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

had been nothing in her own; neither car could have been on the roads for more than a week or two at most. So all that was a great help! Charlesworth’s men would be coping with fingerprints and all the rest of it, and of course they would soon check on the owner of the car. But by that time, as Rufie had said, the stranger, if he existed, might be anywhere.
    If he had existed. Mr Charlesworth, with regrettable reluctance, gave himself over to consideration of the possibility that he never had existed—that this was Sari Morne’s own car.
    Vi Feather had come up out of the past—the somewhat mysterious past with its marriage into an unwelcoming nobility, its history of nameless threats and followings. She had asked for money. Blackmail? But then would Sari have mentioned it?—there had been no need. Unless of course she had known, though she now denied it, that someone had been listening who might later inform on her. ‘Contents of handbag?’ he said, slightly challengingly to Sergeant Ellis.
    But Ginger by name, ginger by nature; the sergeant was by no means always playing games. He listed without troubling to refer to the paper he held, a collection of Miss Feather’s possessions: cosmetics, toilet tissues, comb, mirror, plastic coin purse, unremarkable for anything but a universal grubbiness. There had been an imitation leather notecase with odds and ends of paper in it and a single pound note. There was a good deal of small change loose in the bottom of the handbag, and a crumpled note, pushed down at one side. That sounded as though money had in fact been handed over and thrust, perhaps hastily, furtively, into the handbag; but Miss Sari Morne would hardly be susceptible to blackmail to the tune of a single pound note. On the other hand... First instalment? A ‘refresher’? Had Vi perhaps waited outside the cinema—for her outer clothes had been wet through—and then made the demand? Been in the car perhaps from the beginning, from the beginning of the drive home?
    ‘Result of telephone call to the pub, sir,’ said Ginger, turning over the pages of another report. ‘Landlord looked into the car, took a particular interest because it was the new Cadmus Halcyon. Looked well into the interior; can swear there was nobody there, and no body either, not even lying on the floor behind the front seat, or he’d have seen it.’ The lady had brought the car close up to the door so as to have the shortest distance to run in out of the rain, and he’d been able to see all over it. Looked with special interest to see what leg room there was at the back: a lot of these posh cars failed in that. Agreed that a body might lie there unobserved by the driver, unobserved by anybody getting in and out of the driving seat—especially hastily, coming in out of the dark in all that storm; but when the car drove away from his pub, there’d been nothing there, nobody there.
    Hidden in the boot then, perhaps? But why move it from that hiding place to another so much less secure? Ginger with maddening efficiency whipped out the relevant report. No sign whatsoever—in this brand new, unmarked car—of anything ever having been in the boot, let alone a body, the clothes soaked with rain.
    She hadn’t been killed in the car. Strangled, but not in the car: not, for example, killed in the front passenger seat and hauled or pushed over to lie in the back. No: she had, they thought, been dead before she was put there. The murderer had opened the offside door and pushed in the body as far as it would go, and then, most likely, gone round to the other door and dragged it the rest of the way. But she had definitely been dead by then; perhaps quite a long time dead. Speaking off the top of his head, said the doctor, and without benefit of post mortem—she had died some time before midnight.
    She had been out in the storm. The rain had run off the shiny surface of the plastic mac, but the mac was smeared with mud; shoes, woollen gloves,