A Night on the Orient Express Read Online Free PDF Page B

time on my hands now, with the boys gone. I thought I could be of some assistance.’
    He put his knife and fork down and looked at her. ‘In what way?’
    ‘I’m not sure, but there must be something I can do. You seem under pressure. Maybe I could help with paperwork, or organise a group for new mothers, or . . .’ She trailed off, realising she hadn’t really thought it through. ‘It’s so deathly quiet here now.’
    ‘It’s not really how it works, darling,’ William told her. ‘We have all the staff we need, and we are working to a very tight budget, which is what makes it so difficult.’
    ‘Well, I wouldn’t necessarily want to be paid—’
    ‘The best thing you can do,’ William said with finality, ‘is keep things ticking over here. It’s important for me to come home and be able to relax. I can’t help feeling that if you were involved in the surgery too, things would become very awkward. And what would you do when the boys came home? They need you.’ He smiled. ‘I know you’re finding it hard because they’ve gone but you will get used to it, darling, I promise you.’
    He picked up his knife and fork again.
    Something boiled up inside Adele. It was more than indignation. She knew William wasn’t deliberately trying to patronise her, but she felt outrage. He had put her in her place. She was a wife and mother and that was all.
    On Wednesday morning she woke up. She went through a checklist in her head. It was bed-changing day. Not that she changed the linen; Mrs Morris saw to that. The fish van was coming to Shallowford – William loved his Dover sole. Tim had written to ask her for some new games socks and a French dictionary.
    As she lay in bed, a black blanket of gloom settled upon her. What was the point in getting up? Who would care, or indeed even notice, if she didn’t? William was always up at six, and went downstairs before she woke. He had the same thing for breakfast every morning. Tomato juice, a cup of very strong black coffee which he made on top of the stove in an enamel jug, and a poached egg on toast. He didn’t expect Adele to make it for him. He didn’t even need her for that. If she didn’t appear, he wouldn’t care. He would leave the house at seven thirty-five safe in the knowledge that she would be there when he got home.
    She sat up. What harm would lunch do? She had an alibi. And the new shantung silk dress she had bought for the tennis club summer party. She examined her hair in the mirror – there would be no time to have it done properly, but she had rollers. She smoothed her eyebrows and looked at herself, trying to read the expression in her own eyes. What was she expecting? What was she capable of? What did she want?
    She went downstairs in her dressing gown.
    ‘I’m going to have lunch with Brenda today, remember. At the Savoy,’ she told William, who was sprinkling white pepper on his egg.
    He smiled at her.
    ‘Good girl,’ he told her. ‘You see? There’s plenty to do. Make sure you enjoy yourself. And anyway, I probably won’t be back until late.’
    Again? Adele sometimes wondered why he didn’t sleep at the surgery. But she didn’t say as much. She simply smiled, and hoped William couldn’t hear the thumping of her heart.
    She didn’t know why it was thumping so. It was only lunch, she told herself, because she had an idea and she wanted Jack Molloy’s advice. That was all.

Three
    R iley loved Harrods. He had loved it since the day he’d been sent there as a young photographer’s assistant, to collect a leopard-skin hat for a photo shoot. It had dazzled him then and it dazzled him still now. There’d been nothing like it in the grimy Northern town where he had grown up. When he’d first stepped over the threshold, something deep inside him had whispered that perhaps its flagrant opulence was wrong, when there were people struggling to earn a crust, but the seventeen-year-old Riley had already known he was entering a world that