Aiding and Abetting Read Online Free PDF

pin on a map open before him. It had always worked well. Nobody was looking for him at a place he had picked out with his eyes shut and a pin in his hand. This time he had, however, picked from a map of North Britain. He had business there. “Christina,” she said when he asked the girl her name. “Do you want a table for lunch?”
    “I do. And I don’t suppose,” he said, “that you have smoked salmon or lamb chops on the menu?” “We have both.”
    “Good. I like lamb chops.”
    He was not really aware of the fact that he was sizing up the girl in a certain way that related to Hildegard Wolf. She was younger than Hildegard. Her hair was light gold. She was decidedly skinnier. Lucky then realized, all of a sudden, that he was really thinking of Hildegard, and had been all through his nine holes of golf. “What is your name?” he said again to the Scottish waitress.
    “Christina. They call me Kirsty.”
    “Kirsty, I want a double malt whisky. I want smoked salmon to start followed by lamb chops and the trimmings.” “Your room number?” she said.
    “I’ll pay the restaurant bill in cash.”
    He paid everything in cash, on principle. His source of cash was here in Britain. Nowadays, he came twice a year to collect it personally from his old friend, rich Benny Rolfe, who always, since Lucky’s operation to change his features, had a fat package of money ready for him on his visits. Benny on this occasion was abroad, but he had arranged for the package of pounds sterling to be placed in Lucky’s hands, as he had done twice a year since 1974 without fail. Most of the cash came out of Benny’s own pocket, but there was always a certain amount contributed by Lucan’s other old friends and collected by Benny Rolfe.
    “Aren’t you disgusted, ever, by what I did?” Lucky had asked Benny on one of these occasions. “Aren’t any of you horrified? Because, when I look back on it, I’m horrified myself.”
    “No, dear fellow, it was a bungle like any other bungle.
    You should never let a bungle weigh on your conscience.”
    “But if I’d killed my wife?”
    “That would not have been a bungle. You would not have been the unlucky one.”
    “I think of Nanny Rivett. She had an awful lot of blood. Pints, quarts of it. The blood poured out, all over the place. I was wading in it in the dark. Didn’t you read about the blood in the papers?”
    “I did, to tell you the truth. Perhaps murdered nannies have more blood to spill than the upper class, do you think?”
    “Exactly what I would say,” Lucan had said. He was disappointed that Benny himself was not available on this visit. He ate through his lamb chops. He studied Kirsty and compared her to Hildegard. From the window of the dining room the North Sea spread its great apparent calm. Benny Rolfe was now in his mid-seventies.
    Nearly all Lucky’s old staunch aiders and abetters were over seventy now. Who would provide him with money when his benefactors were gone? So mused Lucky, never letting his mind embrace an obvious fact: one of these days he, too, would be “gone”: a solution to the cash problem. But Lucky did not think along those lines, and he was now filled with nostalgia for Hildegard, that dear doctor. “We are washed in the Blood of the Lamb.” He looked warily over his shoulder at this thought. After dinner he went for a stroll, stopping at a little arts-and-crafts shop which was open late, precisely for people like Lucky to stop at. Among the hideous Scottish folk jewelry he found a fine piece of carved crystal, a pendant, for Hildegard, for Hildegard. He waited while the bearded young fellow wrapped it up for Hildegard, paid over the price and tucked the little parcel in his breast pocket.
    All along the shelves under the three windows of Hildegard’s consulting room was placed her collection of miniature cactus plants. It was of such an extreme rarity that Hildegard was quite annoyed when one of her patients innocently presented her