Read Online Farthing by Jo Walton - Free Book Online Page B

that Angela Thirkie was crying. How could his first glance have failed to notice the tears leaking out of her eyes and streaming down her cheeks? Or had she just begun to cry?
    “Have you come to take me to my husband?” the weeping woman asked. “I haven’t seen him yet, you know.”
    Carmichael swallowed hard. The corpse had never been a pretty sight, and it would be worse now that
    Green would have been poking about at it. Besides, it would be in Winchester by now. “I don’t think—”
    he began.
    Mrs. Kahn deftly intercepted the conversational ball. “Are you sure it would be a good idea in your condition, Angela?” she asked. “I have heard of children being marked when their mothers saw horrors when they were in the womb. You wouldn’t want that to happen.”
    “No.” Lady Thirkie seemed struck by this. “No, you’re right. But how will you identify him if I don’t see him?”
    “There’s no question of the identity of the dead man,” Carmichael said, quietly filing the information that
    Lady Thirkie was expecting. “His face has been known to the nation ever since 1941.”
    “Of course,” Lady Thirkie said. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

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    “There’s only a question of identifying a body if it turns up somewhere unusual surely,” Mrs.
    Kahn said, unexpectedly, with a little laugh. “I mean Sir James was in his own bed, there isn’t any question…” She trailed off, her hand over her mouth.
    The woman by the window, the sister-in-law, turned to them for the first time. She was wearing some kind of red shirt with a flounce down the front. “I shouldn’t think there could be any doubt that it was
    James,” she said in a doleful tone.
    “No, no doubt at all,” Carmichael said. “In any case, formal identification has been done by Mr.
    Normanby, so there’s no need to cause any of you ladies any anguish.”
    “By Mark?” Mrs. Normanby snorted and turned again to the window.
    “I believe Mr. Normanby found the body,” Carmichael said, feeling he was missing something in the crosscurrents of the room.
    “But—” Mrs. Kahn began, and put her hand to her mouth again.
    Carmichael waited patiently. “I didn’t know he’d found him,” she said, rather feebly, after a moment. “He told us that Sir James was dead. I didn’t realize he’d actually seen the body.”
    “Seen and identified,” Mrs. Normanby said, grimly. “Good for Mark; how kind of him to spare the weaker sex this burden.”
    “Oh do be quiet, Daphne,” Mrs. Kahn said, with real irritation in her voice.
    “Who killed him?” Lady Thirkie asked. She was still crying, Carmichael noticed.
    “We don’t know yet, but we intend to do our best to find out,” Carmichael said, as he had said many times before in similar circumstances.
    “And then they’ll hang, won’t they, whoever they are?” she said, with a strange kind of relish.
    Carmichael wondered if she was mad, not the kind of deranged people sometimes temporarily became through grief, but genuinely and long-term cuckoo. Possibly she and her sister were both mad, hereditary madness—though why would two rising politicians have married them if that were the case? They’d been heiresses, but a man wouldn’t want to taint his children. Could she have killed him, if she were mad? He looked at her hands, which were big and broad. If she had ever been wearing any lipstick it had worn off.
    “Do calm down, Angela,” Mrs. Kahn said.
    “Where were you at the time of the murder?” Carmichael asked.
    Lady Thirkie gave a little squeak. “Me? But what was the time of the murder?”
    “Sometime between one a.m. last night and nine this morning,” Carmichael said.
    “Well, I was asleep… and then I got up and went to church, to Early Communion.”
    “What time is Early Communion?” he asked.
    “Eight-thirty,” Mrs. Kahn put in, seeing Lady Thirkie floundering.
    “My maid woke me,” Lady Thirkie said. “She woke me and told me it was time, so