Read Online Ellis Peters - George Felse 02 - Death and the Joyful Woman by Ellis Peters - Free Book Online Page A

loneliness and withdrawal.
    She moved, he thought, as though her course was set, and her own volition had nothing to do with it, having aligned itself long ago with some other influence which was disposing of her. Not Armiger’s influence, or she could not have talked of him like that. Perhaps not any man’s, only a tide of events in which she felt herself to be caught, and which she had to trust because she had no alternative.
    “We’re all imperfect,” said George, trying to speak as simply as she had done, and hoping he didn’t sound as sententious to her as he did to himself. “I think he’d like what you’ve just said of him.”
    “There was a great deal that I had against him,” she said, choosing her words with scrupulous care. “That’s why I want to be fair to him. If there’s anything I can tell you, of course I will.”
    “You were with him last night, at least for part of the evening. Towards ten o’clock, so I understand from one of the waiters, someone asked Mr. Armiger to spare him a few minutes, and Mr. Armiger went out to speak to him. He then came back and spoke to you and the other people at his table, before leaving again. Is that right?”
    “I didn’t look at the time,” she said, “but I expect that’s accurate enough. Yes, he came back to us and said would we excuse him for a quarter of an hour or so, he had to see someone, but he’d be right back, and he hoped we’d wait for him.”
    “That’s all he said? He didn’t mention a name, or anything like that?”
    “No, that’s all he said. And he went, and then Ruth said she had to get back, because she was expecting a call from her sister in London about a quarter to eleven, she’d promised she’d be in at that time. That’s Miss Hamilton, you know, Mr. Armiger’s secretary. And as Mr. Shelley had brought her he had to leave, too, so I was on my own. I thought at first I would wait, and then I didn’t, after all. I was tired, I thought I’d have an early night. I think it must have been just after a quarter past ten when I left, but maybe someone else might know. The car gets quite a lot of attention,” said Kitty without a trace of irony in her voice or her face, “someone may have seen me drive off.”
    Someone had; Clayton had, as he chafed and cursed in his boss’s Bentley in front of The Jolly Barmaid, five minutes or so before he resigned himself to a long wait and moved the car into the courtyard. He had watched her drive out from the car-park and pull out to the right on her way to Comerbourne; and devoted car-enthusiast though he was, it was doubtful if he had been looking at the Karmann-Ghia, “I see,” said George. “So you’d be home by soon after half past ten, I suppose.”
    “Oh, before, I expect. It only takes me ten minutes, even counting putting the car away. Oh, God!” said Kitty, recollecting herself too late, as usual. “I shouldn’t be telling you that, should I?”
    “I’m incapable of working it out without a pencil and paper,” George reassured her, smiling. But even when she made you laugh there was something about this girl that had you damn’ near crying, and for no good reason. She wasn’t heartbroken about Armiger, she’d stated her position with reference to him punctiliously; shocked she might well be, but that wasn’t what had got into even her smile, even the sweet, rueful clowning that came naturally to her.
    “May I ask you some personal questions about your affairs, Miss Norris? They’ll seem to you quite irrelevant, but I think if you care to answer them you may be helping me.”
    “Go ahead,” said Kitty. “But if it’s business it’s odds on I won’t even know the answers.”
    “I understand that your father left his estate in trust for you, dying as he did when you were quite a child. Can you tell me if that trust terminated when you came of age?”
    “I know the answer to that one,” she said, mildly astonished, “and it did. I can do whatever