Read Online Rose in Darkness by Christianna Brand - Free Book Online

cinema last night had dodged out of sight. As she was buying her ticket, seen vaguely out of the corner of her eye. But that hadn’t been some impersonal hired assassin, there had been something vaguely familiar, a flash of colour, had it been?—something vaguely close to home...)
    ‘And over the four years since then, people have been—following you?’
    ‘Only on and off,’ said Sari. (The same sort of strange men hanging about the convent when she’d been having... The nuns had been angels of goodness, keeping her safe and close, keeping her secrets: her secrets and Aldo’s.)
    Charlesworth sat in the big armchair, staring back at her. He said at last: ‘But these people—your husband’s people—?’
    ‘The marriage was not precisely the event of the year for them, was it? Their princeling and heir with a tuppenny little film starlet. They’re fabulously rich, unimaginably rich and, pirate ancestor or not, nowadays terribly grand.’
    ‘Yes, but—’ He said again, helplessly. ‘People in that sort of position—you were divorced from their son, you were over and finished with: what harm could they wish you?’
    ‘They could wish me dead,’ said Sari.
    But it was Vi Feather who was dead.
    Vi Feather. Dead, murdered, lying scrunched up and horrible in that narrow space at the back of the car. Sari lifted her head. She said: ‘So you see it was all true, wasn’t it? They did want to kill me, didn’t they? Only they got poor Vi Feather by mistake.’
    The long afternoon waned away and with it something of that almost chilling frivolity and insouciance. He took her through the adventure of the tree, her return home, and she answered quietly and rationally. No stranger turned up, meanwhile, to collect the Halcyon; she seemed to have the wrong telephone number, she had thrown the piece of paper away. She refused absolutely to remember her own registration number, couldn’t find the log book, had never had any log book, was ap-solutely certain... The Halcyon was a brand new model, just out, and specifications of owners had not yet found their way into the police machine. He’d check it in the end, of course, but meanwhile—what a nuisance women were! He sent her back for a further search of the big, scattered, untidy apartment and talked in turn briefly to the widow, to the fat girl, to the Italian. The Italian came from the south, had met them only recently—through Mr Rufie Soames who had spoken to him at a—well, at a club. Mr Ethelbert Wendover, however, had known her from her filming days, conceded cagily that she had been a bit difficult—she was a nervy, temperamental creature and had made like a film star and, so early in her career, didn’t get away with it. Yes, it was true about the young prince—a very young prince indeed; she had met him at the studio, through a friend, and really he had been at the root of the trouble, always tempting her to play hookey. Yes, one understood that she had actually married him. Divorced? Well, annulled: there was no divorce in San Juan which was a Catholic country. Mr Charlesworth opined airily that anyway, with these papists, it was just a matter of handing over a bundle of used notes, wasn’t it?—and the Pope fixed all the rest. Mr Ethelbert Wendover smiled upon him with a kindly pity.
    The Chief Superintendent put them all on ice and sent for Rufie.
    Rufie had swallowed down about a million tranquillisers but they hadn’t mixed too well with the first frantic swiggings of brandy and he simply couldn’t get back into self-control. Beneath the pale flare of Shelley-like locks, his face was ashen, white hands clenched so tightly that the rings bit sharply into his shaking fingers. Yes, he’d gone round to Etho’s last night, just to—well, just to talk and play records. Yes, despite the weather; he didn’t mind storms—some people were terrified of storms but he thought they were rather fun, and after all, how many of all the millions of people