Read Online Orchestrated Death by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles - Free Book Online Page B

him – looked up at him in fact, for she was about six inches shorter than him, which made Slider,
     who was not a tall man, feel agreeably large and powerful.
    ‘I can’t tell you, but I can take you,’ she said pleasantly. ‘It is a rabbit warren, isn’t it? Did you know it’s even given
     rise to a new verb – to be Barbicanned?’
    ‘I’m not surprised,’ Slider said, falling in beside her as she set off with brisk steps.
    ‘They ought to issue us with balls of thread really. I onlyknow one route, and I stick to it. One diversion, and I’d never be found again.’ She glanced sideways at him. ‘I’m not actually
     a member of the Orchestra, but I’m playing with them today. You’re not a musician, are you.’
    It was plainly a statement, not a question. Slider merely said no, without elaborating, and continued to examine her covertly.
     Though small she had a real figure, proper womanly curves which he knew were not fashionable but which, being married to a
     thin and uncommodious woman, he liked the look of. She was dressed in white trousers, pale blue plimsolls, a blue velvet bomber
     jacket, and a teeshirt horizontally striped in pale – and dark-blue. Her clothes were attractive on her, but seemed somehow
     eccentric, though he couldn’t quite decide why. It made it difficult to deduce anything about her.
    She led him through a steel door in the concrete wall and down a flight of stairs of streaked and dimly lit desolation. On
     the landing she suddenly stopped and looked up at him.
    ‘I say, I’ve just realised – I bet you’re looking for me anyway. Are you Inspector Slider?’
    She regarded him with bright-eyed and unaffected friendliness, something he had rarely come across since becoming a policeman.
     Her face was framed with heavy, rough-cut gold hair which looked as though it might have been trimmed with hedge-cutters,
     and he suddenly realised what it was about her that made her seem eccentric. Her clothes were youthful, her face innocent
     of make-up, her whole appearance casual and easy and confident, and yet she was not young. He had never seen a woman of her
     age less disguised or protected against the critical eyes of the world. And framed by a background of as much squalor as modern
     building techniques could devise, she gazed at him without hostility or even reserve, with the calm candour of a child, as
     if she simply wanted to know what he was like.
    ‘You’re Joanna Marshall,’ he heard himself say.
    ‘Of course,’ she said, as if it were very much of course, and held out her hand with such an air of being ready to give him
     all possible credit that he took it and held it as though this were a social meeting. Warmth came back to him along the line
     of contact, and pleasure; their eyes met with that particularmeeting which is never arrived at by design, and which changes everything that comes afterwards.
    As simple as that? he thought with a distant but profound sense of shock. The moment seemed scaffolded with the awareness
     of possibility – or, well, to be honest, of probability, which was infinitely more disturbing. Like the blind stirring of
     something under the earth at the first approach of the change of season, he felt all sorts of sensations in him turning towards
     her, and he let go of her hand hastily. At once the staircase seemed more dank and dreary than ever.
    She resumed the downward trot and he hurried after her. ‘How did you know who I was?’ he asked.
    ‘Sue Bernstein phoned me. She said you’d probably want to talk to me. I knew you weren’t a musician of course. Come to think
     of it, I suppose you do look like a detective.’
    ‘What does a detective look like?’ he asked, amused.
    She flicked a glance at him over her shoulder, smiling. ‘Oh, I hadn’t any preconceived ideas about it. It’s just that now
     I see you, I know.’
    She shouldered through another pair of steel doors, and then another, and suddenly they were back in