Murder Offstage by L. B. Hathaway Read Free Book Online Page A

could
hear footsteps close by, clicking at her heels. It sounded like a man’s
brogues; totally unsuitable for the heavy snow. At one point she stopped
underneath a street lamp and turned around quickly to face her assailant.
    ‘Who’s there?’ she called loudly, trying not to let the fear
show in her words. ‘Who is it?’
    There was no-one. At least no-one she could fathom, anyhow.
    Trafalgar Square was up ahead, normally so welcoming with
its bright lights and its familiar stone lions. She hurried to reach it.
    But even here the world had changed. The newspaper sellers
who normally thronged the place had packed up and gone, and the crowds of
party-goers who flocked to the square at night to drink champagne had gone
somewhere warmer.
    Only a few poor wretches, soldiers who had survived the
Great War but with limbs or their wits missing, sat underneath damp cardboard
sheets, begging passers-by for money. Life had not been kind to them, and it
was a cruel shame.
    Posie remembered the famous newspaper photographs of
Armistice Day in Trafalgar Square three years before, when the ghastly war had
been stopped forever. She hadn’t been there herself; she was still out in
action in the boggy fields of Amiens with the Ambulance Brigade, picking up the
debris and the bodies from the last few battles. But she knew that unimaginable
crowds had packed the place out. Men in their thousands had climbed on the
lions by the fountain and scaled Nelson’s Column, angrily ripping down the
placards inviting men to enlist.
    Posie distributed the last of her coins among as many of the
men as she could and continued up the road until she hit Pall Mall.
    It was strange. She still couldn’t shake off the feeling
that someone was following her and she found herself turning around several
times, heart thumping.
    But there was never anyone there.
    Ahead of her, up at Piccadilly, she saw the bright
blue-and-white electric lights of the Circus glittering like cat’s eyes through
the snow, and beyond it again, the bright lights of the Theatre District in the
distance. She tried not to think of Len and Babe, together…
    And so she braced herself for her most thankless task yet of
the evening.
    The Tenth Earl, Rufus’ father, was famously a man of few
manners. He reminded people of an unexploded volcano at the best of times.
Posie knew that he would be seething from Rufus’ exploits earlier today, and in
addition he would be tired from his long train journey down from his ancestral
home, Rebburn Abbey. On the whole it was not a great time to turn up and expect
his undivided attention. And if her telegram to the club had gone the same way
as Babe’s other two, Posie’s visit would be unexpected too. But visit him she
must: Rufus had asked her to.
    The impossibly grand pale-yellow stone facades of the London
clubs stretched ahead down Pall Mall, one after another, lining the street as
far as the eye could see. Oil torches flickered at the entrance of each one.
They were the exclusive preserve of men, and only men of the better sort; you
were born a member, you could not become a member. These places
always reminded Posie of the Italian Palaces of the Renaissance; so serene
outside and yet so full of fearsome secrets inside.
    Pall Mall this evening was indeed serene, with only a few
chauffeured cars and taxis waiting politely in the snowy shadows for their
aristocratic owners to emerge at any given hour. There was no sign now of the
hoards of women who had famously chained themselves to the iron railings here,
demanding the vote for women in 1914, before the Great War had come and changed
everything.
    Posie found No 11 and turned in quickly.
    And there it was again – that tap of brogues close behind
her, the soft cat-like stepping on snow, coming to a sudden halt a second too
late. Like an echo.
    So, she hadn’t been mistaken. Someone was following
her.
    She looked out into the street. The burning torchlights at
the club entrance blinded her,