The Shortest Way to Hades by Sarah Caudwell Read Free Book Online

said Timothy. “But the poor girl’s certainly dead, and Julia thinks it’s murder. If you get the next train to London, you can be in the Corkscrew by six-thirty or so, can’t you? We’ll tell you about it then and take you out to dinner.”
    He rang off without telling me which poor girl was dead.

CHAPTER 3
    The urgency of Timothy’s invitation might have justified a taxi; but I was content, on a gentle May evening, to travel by Underground from Paddington to Charing Cross and from there walk at leisure to my destination, observing the streams of office-workers bound eagerly homewards from Kingsway and High Holborn. It was that season of the year when London is at her most hopeful and adventurous: her citizens go lightly clad, without raincoats or umbrellas; they plant geraniums on the window-sills of gray commercial buildings; they buy strawberries from men at street corners; they talk optimistically of British chances at Wimbledon.
    Only the deepening blue of the sky suggested the approach of evening, and the sun still shone brightly on High Holborn. Little of it, however, was allowed to penetrate the interior of the Corkscrew, whose habitues are more at ease in a conspiratorial dimness. Timothy was waiting for me at one of the round oak tables, a bottle of Niersteiner already open.
    “Timothy,” I said, “will you please now abandon these childish devices to excite my curiosity, and tell me, simply and straightforwardly, which poor girl is dead and why Julia thinks it’s murder?”
    “Have you really heard nothing about it? I thought you’d have seen it in the newspapers—it was quite widely reported.”
    “Recently?” I asked, puzzled, for I thought that a mention in the press of the Remington-Fiske family would have attracted my attention.
    “About two months ago. On the day, to be precise, of the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race.”
    My ignorance was explained: I had spent the Easter vacation in the United States of America, dependent for English news on the New York Times. I had formed the impression that April had been a quiet month in England.
    Timothy took from his briefcase a thin cardboard folder, from which he drew a newspaper cutting.
    “This is the report of the inquest which was in the Scuttle. The reports in the other newspapers are much the same, but this is the fullest.” He pushed the cutting towards me across the polished oak table, and I leant forward to study it by the flickering candlelight. It was illustrated by a photograph of Camilla Galloway.
    HEIRESS’S COUSIN IN DEATH FALL AT CHAMPAGNE “PICNIC”
    A champagne and caviar lunch at the Mortlake home of Rupert Galloway, company director father of property heiress Camilla Fiske-Galloway, ended in tragedy when the heiress’s eighteen-year-old cousin Deirdre Robinson fell to her death from the rooftop patio, a South London Coroner was told today.
    Miss Robinson was alone on the patio and no one saw her fall. The other guests, watching the race from the windows of the room below, were unaware of the tragedy until alerted by screams from passers-by.
    Raven-haired Miss Galloway, twenty-two, heiress to the multi-million estates in Wiltshire of the Remington-Fiske family, told the Coroner that her cousin had no reason to be depressed and had seemed to be enjoying herself. “She was looking forward to watching the race,” said Miss Galloway. “I suppose she must have leant over to get a better view and lost her balance. It’s a terrible thing to have happened.” Mrs. Dorothea Demetriou, an aunt of the dead girl, who was with her on the roof only a few minutes before she fell, confirmed that she seemed in good spirits.
    Mrs. Elizabeth Brown, thirty-two, a housewife, who was among the crowds gathered on the towpath, became the first person to be aware of the tragedy. “I didn’t see her fall,” Mrs. Brown told the Coroner. “I was watching the race. The boats were just going under Barnes Bridge and still quite close together, so