Fires of London (The Francis Bacon Mysteries) by Janice Law Read Free Book Online

bad case, I see.”
    I dropped into one of the kitchen chairs.
    The inspector took the other. “With your health, you must always be careful about your living arrangements. If you take my meaning.”
    I caught a whiff of courts and jail and looked as unconcerned as possible. Thanks to the rigors of life with my esteemed father, I’m inured to bullying.
    The inspector turned brusque. “You were on ARP duty last night until eleven twenty p.m. Is that correct?”
    “Yes.”
    “What did you do then?”
    “I decided to have a drink at The Pond.” I did not give the address, and he did not ask.
    “Where you used the telephone?”
    “That’s right.” So they had recorded the number—and my friends at The Pond had spilled the beans. I’d expected better of them. If you can’t trust low company, civilization’s finished.
    “And where you were seen leaving the phone booth,” he ostentatiously consulted a tiny notebook to show this was all duly entered as evidence, “‘in a fine state.’”
    Just so. I could see there was no point in dissembling. They had me “red-handed,” as Nan liked to say, literally so in this case. “I was having a severe asthma attack, and I’d just called in the report of a mutilated body. I was entitled to be ‘in a fine state.’”
    “That’s no excuse for not leaving your name. As you should have done as reporting warden.”
    “As an off-duty warden, I was merely a concerned citizen, who could hardly breathe and was out of change.”
    “You were obligated to wait for the police. Fortunately the dispatcher thought he recognized your voice. Otherwise, we might have regarded it as a prank call of a particularly despicable nature.”
    “I’m telling you, I was panicked for air; I nearly collapsed on the way home.”
    “Where perhaps you had Miss Lightfoot—that is your companion’s name, isn’t it, Miss Jessica Lightfoot?—wash the blood from your uniform? What conclusion might be drawn from that?”
    Let your imagination run riot! But he had Nan’s name, which meant danger. I restrained myself and said, “That as an ARP warden responding to road accidents, I frequently need my uniform cleaned.”
    “How fortunate you have an old retainer to do that for you.”
    “Nan is—” I started to say, but shut my mouth. What Nan was to me was no business of his.
    The inspector sat as motionless as a toad, his hooded eyes half closed. “I believe you also knew the late Damien Hiller. You bought drinks in his memory at The Pond the night after he was murdered.”
    “I buy drinks for quite a few people when I’m flush.”
    “But you did know him.”
    “He was someone I saw around. Look, you were at the other end of the bar. I was trying to cheer up poor Connie.”
    The inspector’s lips pulled back from large and crowded yellow teeth. I’d have given a lot to have been able to paint that peculiar smile. “I have no doubt that your fingerprints will match those on the torch we found beside the body.” A dramatic pause. I hadn’t realized police work required such theatrical gifts.
    “It would be surprising it they weren’t. I’ve already told you that it was my torch—” But here I had to stop a minute to squeeze more oxygen up my protesting airways. I realized that the stress of keeping my lungs topped up was distracting me from the precariousness of my position. If the man had been dead a measurable time before he was found, I was in the clear, no matter what The Ponderous inspector cared to imply. But if not—I postponed consideration of that for the moment. “I literally fell over onto him. Blood everywhere.”
    “How could you fall over him?” The inspector simultaneously raised and deepened his voice for an effect very different from his soft and hopeful tones when we’d met in the park—or his hoarse viciousness afterward. “You had a torch and he was lying smack in the middle of the sidewalk.”
    It’s unpleasant how the most minor misadventure can lead