The Dark Lady by Sally Spencer Read Free Book Online

the sound of Ute’s voice to guide her, it was an impossible task. If she could have run her hands over the au pair’s face, as she would have done with a child’s, then she would have some idea. But so far she’d been too embarrassed to ask Ute’s permission to do so.
    You’ve got to be more assertive, more like you used to be before all this happened, she told herself angrily. The way you act now, it’s almost as if you’re ashamed of being blind.
    And why should she feel ashamed? Her blindness had come as the result of an injury she’d sustained from a police truncheon while protesting against General Franco’s authoritarian regime outside the Spanish embassy. It was an affliction, but it was also a badge of honour.
    There was the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs. “I haf finished ze cleaning, Mrs Rutter,” said a heavily accented voice. “Vud it be all right if I vent out now?”
    Did she have a fat face or a thin one? Was she pretty or plain? Maria supposed she could always ask Bob, but there was that reticence again. As if she didn’t want to put anyone – even her husband – to any trouble. As if she were hoping that if she said nothing, they would forget she couldn’t see.
    â€œUte, would you mind if I touched . . .” Maria began.
    â€œIf you touched vot?” Ute asked, when it became plain that Maria wasn’t going to finish the sentence.
    No, she wasn’t ready yet, Maria decided. She needed more time to prepare herself.
    â€œI’m confused,” she said, sounding it. “What I really meant to ask you was if, while you’re out, it wouldn’t be too much trouble to nip into a shop and buy a packet of tea.”
    â€œBut I bought tea only yesterday.”
    â€œOf course you did,” Maria agreed. “Where are you going? Anywhere exciting?”
    â€œI am going to church, as I do most days,” Ute said in her flat, emotionless voice.
    What was the expression on her face at that moment? Were her eyes full of dreamy devotion at the thought of communing with her God? Or did she have the resigned look of someone who went to church only because that was what she had been conditioned to do?
    â€œThere’s a ten-shilling note in my purse,” Maria said. “Take it. Buy yourself something nice.”
    â€œZat is not necessary.”
    â€œPlease, I want you to have it.”
    â€œYou are most kind.”
    As she listened to the au pair’s footsteps retreat up the hallway, and heard the familiar sound of the front door opening, Maria shifted her position again. Her back was bothering her quite a lot, which was a nuisance, but bearable. What was really troubling her was the thought of how she would cope once the cause of that backache – the baby she was carrying inside her – was born.
    Standing with his back to the bar, Woodend surveyed the group of twenty men he’d summoned to the club to be questioned about what had happened on the night that Gerhard Schultz had died.
    Groups
of men, he corrected himself, not
a
group. Because that was what they were – four distinct groups of men, each huddled protectively around their own table.
    There had been a kind of artless choreography about the way these groups had formed. The first person to arrive – a large man with the sort of bushy moustache once favoured by Joe Stalin – had looked around him, then selected a table which, while not exactly at the very back of the room, was well away from where Woodend was standing.
    â€œWhat’s that bugger’s name?” the chief inspector had asked Tony the bar steward.
    â€œLuigi Bernadelli.”
    â€œAn’ what’s his job?”
    â€œHe’s a shift worker on the production line, like most of the other fellers who you’ll be talkin’ to.”
    The second man to enter the room had seemed to have no doubts as to where to sit. The table he