Almost a Crime by Penny Vincenzi Read Free Book Online Page B

already. Manon, superb production, I’m told.’
    ‘We have,’ said Octavia, ‘but thank you for thinking of
    us. And it is a superb production. We saw Sylvie Guillem in
    it.’
    ‘Good. Well, I’m taking Marianne anyway. Maybe her
    children will be able to come.’
    ‘I hope so.’ Marianne was her father’s mistress of a great
    many years: she and Octavia enjoyed a rather taut
    friendship. ‘Is - is she there now?’
    ‘No, no, I’m here on my own,’ said Felix. A notional
    sigh hung in the air.
    There was a silence. Then, ‘Well, good night, Dad,’ she
    said. ‘I’ll get Tom to ring you.’
     
    ‘Now why did you say that?’ said Marianne Muirhead,
    lifting her head from the magazine she was reading, and
    looking at Felix with cool green eyes. ‘As if I needed to
    ask.’
    ‘Say what?’ said Felix.
    ‘That you were on your own. Felix, you are a nightmare.
    It’s a miracle poor Octavia isn’t even more of a neurotic
    mess with you for a father.’
    ‘She’s not a neurotic mess!’
    ‘Of course she is. Well, maybe not a mess, but certainly
    neurotic’
    ‘I would call it highly strung. And it’s the life she leads
    that contributes to that, nothing I do.’
    ‘I would beg to differ. She was obviously upset about
    something and the last thing she needed was all that loaded
    stuff about her husband. Or to be told you were all alone in
    the house, after she’d turned down your invitation to the
    ballet. The words “lonely” and “neglected” hanging heavy
    in the air. Really, Felix!’
    ‘Look, I don’t interfere with the way you manage your
    children,’ said Felix irritably, pouring himself a large
    Scotch, ‘so perhaps you’d be kind enough to allow me to
    handle my own.’
    Marianne didn’t answer, returned to her magazine. Felix
    turned up the stereo; Bruch’s violin concerto filled the
    room.
    ‘Felix, not quite so loud, please. It was perfectly all right
    before.’
    ‘I thought you liked this. You always say it’s one of your
    Desert Island Discs.’
    ‘I do, but not when it precludes all thought.’
    ‘You’re only reading Vogue, for Christ’s sake. That
    doesn’t require much thought.’
    Marianne closed her magazine, stood up. ‘I think perhaps
    I might go home tonight after all,’ she said. ‘I’m rather
    tired.’
    ‘Oh, don’t be so ridiculous,’ he said irritably. ‘Now
    who’s playing games?’
    ‘Felix, I’m not playing games. I don’t play games. I am
    tired, and I don’t find your mood very restful.’
    It was true: Marianne didn’t play games. She was an
    extraordinarily straightforward woman, coolly intelligent
    and self-assured. She was thirty-nine years old, with a pale
    blonde beauty, slender, elegant, always perfectly dressed. It
    had once been famously said of Marianne Muirhead in an
    article in Vogue that she did not follow style, her own
    particular version followed her. Neither ultra-fashionably
    nor classically dressed, she had evolved a look of her own
    over the years that she simply adapted as she felt required to;
    a long lean silhouette, a splash of primary colour added
    fairly sparingly to black, always high heels, almost always
    hats, skirts just above the knee, and a wardrobe that
    contained at any one time (also famously) at least thirty
    white Tshirts, in every possible fabric and style. She looked
    as good on the golf course, which she claimed was her
    natural habitat, as she did lunching at Caprice, or on the
    floor at a charity ball. Any slight tendency to severity in her
    appearance and manner was counteracted by her laugh,
    which was loud and exuberant.
    She had married Alec Muirhead, a London-based American
    lawyer, in 1975 when she was only eighteen. Her own
    father had been in the diplomatic service, based for much of his life in Washington, and she was herself half American and,
    her only brother was entirely American-based — so she
    settled happily into what most Englishwomen would have
    found a difficult life. But