A Night on the Orient Express Read Online Free PDF

whiskies and hung the painting in the place where she had envisaged it.
    And when William finally strolled in at twenty past eight, with only the merest flicker of apology, she told him nothing about her day at all.
    On Friday, she found a letter on her breakfast plate. A white vellum envelope with turquoise ink. She didn’t recognise the writing and there was no return address on the back, only a London postmark. She took the paper-knife and slit open the envelope. It was a brief letter riddled with dashes and underlining and exclamation marks.
    Darling darling Adele
    Can you believe? Thank goodness – after all this time we are back in London at long last! Nairobi had its good points but heavens it’s wonderful to feel chilly again!! Anyway, I am longing to hear all your news and tell you mine. Do say you’ll come and have lunch with me. What about next Wednesday at the Savoy? The dear Savoy! How I’ve missed London!! And you. I will see you there at 1 p.m. unless I hear otherwise.
    Mad dash – Brenda xxxx
    ‘Goodness,’ Adele said. ‘Look at this.’
    She passed it over to William, who was reading the paper.
    He read the letter in the same way he read everything these days: scanning the page from top to bottom in record time, picking out the information he needed, disregarding the rest. He smiled and handed it back, balancing it between his first and second finger as he turned back to the news.
    ‘You’ll enjoy yourself,’ he told her. Then frowned. ‘Brenda – do I know her?’
    ‘We were at school together. She was at our wedding. Ill-chosen hat that made her look as if she had a chicken sitting on her head. I think we might have laughed at her, poor thing. But she’s a darling.’
    William shook his head. He didn’t remember.
    Which was hardly surprising.
    Adele didn’t have – and never had had – a friend called Brenda.
    The letter lay on her writing desk for three days, underneath her unconventionally acquired painting.
    She went about her daily life. She told herself that Jack Molloy was presumptuous, provocative, and toying with her for his own amusement. Of course she wasn’t going to go to lunch at the Savoy. The whole idea was absurd.
    On Sunday night, she crumpled up the letter and threw it in the bin.
    Yet somehow it had got under her skin. The words came back to her at all hours of the day and night, worming their way into her brain no matter how hard she tried to resist them. And she couldn’t deny that the letter was ingenious. Jack Molloy had summed her up so well – he had told her that he knew exactly who she was, and the sort of friends she would have. His construct, Brenda, was the perfect alibi.
    Adele could picture Brenda quite clearly, waiting at the table in the Savoy, in her good coat and hat and her brown shoes and gloves, all slightly out of date after years abroad, but eager to dispense gossip and trivia . . .
    In short, a reflection of Adele herself: provincial, slightly dull, conventional. In which case, what on earth did he see in her? Why was he enticing her up to lunch, if she was such a dreary, laughable creature? So . . . unsophisticated.
    Because he saw something in her, a little voice told her. Jack Molloy had seen her potential. He could unlock something in her that would make her blossom and flourish. She thought back to the thrill she had felt when he spoke to her, the feeling she had desperately tried to hide, so much so that she had fled the table.
    The feeling that she wanted to have again.
    She suppressed it. Apart from being mischievous and capricious, she could tell he was dangerous. Yet she had to do something with her life. The episode had highlighted to her just how empty she felt.
    On Monday evening, she waited until William had taken off his tie, read his post, drunk his first whisky and was tucking into his lamb chops.
    ‘I was wondering,’ she said to him, ‘if there was anything I could do to help at the new surgery. I mean, I’ve got so much