Honour Among Thieves Read Online Free PDF

interested
in the work T. Hamilton McKenzie had done for ‘our gallant war heroes’, as she
referred to them.
    The
school rule that the headmistress had allowed to be waived on this occasion was
one of dress. She had agreed that Sally McKenzie, head of student government
and captain of lacrosse, could go home one hour early from afternoon class and
change into clothes of a casual but suitable nature to accompany her father
when he addressed the class later that evening. After all, the headmistress had
learned the previous week that Sally had won an endowed national scholarship to
Oberlin College to study medicine.
    A
car service had been called with instructions to pick Sally up at four o’clock.
She would miss one hour of school, but the driver had confirmed that he would
deliver father and daughter back by six.
    As
four chimed on the chapel clock, Sally looked up from her desk. A teacher
nodded and the student gathered up her books. She placed them in her bag, and
left the building to walk down the long drive in search of the car. When Sally
reached the old iron gates at the entrance to the drive, she was surprised to
find the only car in sight was a Lincoln Continental stretch limousine. A
chauffeur wearing a grey uniform and a peaked cap stood by the driver’s door.
Such extravagance, she knew only too well, was not the style of her father, and
certainly not that of the headmistress.
    The
man touched the peak of his hat with his right hand and enquired, ‘Miss
McKenzie?’
    ‘Yes,’
Sally replied, disappointed that the long winding drive prevented her
classmates from observing the whole scene.
    The
back door was opened for her. Sally climbed in and sank into the luxurious
leather upholstery.
    The
driver jumped into the front, pressed a button and the window that divided the
passenger from the driver slid silently up. Sally heard the safety lock click into
place.
    She
allowed her mind to drift as she glanced out of the misty windows, imagining
for a moment that this was the sort of lifestyle she might expect once she left
Columbus.
    It
was some time before the seventeen-year-old girl realised the car wasn’t
actually heading in the direction of her home.
    Had
the problem been posed in textbook form, T. Hamilton McKenzie would have known
the exact course of action to be taken. After all, he lived ‘by the book’, as
he so often told his students. But when it happened in real life, he behaved
completely out of character.
    Had
he consulted one of the senior psychiatrists at the university, they would have
explained that many of the anxieties he’d kept suppressed over a long period of
time had, in his new circumstances, been forced to the surface.
    The
fact that he adored his only child, Sally, was clear for all to see. So was the
fact that for many years he had become bored with, almost completely
uninterested in, his wife Joni. But the discovery that he was not good under
pressure once he was outside the operating theatre – his own little empire –
was something he could never have accepted.
    T.
Hamilton McKenzie became at first irritated, then exasperated, and finally
downright angry when his daughter failed to return home that Tuesday evening.
Sally was never late, or at least not for him. The journey by car from Columbus
should have taken no more than thirty minutes, even in the rush-hour traffic.
Joni would have picked Sally up if she hadn’t fixed her hair appointment so
late. ‘It’s the only time Julian could fit me in,’ she explained. She always
left everything to the last minute. At 4.50 T. Hamilton McKenzie phoned
Columbus School for Girls to check there had been no late change of plan.
    Columbus
doesn’t change its plans, the headmistress would have liked to tell the Nobel
Laureate, but satisfied herself with assuring him that Sally had left school at
four o’clock, and that the limousine company had phoned an hour before to
confirm that they would be waiting for her at the end of the drive by