An Unsuitable Job for a Woman Read Online Free PDF Page A

travelled around a good deal. He died in Rome last May after a heart attack and I came home. I had taught myself some shorthand and typing so I took a job with a secretarial agency. They sent me to Bernie and after a few weeks he let me help him with one or two of the cases. He decided to train me and I agreed to stay on permanently. Two months ago he made me his partner.”
    All that had meant was that Cordelia gave up a regular wage in return for the uncertain rewards of success in the form of an equal share of the profits together with a rent-free bed-sitting room in Bernie’s house. He hadn’t meant to cheat. The offer of the partnership had been made in the genuine belief that she would recognize it for what it was; not a good-conduct prize but an accolade of trust.
    “What was your father?”
    “He was an itinerant Marxist poet and an amateur revolutionary.”
    “You must have had an interesting childhood.”
    Remembering the succession of foster mothers, the unexplained incomprehensible moves from house to house, the changes of schools, the concerned faces of Local Authority Welfare Officers and school teachers desperately wondering what to do with her in the holidays, Cordelia replied as she always did to this assertion, gravely and without irony.
    “Yes, it was very interesting.”
    “And what was this training you received from Mr. Pryde?”
    “Bernie taught me some of the things he learnt in the CID: how to search the scene of a crime properly, how to collect exhibits, some elementary self-defence, how to detect and lift fingerprints—that kind of thing.”
    “Those are skills which I hardly feel you will find appropriate to this case.”
    Miss Leaming bent her head over her papers and did not speak again until the train reached Cambridge.
    Outside the station Miss Leaming briefly surveyed the car park and led the way towards a small black van. Standing beside it as rigidly as a uniformed chauffeur, was a stockily built young man dressed in an open-necked white shirt, dark breeches and tall boots, who Miss Leaming introduced casually and without explanation as “Lunn.” He nodded briefly in acknowledgement of the introduction but did not smile. Cordelia held out her hand. His grip was momentary but remarkably strong, crushing her fingers; suppressing a grimace of pain she saw a flicker in the large mud-brown eyes and wondered if he had hurt her deliberately. The eyes werecertainly memorable and beautiful, moist calves’ eyes heavily lashed and with the same look of troubled pain at the unpredictability of the world’s terrors. But their beauty emphasized rather than redeemed the unattractiveness of the rest of him. He was, she thought, a sinister study in black and white with his thick, short neck and powerful shoulders straining the seams of his shirt. He had a helmet of strong black hair, a pudgy slightly pock-marked face and a moist petulant mouth; the face of a ribald cherub. He was a man who sweated profusely; the underarms of his shirt were stained and the cotton stuck to the flesh emphasizing the strong curve of the back and the obtrusive biceps.
    Cordelia saw that the three of them were to sit squashed together in the front of the van. Lunn held open the door without apology except to state: “The Rover’s still in dock.”
    Miss Leaming hung back so that Cordelia was compelled to get in first and sit beside him. She thought: “They don’t like each other and he resents me.”
    She wondered about his position in Sir Ronald Callender’s household. Miss Leaming’s place she had already guessed; no ordinary secretary, however long in service, however indispensable, had quite that air of authority or talked of “my employer” in that tone of possessive irony. But she wondered about Lunn. He didn’t behave like a subordinate but nor did he strike her as a scientist. True, scientists were alien creatures to her. Sister Mary Magdalen was the only one she had known. Sister had taught what the