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

ever got struck by lightning? ...Yes, he’d known Sari from her filming days, only slightly then but he’d got in touch through Etho when she came to London and kept up with her ever since; she was so gorgeous, so sweet, so ap-solutely special... Yes, he supposed you could say he’d known Vi Feather in those days too but not tickly well, not as a person—he’d been working on the costume designs and after all she’d been only a dresser. No, for heaven’s sake, never set eyes on her since, not until—not until today... No, the Halcyon hadn’t been there when he got home last night, he’d already told them that a thousand times; and yes, Sari had arrived back soon after he did. Yes, she told him about the stranger and the fallen tree. And about being followed. He fell suddenly into a terrible weeping. ‘We never believed her when she said all these things about being followed, people wanting to kill her and all that. But see what’s happened now!’ And he looked as though he would be sick, would vomit up into the hand clapped over his mouth; blue eyes blurred and staring. ‘Supposing it had been Sari! All huddled up there, so—disgusting... We were all so wrong, we did nothing to help her.’ Suppose it had been Sari, lovely, beautiful, darling Sari! He got up and blundered away so that the handsome Chief Superintendent shouldn’t see him blowing his nose, so unromantic! ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, returning, the tears drying on his white cheek bones. ‘I took all these pills and on top of alcohol you simply go beresk.’ Rufie’s top favourite word with the Eight Best Friends was beresk; they were terrified of his finding out that he said it wrong and always used his pronunciation themselves, considerably to the astonishment of those outside the secret.
    Two small components, light as air, of Mr Charlesworth’s collage floated across his line of vision and out again. He grabbed at them mentally, but they were gone. Oh, well, he thought, I’ll switch off and they’ll come back to me when I’m not thinking about it. He brought Mr Soames back to cases. ‘If Miss Morne is telling the truth, then this is the stranger’s car?’
    Well of course, said Rufie, staring. One had to believe that now. How else could...? He made a gesture of repugnance. ‘How else could—it—have got there? Poor Sari just drove back not knowing it was there.’
    ‘But how could this woman’s body have got into his car? He was coming back towards Wren’s Hill. The woman was working there in the cinema.’
    ‘I suppose’, said Rufie intelligently, ‘that a cashier doesn’t stay till the end of the evening. After the feature film started, she’d pack up, hand over the takings and go home. And if he—well, met her, or took her, or whatever you like—beyond where the tree fell later, on the London side—’ That, suggested Rufie, could be why he was in such a panic to get on.
    ‘Turning his car over to an unknown woman, complete with dead Miss Feather in the back of it?’
    ‘And then doing a bunk? You may never hear from him again.’
    This possibility had not escaped Mr Charlesworth who had already set on foot suitable arrangements; though in view of Sari’s total lack of any help in identifying the stranger, it had hardly been a promising outlook. Yes, he’d given her a ‘phone number but the paper had got all wet, you couldn’t make it out properly and the wrong people kept answering, so she’d chucked it away—he’d get in touch with her. As for his appearance, he’d been tall but otherwise she’d no idea what he had looked like. They’d both had their hats pulled down over their ears, coat collars turned up, heads bent down to keep the wind from absolutely blowing their eyelashes back into their eyes; it had been pitch dark and teeming with rain and most of the time they’d had a vast great fallen tree between them, branches and the lot. There was nothing in the way of personal property in his car, as there