Read Online Winter at Death's Hotel by Kenneth Cameron - Free Book Online

bit slimy to the touch, but otherwise all right, I suppose. It may simply be professional surface—a glossy carapace, like a beetle.”
    He seemed quite brittle today; she remembered her sense yesterday that Newcome was somehow “safe.” Today, she didn’t feel it, whatever she had meant by it. As if he knew what she was thinking, he said, “My aunt thinks I’m not much better than Carver, I’m afraid. She thinks that London has made me ‘a poser,’ by which I suppose she means a poseur .”
    â€œAnd are you?”
    â€œOh, isn’t everyone?”
    At that point, Arthur came out, smiling rather grandly. He shook Newcome’s hand. “You saved our lives. We’d have missed that train for certain if you hadn’t done what you did. Capital!” He smiled at Louisa. “Carver fixed everything in two shakes. Splendid man, splendid.” Suddenly, his face darkened. “Where is Ethel?”
    Louisa turned him toward the bronze doors. “She’s the woman with all the luggage piled around her.”
    â€œHas she everything? Is my satchel there? Dammit, Louisa, if she’s misplaced that—!”
    He insisted on seeing the satchel and then on counting all the luggage. “Fourteen, fifteen. Or did I count this one before? Damn! I shall have to start over!”
    â€œYou didn’t count it before, and there are fifteen, and that’s everything. Do calm yourself, Arthur.”
    â€œHa! Well—are we ready? Boy!”
    The same two boys had been waiting at the outer limits of the luggage; now, each picked up a suitcase in each hand and started out. There was confusion about a carriage, then about the trunks—they’d have to come in a separate vehicle—but Ethel seemed already to have commandeered both, so off the boys went. Then came Ethel with the small bags (the lady’s essentials); then the boys came back, and so a kind of revolving wheel of people and luggage went in and out until suddenly the carpet was bare.
    â€œLouisa! Into the carriage—hurry. Louisa?”
    She was looking back down the lobby. “Oh, Arthur, I like this place! I shall miss it.”
    â€œWe’re staying here on our way back; you’ll see it again. Come—come!”
    She waved at Newcome, who was still idling near Reception, and then she turned and took a step toward her husband, and then she felt a terrific pain in her right ankle as she sailed through the air, as completely free of the ground as an aerial balloon. She came crashing down on her hands and elbows and knees and eyeglasses, the breath knocked out of her. People screamed; men ran toward her. Somebody tried to pick her up, and some of her weight came on that same right ankle and it was her turn to scream, and she fell forward again.
    â€œMy ankle—I think I’ve broken my ankle!” She looked through tears of pain and saw Arthur standing by the bronze doors.
    He said, “Louisa, how could you! Now we shall be late !”

CHAPTER 3
    The Murder Squad had a big room in police headquarters at 300 Mulberry Street that was no more squalid than the hallways of the average tenement. The room was forty feet on a side, matchboarded up to the height of a desk, then distempered in some color long forgotten, now more or less that of cocoa powder. Along one wall had been set wooden chairs with pressed, imitation-leather seats; the wall behind them had a smear of darker color from the heads that had rested against it. These were for witnesses and suspects. Overhead were giant fans and lights with green shades of the sort used on factory floors; the ceiling above them was filigreed with gas pipes that no longer carried gas, and the channels that carried electric wiring; and above those were sheets of pressed tin, cobwebbed and darkened by decades of tobacco smoke. In this room, murders that had proved too tough for the precincts or that involved more than one