisers refused to comment.' A photograph of the baroness waggling her finger appeared behind the newsreader. 'Lady Babcock's successor as chairperson, the controversialist, Lady Troutbeck, Mistress of St Martha's in Cambridge, was not available for interview.'
    'What's a controversialist?' asked the baroness.
    'Someone the BBC doesn't agree with, I guess.'
    'The Irish singer and soap-star,