Read Online On the Blue Train by Kristel Thornell - Free Book Online Page B

life different from his present one. Admittedly a kind of halved life to match the half-lie of the hotel furnishings. For though all the leisure time he enjoyed, particularly his compulsivewalking through wholesome surrounds, had made him quite physically tough, he had no illusions as to the fitness of his spirit. It remained convalescent, requiring cosseting.
    He should have dined away from the Hydro that night and avoided the Winter Garden Ballroom. He would not, alas. But he had to be on his guard. At this very moment, she was preparing to lie down under the hands of a trained professional. How on earth was he to wade through the sluggish hours separating him from dinner?
    He subsided into the wingback chair and snatched up the Daily Mail he hadn’t had the patience for that morning. Some pages in he encountered a photograph of a woman. It was not a very sharp image, yet it caused him to pause. The woman resembled—rather a lot—Teresa Neele.
    He inhaled raggedly. Look at the state you’re in, he chided himself. Seeing her everywhere. The likeness, though, was considerable. He scrutinised the photograph until the grainy chiaroscuro visage was unmade into flecks of light and shade that nevertheless remained hauntingly feminine. Then he read the article. Three times.
    He had overheard a little of this story from the conversations of other guests at the Hydro, without paying it much attention. A woman had gone missing from her home in Sunningdale, Berkshire, three days previously, on Friday evening. She happened to be a quite renowned author of mysteries. Her abandoned motor had been found in nearbycountryside at eight o’clock on Saturday morning. It had lodged in some shrubbery at the edge of a chalk pit, possibly after having been purposely allowed to run down from a place called Newlands Corner. The police had spent the weekend scouring the North Downs. They had dredged something called the Silent Pool. No trace of the woman had been uncovered. She seemed simply to have vanished. ‘A beautiful woman,’ was how the newspaper referred to her.
    Somehow, this observation offended him as voyeuristic. They spoke of her with a nasty mix of surgeon’s impassibility and circus-goer’s idle glee.
    Her husband claimed . . .
    Husband .
    Her husband claimed she was undergoing a nervous collapse. He described her, furthermore, as ‘a very nervous person’.
    He would. He had to explain her desertion so that it did not reflect badly on him. Which naturally it did. What a cad, to tell the press such things about his own wife, even if he believed them to be true. The stark fact that she’d run away from him was screaming evidence that he had not been the husband he should have been. These thoughtless comments confirmed it.
    What appeared to be her sadness surely did, too. If indeed she was the person Harry knew as Teresa Neele.
    When he returned to the fuzzy photograph, it seemed to him that the eyes were hers. The very vagueness of theimage was hers. The story began to bring this into focus, explaining her evasiveness and her unusual conversation—so careful, slow, and then queerly impromptu. Had he danced the charleston with a notorious woman? He’d suspected South Africa to be a lie. He hadn’t suspected his dance partner had removed a wedding ring.
    He had always thought Agatha, as the missing woman was called, such a lady’s name. Just slightly wild, with grey trappings, something of moths’ wings or mole fur. Or a prettyish fuzz of mould that would make your blood run a little cold.
    Agatha’s husband was a colonel. Oh yes. A small likeness of the man indicated an appearance that some would have considered handsome. In it, he clearly felt dashing and satisfied with himself. Harry thought him uninspiring and rather insubstantial in his military uniform, with his studiedly distant, thin gaze. (Harry was sometimes sensitive about not having served in the war on account of the examining officer, when he’d gone to